Trust Is Like the Soul

About a month or so ago, my older sister, J., sent me a direct message on Twitter (stupidly renamed ‘X’ by Elon Musk, proving once again that the wealthiest in the world aren’t necessarily the smartest, just the most exploitative…but I digress). She has apparently read some of my blog posts on my family issues back in Canada. I don’t know which ones she read: there are so many of them that I doubt she had the time, let alone the patience, to get through anywhere even approaching all of them, but she seems to have gotten the basic idea of why I’m so upset with her and our two older brothers, R. and F.

I must say that this reading of hers is perhaps the first time she’s ever meaningfully paid close attention to my side of the story regarding my relationship with the family. Over a period of decades of never taking my point of view about anything seriously, her response to what I wrote is a precedent that I find quite…impressive.

Since she knows she has to choose her words tactfully in an attempt to hoover me back into the family, and my living on the other side of the world means that her choosing her words foolishly will only strengthen my resolve not to end my NO CONTACT status with her and our brothers, she expressed herself with the usual honeyed words. ‘I’ll always be her brother, and she’ll always love me.’ Pleasant words to read, no doubt, and the kind of thing a love-starved man like me needs to hear…but not the kind of thing that will make me easily forget decades of emotional abuse from her, our brothers, our dad, and most of all, our–in all likelihood–malignant narcissist mother.

I’m sure J. sincerely believes she loves me, but there are a number of things that need to be understood about this love to put it in the right context. I’m her younger brother: she has to love me. I’ve discussed in other posts how she, as the golden child of the family, was pressured by our mother to personify an idealized version of Mom: J. had to be the ‘perfect’ daughter, has to be the ‘perfect’ sister to R., F., and me, the ‘perfect’ aunt to our nephew and niece, the ‘perfect’ mother to her two sons–she has to be the ‘perfect’ family woman, all to please our mother and be ‘worthy’ of Mom’s love. Remember that a narcissistic mother makes her sons and daughters compete for her very conditional love, so they aim to please her in every way.

Now, to be fair to J., none of this pressure or her caving in to it was her fault–it was our mother’s. By placing these impossible-to-fulfill standards on J., and by manipulating her into believing she must embody–and has successfully embodied–these lofty ideals, Mom was not doing her job as a mother. In fact, J. should be infuriated with Mom for putting her through all of that. It was never J.’s job to be Mom’s ‘perfect’ daughter: it was J.’s job simply to be herself. But let’s at least be honest about all of this. J. ‘loves’ me because she has to, not because she deep-down wants to.

I, too, was assigned a phony role to play in the narcissistic family: I was the scapegoat, or identified patient. I was manipulated by Mom, through gaslighting, into embodying everything she hated about herself and therefore projected onto me–hence the autism lie, which was a projection of Mom’s narcissism (recall the early definition of autism, which is hardly applicable today). This role that I was forced into playing is why the family ‘loves’ me, but has never really liked me–and that includes J., who always tried to change me into a more ‘acceptable’ person. She thinks this kind of changing people is a form of love (she got this, no doubt, from Mom having done it to her), rather than thinking that accepting a person as he is will do a much better job of making him feel loved, which would in turn inspire him to change himself and rid himself of his dysfunctional habits.

J. is the only family member who makes any attempts at all to contact me, and that has far less to do with any genuine feelings of affection for me, and far more to do with her need to salvage what’s left of the family she’s lost over the years (her husband–for whom I composed this short piece of music–our parents, and me out of estrangement). She wants to keep alive her fairy-tale, romantic notion that we’re all a ‘happy, loving family’: this is all tied in with her being the golden child, as I described above. The point I’m trying to make here is that I exist, to her, only as a family relation–that is my whole value to her. As a unique, individual person, I mean nothing to her. Recall what she said: I’ll always be her brother, and she’ll always love me (my emphasis).

I mean absolutely nothing to R. and F., my two ‘brothers.’ I could rot away in a leper colony, and they wouldn’t care; they’d blame me for getting into the predicament rather than pity me for my misfortune. As I said in my post, False Families, they’d probably be amused at the idea of my home becoming a war zone from the US provoking a war with China over Taiwan, the way the MIC and NATO provoked Russia into a war over Ukraine. There is no affection between R. and F. on their side and me: I feel none for them because, in their constant bullying and belittling of me as a kid, teen, and young adult, they destroyed any foundation for a normal, healthy, brotherly relationship between us. Mom sat back and let it all happen, too, perfectly aware that her flying monkeys were hurting me. Dad didn’t do much to help me, either. R. and F. feel no affection for me because they regard me as a worm: why would I be OK with that?

The childhood trauma I suffered from the family’s abuse resulted in a number of dysfunctional habits of mine at the time, which existed as trauma responses, but which our mendacious, ignorant mother labelled as ‘autism symptoms’: these trauma responses included maladaptive daydreaming and social isolation. If no other people are around, I can feel safe, because my family’s treatment of me as a child taught me that people are mean and hurtful. Bullies at school and in the neighbourhood only made my problem worse, and I got no relief when I got home.

When your family betrays your trust, it’s hard to trust anybody, because as object relations theory teaches us, those primal family relationships you have as a child are like the blueprints for all future relationships you’ll have with anyone else. The bad relationships with family members become bad internal objects that haunt you like demon possession (<<p. 67 here). Alienation thus becomes epidemic: if those early family relationships go sour, you learn to believe all future relationships will go sour, too, because you don’t know any other way to relate to people; even if you try your best to fit in, you’ll unconsciously do something wrong to sabotage the relationship. As an adult, I have C-PTSD because of what happened when I was a kid, and I’ll always feel as though I can’t fit in, however hard I try.

Publilius Syrus once said, “Trust, like the soul, never returns once it is gone.” I first heard that quote in Child’s Play (not the Chucky movie), which I watched with my mother when I was a teen. I can never return to the family that betrayed me with lies, abuse, and gaslighting. I’m trying to heal, currently through the application of Jungian concepts like Shadow work and Active Imagination to get to the darkest recesses of my unconscious to find out what’s making me sabotage my life so much–I can’t heal by being in any way involved with the very people who made me sick in the first place.

If I were to be around R., F., and J. ever again (even if just online), I would be subjected to their little digs at me again. Those little digs may typically be small, by any objective measure, but even the minor ones would trigger in me memories of the nastier moments I endured with them when I was a kid. Also, I have good reason to believe that the three of them, as well as our mom when she was still alive, were doing so many smear campaigns on me–whenever discussions around the dinner table, for example, drifted towards me as a topic–that the younger generations have been taught to have at least slight regard for me, if not outright loathing.

You see, it isn’t so much that they ‘did this’ to me forty years ago, or ‘did that’ to me thirty years ago; it isn’t just the things that they did; it’s more about who they are that made them do these things, because I know that–them being who they are–they are sure to do those kinds of things again. I’m not just wallowing about in my remote past: I’m trying to protect myself from future re-traumatizing.

To regain my trust of R., F., and J. would be a Herculean task for them, especially with the limitations of the internet, and I simply don’t think the three of them regard me as worth the effort (R. and F. wouldn’t regard me as worth even a slight effort). For these reasons, I must maintain NO CONTACT with them, however well-intentioned my sister may seem.

Analysis of ‘The Brood’

The Brood is a 1979 Canadian horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It stars Oliver Reed, Art Hindle, and Samantha Eggar, with Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Susan Hogan, Cindy Hinds, Gary McKeehan, and Nicholas Campbell.

It was a profitable film, grossing over five million dollars. Positively received by critics, The Brood became a cult film in later decades. Academics have shown a scholarly interest in the film for such themes as mental illness and parenthood.

The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 88th scariest film of all time in 2006.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film, and here‘s a link to the complete film.

Cronenberg’s inspiration for The Brood was his own acrimonious divorce and bitter child custody battle over his and his ex-wife’s daughter. In fact, Hindle and Eggar were cast as Frank and Nola Carveth because of their physical resemblances to Cronenberg and his ex-wife.

Another inspiration for the film was Kramer vs. Kramer, though The Brood is meant to be a correction of the optimistic ending of a marriage in the American drama that came out the same year. In spite of the science fiction element (“psychoplasmics”) of The Brood, Cronenberg described it as “more realistic” than Kramer vs. Kramer, and he called it “the most classic horror film [he’d] done” in retrospect.

Of course, divorce causes serious emotional trauma in the children caught in the middle of their parents’ fighting, and the link between The Brood‘s themes of mental illness, parenthood, and separation lead to another key theme in the film: child abuse–not just physical, but also emotional. I’m reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin, for in many ways, that’s what The Brood is all about.

Parental abuse, however, isn’t the only kind of abuse to be explored in this film. The ways in which psychotherapy can be abusive, intentionally or not, are also an issue here. And when one considers the ramifications of transference, an abusive psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst can be just like an abusive parent, as we see in the film’s opening scene.

Dr. Hal Raglan (Reed), a psychotherapist, is demonstrating to a group of people something he calls “psychoplasmics,” a form of therapy he’s devised to get his patients to release suppressed emotional trauma by making it appear as physiological changes to their bodies. His audience watches him facilitate a father transference in a patient, Mike (McKeehan), who has abandonment issues with his biological father.

Raglan speaks cruelly to him, like an authoritarian father, calling Mike weak and feminine for not looking him in the eyes. His harsh words are meant to bring out Mike’s psychological pain, as part of the therapy, but it just looks as though Raglan is retraumatizing him. Indeed, the last thing that those spots seen all over Mike’s chest and face look like are signs of healing.

Nonetheless, at least one of the members of the audience is amazed at the results of psychoplasmics, and thinks Raglan is a genius. Frank Carveth is less impressed, and he’ll be furious when he sees marks all over the body of his daughter, Candice (Hinds), concluding that Raglan is a fraud and that his ex-wife, Nola, has physically abused their daughter.

That demonstration, with the lights turned down low and Raglan and Mike on a stage embracing at the end, looks more like a theatre performance than real therapy. The doctor switching from abusive words to hugging Mike, in fact, looks like traumatic bonding.

In these contradictions, we see the anti-psychiatric critique in The Brood. Psychotherapy is supposed to help the mentally ill, not make them worse. One could consider this film to be an allegory on religion, too, with Raglan’s therapeutic innovations as the beginnings of a new cult, conning people into following him and paying him for a salvation that is nothing of the sort.

Indeed, Nola has been receiving Raglan’s therapy for her own mental health issues, and she’s getting worse rather than better. Frank wants to stop his ex from seeing their little girl, to protect her from further physical abuse, but Raglan won’t have it, since he feels that Nola’s seeing Candice regularly is crucial to her recovery. Frank threatens to sue Raglan.

Now, what is “psychoplasmics” as a form of therapy, really, in its essence? Symbolically speaking, it’s projection, and projective identification. The patient tries to push his or her pain outward, to get it out of him- or herself, hence the markings on the patient’s body.

The problem is that through projection and projective identification, the pain that is pushed out tends to be put into other people, and this is what is personified by the brood of deformed, killer kids that Nola parthenogenetically produces. “They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you,” as Larkin says in his poem.

The thing about projection and projective identification is that, as ego defence mechanisms, they act as a kind of amateurish therapy for the self, a self-soothing. If people have hurt you, by projecting that pain onto others (often not the ones who initially hurt you), you can relieve yourself of it, then carry on your life in a reasonably functional way. You kid yourself into thinking you’ve removed the pain from yourself and passed it on to somebody else (“Man hands on misery to man”), though that pain is still rooted in the unconscious.

This passing on of pain is what Nola is doing by creating the brood and having them kill for her. First, we see Raglan do a therapy session with her, in which he takes on the role of Candice to bring out the source of the abuse the little girl suffered. At first, Nola naturally denies it, even going to the point of claiming that “Mummies don’t hurt their own children.”

This, of course, is utter nonsense coming from Nola’s mouth. The ideal mother would never hurt her own child, certainly not intentionally…”They may not mean to, but they do.” Many mothers and fathers out there at least don’t deliberately hurt their children…but some do. Nola’s certainly aware of the knowingly hurtful ones, for as Raglan carries on with his therapy with her, the repressed pain comes to the surface, and she admits that “bad mummies…fucked-up mummies” sometimes hurt their kids (“But they were fucked up in their turn”).

Raglan gets her to admit that her own mother physically abused her. He now takes on the role of her mother, repeating her denials of mothers ever committing abuse in order to provoke more of a surfacing of Nola’s pain. And just as with Mike, he has her physically manifest her pain…but it doesn’t appear as mere marks on her skin. It comes out as the brood.

The fact is that Nola’s trauma is far more severe than Mike’s ever was. He suffers abandonment issues, which are surely terrible, but she as a child was beaten, scratched, and thrown down the stairs. Her alcoholic mother, Juliana Kelly (Fitzgerald), is as much in denial of what she did to little Nola as Nola is of what she did to Candice…through the brood, mind you, as we will learn.

These parental denials add a new dimension to the abuse, a psychological dimension called gaslighting. The victim’s refusal to acknowledge the pain she’s been through–as we see initially in Nola and in Candice’s quiet non-reactions to any violence–is a coping mechanism: an attempt to remove the pain by pretending it isn’t there.

But Nola, having felt the pain resurface, can find only one way to get rid of it now, and that’s through projecting it into the brood, one of whom goes over to Juliana’s house, where Candice also is. The evil, deformed child attacks and kills Candice’s grandma, and Candice, seeing the bloody corpse in the kitchen, gives no emotional response, but just goes up to her room to sleep, and forgets about the whole thing.

And just as Juliana would deny any knowledge of how little Nola got all those bumps on her body, Candice seems to know nothing of how Juliana got her injuries. The police psychologist, Dr. Birkin (played by Reiner Schwarz), has examined Candice, and he can tell that she has repressed trauma that must be dealt with. Taking Birkin’s advice, Frank tries to get his daughter to talk about what happened, but she stays quiet.

In another therapy session with Raglan, Nola has a father transference with him, complaining of her fears that Frank is taking Candice away from her. Raglan, taking on the father role, defends Frank’s actions as protective of their daughter; he claims that in a similar way, Nola’s father did his best to protect her, which provokes her into denying that protection, which truly never happened. As a codependent, alcoholic ex-husband to Juliana, Barton Kelly (Beckman), sat back and allowed Juliana’s abuse of Nola to happen.

When parents look away and ignore abuse, pretending it never happened, just as the abuser denies it, and even the victim pretends it never happened, all of this denial enables the abuse. When the victim does this, it’s wrongheaded but understandable, as confronting and trying to process the pain feels almost impossible; but when abusers, flying monkeys, and codependent enablers let the abuse slip by without judgement, they are in many ways as guilty as the abuser is.

Interestingly, as Nola is tearfully telling Raglan (as her father transference) that he looked away and never protected her from Juliana, he turns his back on her and looks the other way. At one point in the scene, he, in the role of ‘loving father,’ kisses her on the cheek and calls her ‘sweetheart.’ He, as a psychiatrist, is being as emotionally abusive to her as her father was, in however indirect that way Barton was (and Raglan is). In fact, that kiss also suggests he has a sexual interest in Nola, who is an attractive woman.

Frank takes photos of Candice’s bruised back as evidence to be used in a court case against Raglan and Nola. He also receives a visit from Barton, who’s happy to see his granddaughter, but saddened to know the cycle of intergenerational family abuse has resurfaced.

To get more evidence against Raglan, Frank sees Jan Hartog (played by Robert A. Silverman), who has also received psychoplasmics therapy and has lymphosarcoma on the front of his neck. Hartog knows he can’t prove in court that Raglan’s methods caused his cancerous condition, but he hopes that even a losing court case will hurt Raglan’s business by giving him bad publicity. Frank’s hoping for more convincing evidence for the court case.

Barton drives over to see Raglan about telling Nola of her mother’s murder, but Raglan doesn’t want her father to contact her, claiming that her isolation is key to her therapy. Isolating someone is, of course, a kind of emotional abuse, reminding us that therapists can be as bad as abusers, especially ones with Raglan’s narcissistic tendencies, i.e., his apparent god complex, which is something I’ll elaborate on later.

Barton is infuriated with Raglan’s refusal to let him see Nola, so he gets drunk that night in his old house with Juliana. Meanwhile, Frank is having dinner with Candice’s teacher, Ruth Mayer (Hogan), and there’s a potential romantic interest between the two, since she could be a new mother to the little girl. Nola will find out, though, and her rage against her non-protective father, and her jealousy of Ruth, will get both objects of Nola’s rage killed by the brood.

Now, before Barton is killed by one of the brood, as I said above, he gets drunk and ruminates sadly over his failed family in his old house, the one he lived in with Juliana. He talks on the phone with Frank, and he’s on the verge of tears.

The word brood has two significant meanings as far as this film is concerned. As a noun, brood refers, of course, to the group of deformed killer children that Nola produces out of her rage. As a verb, to brood is to ruminate sulkily about whatever is making you unhappy, as Barton does before he’s killed, and as Nola does in her rages that produce the brood.

While Frank is gone to get Barton before he does something foolish in his drunken depression, leaving his dinner date, Ruth, in his home, Nola phones Frank, with Ruth receiving the call and inflaming Nola’s jealousy…and causing her to brood in her own right. Just before Barton is beaten to death, he looks at his brood-killer and sees Nola’s face on it. Of course he does: the brood are all her projections.

When Frank arrives at Juliana’s house and finds Barton dead, the killer child tries to kill him, too, but it soon ‘runs out of gas,’ so to speak, and dies. The child’s body is examined, and we learn that it is sexless, having no genitals. It also has no navel, and therefore wasn’t born the natural, human way. It’s toothless and colourblind, too.

One should consider the implications, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, of it apparently seeing only in black and white. Since these brood children are fueled by a murderous rage, and are projections of Nola’s mental instability, we can understand their black-and-white vision as representative of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting.

The brood’s murderous rage comes from seeing the world as either all white (i.e., all good, as in Nola and Candice) or as all black (as all bad, or those to be killed). There is no grey in-between for them. Such is the mental state of what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (PS): paranoid, because of the paranoid fear that comes from contemplating a retaliation from the hated object; schizoid, because of the splitting of objects into absolute good and bad ones. All babies experience PS at first, but soon enough will acknowledge people as a grey mixture of good and bad, resulting in the mental state called the depressive position (D). The brood can never integrate the black with the white, so instead of experiencing D, they’re always in PS.

In this permanently split state, the brood can never be fully human, hence their lack of teeth, genitals, and retinas in their eyes; their physical deformity (including cleft lips) is symbolic of this human incompleteness. Furthermore, their tongues are too thick and inflexible for proper speech; all they can do to communicate is to grunt and scream without any articulation.

This inability to form words means that the brood cannot participate in society and culture–they have no sense of what Lacan called the Symbolic. Their violent world is that of the Real, an undifferentiated, traumatic, inexpressible world.

Nola’s mental instability is at such a severe state that she splits off and projects her hostility in personified forms that are symbolically comparable to what Bion called bizarre objects, projections that take on a life of their own.

When Raglan learns of the killing of Barton, and that the killer was obviously one of the brood, he realizes that, through psychoplasmics, he’s created a monster…or many monsters. In spite of his narcissistic tendencies, he isn’t all bad, for he’s feeling a pang of conscience.

That pang, nonetheless, isn’t inspiring him to make the best of moral choices, for he tells Chris (Campbell) to have all of his patients, save Nola, removed from his institute. This will feel like he’s abandoning these patients, especially Mike, as Chris tells Raglan. And while it’s true that Nola’s care needs special focus, Raglan’s form of therapy is the last thing she needs; the fact is, he still wants her for himself, so his narcissism wins out.

Frank learns through Hartog about Mike being sent out of Raglan’s institute, and that Nola, “the queen bee,” is the only one Raglan is interested in. She doesn’t even have to pay for the therapy, because Raglan can use her to prove how ‘effective’ psychoplasmics is at projecting pain outward. He, of course, isn’t really going to cure her: the creation of the brood is feeding his god complex.

Mike is now desperate for a father substitute, having been abandoned by his real father and now by Raglan. Mike wants Frank to be his new ‘daddy,’ and he’ll do anything for Frank in exchange for that. Mike will spy on and try to find out what Raglan’s doing with Nola.

To get an idea of how ‘effective’ the projections are in removing pain from oneself, we see after the killing of Ruth how at peace Nola is from waking from a restful sleep. The removing of that pain, however, is only temporary, for she’ll continue to be raging, jealous, and possessive of Candice, who’s been taken, by the pair of brood-children who killed Ruth, back to her.

Frank learns from Mike that Raglan has the brood under Nola’s care in a work shed at the institute, and he surmises that Candice, who’s been missing since the killing of Ruth, must be with Nola. So he rushes over in his car to the institute. He confronts Raglan in front of the work shed, the latter having a gun, and he learns that she is the brood’s mother, and that it was the brood that beat Candice at the beginning of the movie.

And here is where Raglan’s god complex comes in. Even though he can be implicated in the killings of Juliana, Barton, and Ruth, since it’s his psychoplasmics that created the brood in the first place, he won’t use his gun to shoot the killer kids, except in self-defence, as he does to some of them at the film’s climax. Deep down, he loves the brood, because he’s their father, if indirectly. He’s proud of his creations.

Raglan, in this sense, is like God the Father, though he’s more like the inferior Demiurge, creator of what’s physical (i.e., the skin markings, the brood). He’s an evil god, or at least an inferior one, and Nola is an evil Mary, giving virgin births to evil Jesuses, as it were, who kill rather than give life, then die themselves soon afterwards.

So in this sense, The Brood is not just a statement against failed parenting and bad psychiatry; it’s also symbolically a critique of religion’s failed attempts at healing and guiding people. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”: this includes therapists as parental transferences, priests (the Fathers in church), the Mother of God, and God the Father…whether they mean to, or not.

Interestingly, the first verse of Larkin’s poem was recited by a judge during an acrimonious divorce/child custody case in 2009, reminding us of that of Cronenberg and his ex-wife, which in turn inspired this film. The misery man hands down to man, incidentally, reminds me of Exodus 20:5, in its relation to a wrathful, jealous father-God.

Raglan, in an attempt at redeeming himself somewhat, offers to fetch Candice from the room where she is to sleep with the brood, as long as Frank can go in the work shed and speak to Nola in a conciliatory way, to keep her calm so the brood won’t be enraged and attack Raglan and Candice. The plan works at first, until Nola reveals her external womb, created through psychoplasmics, which produces brood-babies. Frank cannot hide his shock and disgust at her ripping open the womb, taking a bloody baby out of it, and licking the blood off of it.

Offended at Frank’s disgust, Nola is enraged, and the brood attacks Raglan, who uses his gun to shoot a few of them before the rest kill him. In her jealous possessiveness of their daughter, Nola tells Frank she’ll kill Candice before letting him take her from Nola. This forces Frank to choke Nola to death, since he knows otherwise that the brood will kill Candice through Nola’s rage; but with her death, the brood dies, too.

In Frank’s killing of Nola, since the two characters represent, and the actors even resembled, Cronenberg and his ex-wife, we can see just how much bitterness the writer/director must have felt toward her, enough to include a scene that is, in effect, a wish-fulfillment. I’m reminded of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” a song about the drummer/singer’s own bitter divorce–these lines in particular: “if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand.”

Frank fetches Candice, takes her to his car, and drives away. The movie ends with a shot of her arm, which has two of the kind of lesions Nola had as a child, which her mom noticed on her. Now, whether Juliana was telling the truth about Nola’s lesions as being there irrespective of the mother’s abuse of her daughter, or if she was lying and in denial about having caused the lesions, they are certainly at least symbolic of the passing on of intergenerational abuse.

The sins of Juliana’s and Barton’s generation are being punished in not only Nola’s but also Candice’s generation. “Man hands on misery to man.” Even outside the realm of family abuse, the sins of the baby boomers and those before them are being punished in generations X, Y, and Z. The brood, in their deformities, incompleteness, and violence, are surely personifications of this problem.

Tents

Camping
is supposed to be
for people who are on
vacation, not the homeless.

High rents
can toss you out
of buildings, and into
tents, but so can bombers.

There are
camps for the
summer, and there
are concentration camps.

You are
in the open air,
& yet still, you are
trapped, just like rats.

Rows of
tents replace
the homes of Gaza.
Zion’s a cruel landlord.

Analysis of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

I: Introduction

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 slasher film produced and directed by Tobe Hooper, written by him and Kim Henkel. It stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, and Gunnar Hansen, all relatively unknown actors, since it was filmed on a low budget.

The film was marketed and hyped as if based on a true story, and while it, like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs (i.e., Buffalo Bill), was inspired by Ed Gein and his crimes (serial killing, grave robbing, wearing human flesh, cross-dressing, etc.), the plot is largely fictional.

It initially received mixed reviews from critics, but it was hugely profitable and has since been regarded as one of the best and most influential horror films ever made. It helped establish, as did films like Black Christmas and Halloween, a number of tropes common to slasher films, including the final girl, and the killer as a hulking, masked figure.

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

II: Politics and Lies–a Brief but Necessary Digression

There is subtle political commentary in this film. Pretending it’s based on a true story, apart from hyping the film to get a wider audience, is a way of saying that, in a sense, the horrors depicted represent some unsettling realities in our world back in the early 1970s, and perhaps, even more so today. The date for the events of the film is given as August 18, 1973, the same year that, just two months later, the oil crisis would begin. Nixon would resign, because of the growing scandal around Watergate, the year of the film’s release.

In other news around that time, the Vietnam War was in its final years, ending the year after the film’s release. Also, during the early development of Hooper’s story, there was the Chilean coup d’état of September 11th, 1973. Hooper’s point in pretending that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a true story is that the media lies all the time about what the US government has been doing all over the world…so why couldn’t he lie, too?

Nixon lied that he was “not a crook.” The atrocities of the Vietnam War, committed by US troops, were rationalized and minimized in the news media as being an essential part of ‘defending Western democracy’ against ‘the Godless commie menace,’ as was the putative reason given for overthrowing the democratically-elected Salvador Allende to replace his socialist government with Pinochet‘s right-wing dictatorship, which killed, imprisoned, tortured and disappeared tens of thousands of leftist political dissidents. The Pinochet government also established the “free market” policies of the Chicago Boys, benefitting only the Chilean wealthy and American investors, but throwing the rest of the Chilean population into poverty.

This “free market” model would be a kind of prototype for Reagan’s and Thatcher’s economic policies of the 1980s, all lied about in the media as promising economic prosperity for all, when in reality all these policies did was bring about the neoliberal nightmare we’ve been suffering through more and more in the decades since. Indeed, Hooper’s film could be seen as prophetic in a way, for its making and release coinciding with the oil crisis means that the early 70s were the beginning of the end of the Keynesian era of welfare capitalism and its post-WWII economic prosperity. The poverty surrounding the family of Leatherface (Hansen) can be seen as symbolic of the coming economic problems of the US and beyond.

A hint in the film that helps us understand the story’s connection with the ups and downs of capitalism is when the hitchhiker (Neal)–in the van with Sally (Burns) and Franklin Hardesty (Partain), Jerry (played by Allen Danziger), Kirk (played by William Vail), and Pam (played by Teri McMinn)–tells them that the air gun used to kill cattle in the slaughterhouse was no good because “people were put out of jobs.” Technological advances tend to replace workers, as many fear AI might do today.

Technological advances also play a role in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which in turn leads to periodic economic crises, putting many out of work, which is what has happened to the hitchhiker’s family, including Leatherface, the old man (Siedow), and Grandpa (played by John Dugan).

These economic crises, happening every ten to fifteen years, combined with such other capitalist problems as income inequality and poverty for the majority of the population, problems that are especially scandalous in the richest country in the world, will eventually take their toll on the mental health of much of the population. Small wonder Leatherface’s family is so screwed up, this family being an extreme example of the mental health issues of many in the United States.

III: Deathly Desires

Now we can look at the issue dominating the beginning of the film: grave robbing, of which we later learn is the hitchhiker’s responsibility. Both he and his brother, Leatherface, exhibit traits of what Erich Fromm called the necrophilous character. This is not to be confused with necrophilia as a sexual perversion. Rather, Fromm characterizes it thus: ““Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. [Fromm, page 369, his emphasis]

This necrophilous sickness in the hitchhiker and Leatherface is also something I wrote about in an article expressing my concerns about the escalations of current global conflicts leading to a very possibly nuclear WWIII. These concerns are also linked to capitalism and imperialism, since war is a business and a racket, meant to generate profits for such weapons manufacturers as Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. Beyond the wish to make money, though, is the fact that these psychopathic warmongers in the Pentagon, etc., seem to have a lot in common with the ghouls of this movie, a desire for death. Only the differences in income and social status, of the real-life people and the movie characters, separate them from each other.

Sicker than merely digging up bodies is the way the hitchhiker and Leatherface, as was the case with Gein, like to turn human corpses and skeletons into grisly works of art. In these ‘sculptures,’ we see the perverse and paradoxical merging of the creative and destructive instincts. Family abuse, something I’ll return to and expand on later, has surely been the root cause of this ghoulish perversion of the artistic impulse.

Instead of having a conventional soundtrack with, for example, an orchestral score, Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell recorded a track of eerie background sound effects. This lack of conventional expressivity in music (the country songs heard in the film notwithstanding) is paralleled with Leatherface’s lack of verbal language and the hitchhiker’s speech impediment. These elements, taken together, represent one of the film’s major critiques of American society, as well as of capitalist society as a whole: the inability to communicate because of social alienation; the ghoulish sculptures mentioned in the previous paragraph are of course also a reflection of this problem.

Tied in with the ghoulish art and the alienating inability to communicate is how the film begins mostly with a black screen, as photos are taken of the parts of the exhumed corpses, all while those grating, screeching sound effects of Hooper and Bell are heard. In that blackness is a feeling of undifferentiated, hellish isolation, with no one to talk to, a place where terror cannot be verbalized.

IV: The Graveyard Scene

The five youths in the van go to a graveyard in the area where the grave robbing has occurred, somewhere in central Texas; they want to see if the grave of Sally’s and Franklin’s grandfather has been disturbed–it hasn’t. Still, a few things happen here that have some bearing on, or at least that hint at, what’s to come.

A cowboy (played by Jerry Green) leads Sally away to where her grandfather’s grave is, but he does it in a way that suggests he has a sexual interest in her. She is, after all, pretty and curvaceous. He takes her by the arm and tells her boyfriend that he’s going to run off with her. This ties in with the song, “Fool For a Blonde” (Sally is blonde), heard later in the van when the hitchhiker is given a ride, and he almost kills her towards the end of the film. My point is that men eyeing women lewdly, the subject of the song and what’s obviously on the mind of the cowboy taking her to the grave, is on a continuum with the psychopathic extreme of the hitchhiker trying to send her to her grave, then feast on her flesh. All of these men are regarding women as delicious meat.

The other noteworthy thing during the graveyard scene is the drunk (played by Joe Bill Hogan) alluding to the horrors we’re about to see, horrors no one believes are true because a drunken old man is talking about them. He’s like an ignored prophet, a male Cassandra. This foreshadowing continues back in the van when Pam reads the dire predictions of their horoscopes that day.

V: Franklin and the Hitchhiker

The vulnerability of Franklin is emphasized early on, not just because he’s in a wheelchair, but also from his fall off the side of the road when he needs to urinate, as well as when the hitchhiker uses his knife to slash Franklin’s arm, making him whimper in pain. So when he’s finally carved to pieces with Leatherface’s chainsaw, it’s especially horrifying.

The hitchhiker’s viciousness is, of course, tied in not only with how “weird looking” he is (i.e., the port-wine stain birthmark on the right side of his face, his quirky body language), but also the awkwardness of his conversation with the five of them (graphically describing the killing of the cattle in the slaughterhouse, showing them his knife, imposing on them to pay him for a photo he’s taken of Franklin). His deep digging of Franklin’s knife blade into his own hand, before slashing Franklin’s arm with his bigger, stronger knife, shows the relationship between sadism and masochism that Freud wrote about. It also indicates how the hitchhiker’s violent nature is rooted in his own personal trauma.

After getting rid of the hitchhiker, who has smeared his blood on the side of the van and has childishly blown raspberries at them as they drive off, the five youths stop at a Gulf gas station to fill up the van; but the owner of the gas station, the old man, says he has no gas (which I see as an allusion to the 1973 oil crisis). He presumably has seen the blood on the van, and I suspect he knows that it was his younger brother who put it there, to mark the five for death. He says he won’t get any more gas ’til late that afternoon, or not even until the next morning; but I suspect he’s lying (he’ll never get any gas), hoping to have the kids not only buy and eat his barbecue (!), but also to keep them there so he and his brothers can make barbecue out of their flesh.

VI: Vegetarianism

When Franklin asks the old man where “the old Franklin place” is, which is dangerously close to the house of the family of psychopaths, the old man warns them to stay away. Though just as psychopathic as the rest of the family, the old man is able to put on a respectable face of sanity for the public, in his hopes of hiding his family’s criminal insanity from the world.

It’s been noted that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a ‘vegetarian‘ horror film, in that the brutal killing and cannibalistic eating of the victims–by a family of former slaughterhouse workers–gives the audience an idea of the suffering of farm animals. Indeed, Paul McCartney once made a video saying that if we ever saw the brutality inflicted on farm animals, we’d all be vegetarians. When hearing about the killing of cattle in the slaughterhouse during the ride in the van, Pam says, “People shouldn’t kill animals for food.”

Since the psychopathic family is so poor, it’s easy to see that survival is one of their main reasons for resorting to cannibalism. It’s also exocannibalism, the killing and eating of outsiders, who are perceived as the enemy. In these two motives, we see capitalism again as the root cause, through extreme poverty and alienation, but also in the commodification of the human body (i.e., selling human flesh as “barbecue” in the old man’s gas station). Finally, eating their victims can be seen as an attempt to introject their healthy qualities; since the brothers are so obviously sick, they desperately seek some kind of a cure.

VII: Abuse, Trauma, and Projection

Their extreme psychopathy is on a continuum with the kind of pain we all feel, but it’s moderate for us, of course. We can see this in a comparison of the hitchhiker with Franklin, both of whom come across as childish with their blowing of raspberries, and both having knives. We all want to blow off pain by projecting it, which is symbolized in the film by blowing raspberries and digging knives into people. Sometimes pain is projected in a moderate way, as with Franklin; other times, in an extreme way, as with the hitchhiker.

Family abuse (i.e., the old man’s aggressions against Leatherface and the hitchhiker) has driven the younger two brothers to project their pain in an extremely violent way, while emotional neglect makes Franklin project only in a minor way, blowing raspberries during a temper tantrum at the old Franklin house.

With his slashed arm, Franklin has just had a terribly traumatic experience, and he needs to process his fear by constantly talking about it. Though his endless prating gets irritating for the other four, he needs to have his feelings validated and empathized with in order to be soothed and healed. The others’ neglectful attitude, even to the point of Jerry taunting Franklin that the hitchhiker is going to kill him, only makes his trauma worse.

VIII: A Brief Psychoanalytic Digression

The soothing process that Franklin needs is well understood through the container/contained theory of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (read here for more about psychoanalytic concepts). Harsh emotional experiences–especially those of babies and psychotics, who are incapable of self-soothing–need to be contained, that is, soothed, detoxified, and processed, in order for one to make sense of them and return to normal mental functioning. The container is the one who helps us process and detoxify these harsh feelings, the contained; the mother is usually the baby’s container, and the psychotherapist is the mental patient’s container. If we’re reasonably healthy, we can be our own containers, or self-soothers.

The container is given a yonic symbol, and the contained is given a phallic one. Healthy containment, starting with the use of projective identification as a primitive, pre-verbal form of communication between mother and baby, leads to normal mental functioning and the ability to communicate in society through language–what Lacan would have considered a healthy transition from the dyadic mother/son relationship in the Imaginary to a relationship with many people in the cultural world of the Symbolic.

Franklin and the hitchhiker have made at best tenuous entries into the socio-cultural world of the Symbolic; Leatherface, on the other hand, hasn’t properly entered that world at all, since the closest he’s able to use language is through whimpering and oinking. He’s generally described as being mentally handicapped, but I suspect that extreme trauma from his childhood has silenced him…has, pardon the expression, retarded his development.

You see, sometimes containment is negative, that is, the opposite of soothing. Negative containment can lead instead to a nameless dread, something the three brothers originally experienced, then started projecting on to other people; this negative containment is symbolized in the film by Leatherface’s phallic chainsaw, or the hitchhiker’s phallic knife, cutting into their victims’ bodies and making yonic wounds in them. In Lacanian terms, this nameless dread could be called the Real, that traumatizing, inexpressible, undifferentiated world expressed in the black screen seen at the beginning of the film.

Note how I never refer to the three psychopathic brothers by their names, as they’re referred to in the sequels. I prefer to refer to them as the “old man,” “hitchhiker,” and “Leatherface” as given in the end credits, because I feel that their namelessness is significant as far as the meaning of the film is concerned. Not having names reflects their social alienation, as well as their inability to communicate and be communicated to normally. These problems of theirs explain their regressive tendency towards the infantile, primitive, preverbal communication of projective identification as through the piercing of the contained (the knife, sledgehammer, or chainsaw) into the container (the victim’s wound). The hitchhiker, recall, calls his brother “Leatherface,” rather than by a normal Christian name.

IX: When Victimizers are Victims, Too

Kirk and Pam go off outside, and they find the house of the psychopath family. Hoping to get some gas from them, Kirk ventures inside to look around and see if anyone is in.

This going into a house one hasn’t been permitted to enter, only to suffer terrible horrors, if not to be outright killed, had already been seen in Psycho (Detective Arbogast and Lila Crane going into Bates’s house), and would be seen in Pulp Fiction (Butch and Marcellus Wallace barging into Maynard’s pawn shop). This ‘invasion’ of the psychopaths’ private world will result in the invasion of the intruders’ bodies by a hammer, a hatchet, a chainsaw, and a knife.

Being so impoverished, and mentally ill from that impoverishment, the family of psychopaths perceive the outside world to be unremittingly hostile. Their viciousness is thus projected onto the world. Small wonder Leatherface is so terrified when Kirk, Pam, and Jerry come into his house.

Indeed, as scary as Leatherface is, he is by far the most scared of all. The old man beats him and bullies him, his only name seems to be Leatherface (note that I’m unconcerned with the sequels and remakes), and–speaking of that name of his–can one even being to wonder what cruel tortures he went through to make him need to cover his face with dying human flesh?

I’m less concerned with any physical damage or disfigurement done to his face, or ugliness, that the masks are supposed to hide. The three masks we see him wear in the film, those of the Killer, the Old Lady, and the Pretty Lady (i.e., the last one with the makeup on it), all represent three personalities for Leatherface, for without the masks, he has no personality. The extremity of the abuse he has suffered, from financial hard times taking away his job and identity as a slaughterhouse worker, to the particularly cruel abuse from his family–presumably from early childhood–has destroyed his whole sense of self. His masks represent False Selves hiding no self, just as the old man’s pretense of comforting gentleness to Sally during the film’s climax, as well as his warning of the five youths to stay away, is his False Self of kindness and sanity hiding his psychopathic True Self.

So when we see Leatherface, we see a mad slasher, but he sees himself as protecting his home. First came the financial hard times, and the unemployment and hunger that have led to cannibalism; then there were all these strange people coming into his house uninvited. He feels as though the whole world is closing in on him.

X: The First Killings

Still, his use of that sledgehammer to crack Kirk’s skull open is a scary sight to see. His wearing of the Killer mask to murder Kirk, Pam, and Jerry is thus fitting. That slamming shut of the steel door to the back room after killing Kirk is chilling. It also begins what is for me the tensest, scariest moment of the film. We’re all begging Pam not to follow her dead boyfriend into the house.

Her stumbling into that room with all the lint-covered skulls and bones of humans and animals just confirms all of those dire astrological warnings she read in the van. I’m not sure if a tiny ribcage we see hanging is one of an animal or of a baby. She’s so overwhelmed with these ghoulish sculptures that she pukes.

Part of the terror of her seeing Leatherface is his terror of seeing her in his house; as I said above, believe it or not, he’s the most scared of all. On the other hand, an interesting contrast to be made is between how the male victims are largely killed, usually dispatched quickly, and how the female victims are terrorized before either being killed, or in Sally’s case, slashed and beaten in the attempt to kill her.

Hanging Pam on her back on that hook is more than painful to watch: like the phallic stabbing of Marion Crane in the shower in Psycho, the invasion of that phallic hook in her back is a symbolic rape. I’m reminded of a line in Tori Amos‘s “Me and a Gun,” a song about her having been raped at knifepoint (I think we know what the gun really was): “…and a man on my back.” Recall, in connection with all of this, what I said above about the objectifying of Sally early in the film, and her being sliced up by the hitchhiker towards the end.

[Incidentally, on page 11 of the script, just around when the cowboy takes her by the arm and away from Jerry to find her grandfather’s grave, Sally is described as “braless and her breasts bounce enticingly beneath the thin fabric of her t-shirt.” She’s also described on page 2 as “a beautiful blond girl,” reminding us of the lecherous song, “Fool For a Blonde.”]

XI: Punching Down

This abusive, sexually-charged treatment of women (symbolically, that is), as if they were just pieces of tasty meat, is linked with a more general issue of this impoverished, psychopathic family: they punch down, instead of even trying to punch up. I discussed this issue in my analysis of the TV film, Duel. The frustrations of the poor under capitalism are far too often taken out on other poor people, a product of alienation, rather than channeled together, in solidarity with all of the poor, to rise up in revolution against the ruling class. The slaughter of defenseless animals is certainly tied in with, and symbolic of, this problem of punching down.

It’s always easier to take one’s frustrations out on the weak, then to rise up against the strong.

Even more punching down happens when Jerry repeatedly taunts Franklin with the threat, however joking, that the hitchhiker is going to kill him–a truly mean thing to say to a traumatized, vulnerable young man in a wheelchair, though I’d say that Jerry’s worst sins are that hair and that shirt of his.

XII: The Climax

After the killings of Jerry and Franklin, Sally becomes the final girl, screaming and running from Leatherface and his chainsaw in the outside grasses and bushes at night. This terror involving running away from an armed killer in the bush at night suggests the trauma of soldiers and civilians in the jungles of Vietnam, experiencing the terror of an ambush. Such a comparison deserves to be made considering the subtle political commentary I mentioned above in a film made in the early 70s.

Sally runs into a house where she thinks she’ll be safe, though she’s totally unaware that it’s the house of the psychos. Leatherface saws up the front door to get in after she has locked it; this damaging of his own home represents how the abuse of others can be so destructive that it can bounce back and harm oneself. Certainly, when the old man comes home and sees the door, he’ll be abusive to Leatherface for it; of course, if the family hadn’t been going around ‘punching down’ in the first place, things wouldn’t have escalated to the point of ‘punching themselves.’

Sally runs up to the second floor and finds Grandpa and ‘Grandma,’ presumably, hoping she can get some help from them. Note the lack of any living females in this beyond dysfunctional family. Small wonder Leatherface crossdresses: he isn’t transgender–he just does it to compensate for the lack of sisters, mothers, and grandmothers.

Sally has to jump out the window and run outside again. She returns to the Gulf gas station where she thinks the old man will help her; but just as with the family’s ‘grandparents,’ any sense of safety from Leatherface in this shelter is only illusory. The gas station can thus be seen as the ‘sane’ double of the house. It seems normal, the cooked human flesh masquerading as ‘barbecue,’ just as the old man seems reasonable and comforting to Sally at first…until he brings out the bag and rope. Indeed, the insane are often able to wear a mask of sanity when in public.

Part of the old man’s sadism is leaving the gas station door wide open as he goes off to bring over his truck. That wide-open door, with the blackness of night outside as well as our knowledge that Leatherfae is out there somewhere, just adds to the tension.

XIII: An Abuser’s Mask of Sanity

The old man hitting her with the broomstick to subdue her should be seen as no different from his beating the hitchhiker or Leatherface: he’s simply abusive, while putting on a front of sanity and reasonability. With her tied up, gagged, and in the bag as he drives her back to the house, he talks his fake consoling words while poking her with a stick and chuckling like the sadistic psychopath that he is. This juxtaposition of ‘consoling’ and cruelty is typical of the abuser, who alternates between periods of ‘kindness’ and meanness to his victim in order to establish traumatic bonding. As a result, Sally’s ordeal draws out into a seemingly endless nightmare.

Driving towards the house, the old man finds the hitchhiker, and we learn–through the former’s angry scolding of the latter–who has been responsible for all the grave robbing. The old man is concerned with preserving the false image of his family’s innocence and status while allowing all kinds of viciousness and cruelty in secret. Recall his words when seeing the sawed-up front door to the house: “Look what your brother did to the door! Ain’t he got no pride in his home?”

An example of the family’s cannibalism, as well as their regard of pretty Sally as delicious food, is when Grandpa is allowed to suck the blood out of a cut on her finger. Franklin was right when he said in the van, upon meeting the hitchhiker, “A whole family of Draculas.”

Such a false image of a ‘virtuous’ family with a good social status is common among abusive ones, their insistent, narcissistic denial of any wrongdoing. Such a duality of seeming virtue versus secret vice is epitomized when we see the three brothers and Grandpa at the dinner table with screaming Sally. The old man (playing the role of ‘father’), Leatherface in the dark wig and Pretty Lady mask (‘mother’), and the hitchhiker (the ‘rebellious teen son’) parody the traditional American family at dinner. Their bickering looks like a trivializing of their profound dysfunction–again, typical of abusive families. (Incidentally, research has suggested that psychological aggression in American families is so prevalent as to be almost universal.)

Paralleled to this duality of the façade of the virtuous family vs. the real, dysfunctional one is the duality of the cook vs. the killers. The hitchhiker, in the role of the ‘rebellious teen son,’ defies the authority of the old man, the ‘father,’ by saying he’s “just a cook,” while the hitchhiker and Leatherface have to do all the dirty work of killing Sally et al.

The old man, pretending he’s the sane one of the family, says he takes “no pleasure in killing,” even though he’ll stand by and allow his brothers to do it, even laughing as it’s happening. He’ll cook the human flesh, but he hypocritically fancies that he’s above killing. The family’s cannibalism, recall, represents the non-vegetarian lust for animal meat. Many of us are content to buy and cook our beef, chicken, pork, etc., but let the farmers do the killing for us.

XIV: Mirroring Faces

The hitchhiker and Leatherface like to add psychological terror into the mix by going up to Sally for a closer look. (One is reminded of that song, “Fool for a Blonde,” in which the singer sings about watching women, thinking lewd thoughts.) The hitchhiker asks Leatherface if he likes her face, implying that after they kill her, he’ll cut hers off and use it as a new mask. I used to think the hitchhiker was asking Sally if she liked Leatherface’s Pretty Lady mask, which of course she never would.

Leatherface’s Pretty Lady mask, with make-up crudely painted on it, and his woman’s wig, can be improved on in terms of beauty, or so he imagines, if he replaces it with hers as a new mask. His stroking of her pretty long blonde hair indicates that he’d like to replace the wig with it, too.

As I said above, this cross-dressing of his shouldn’t be confused with the actual transgender experience; as with Norman Bates and his ‘Mother’ personality, the Pretty Lady is just one of Leatherface’s False Selves, because his trauma has deprived him of a True Self. The Pretty Lady is actually a feeble narcissistic defence against total psychological fragmentation.

Leatherface looks at Sally as if she were a metaphorical mirror showing his ideal-I, which he wishes he could live up to. He has a tenuous narcissistic link to the Imaginary while teetering on the brink of the Real, where he’d have no identity at all, no link at all with reality, since the trauma of the undifferentiated, inexpressible blackness of the Real is a total psychotic break with reality, total psychological fragmentation.

While he looks at her, admiring an ideal of feminine beauty, she of course can only look back at him with disgust. This contrast underscores the alienation felt between the ideal-I and the fragmentary, awkward reality that is Leatherface’s physical existence. It also underscores the alienation felt in the inability to communicate with others, to connect in the world of this film.

The brothers and Grandpa sit at dinner, posturing as a normal family, while Sally screams and screams, tied to a chair with the severed hands of one of her murdered friends attached to it. Leatherface and the hitchhiker mock her screams like two mean, immature kids, as if abuse were a trivial form of pain. The hitchhiker’s immature mocking of her screaming and–as he sees it–babyish sobbing is a projection of his own babyishness, with his blowing of raspberries.

When the old man chides his two younger brothers for the noise they’re making and their mocking her, saying, “No need to torture the poor girl,” he’s demonstrating his hypocrisy in pretending to have even a modicum of sympathy for her, since only seconds earlier, he too was laughing at her screaming and crying. His fake pity is another example of the false front of goodness that an abuser presents to the public, to make himself look good.

XV: Escape

Finally, the brothers decide to let Grandpa kill her with a quick blow of a hammer on her head. The old man brags that Grandpa’s “the best killer there ever was,” that he could kill her with “one lick,” and so her death would be quick and minimally painful; but at his advanced age (he’s over a hundred years old!), Grandpa can barely hold the hammer in his hand, much less give Sally a fatal blow. So a ‘quick death’ turns into all the more of a prolonged agony for her.

When the hitchhiker offers to take the hammer from Grandpa and kill her, he foolishly loosens his grip on her, so she can break free and jump out the window. It’s morning, and the sun’s up. As she’s limping towards the main road, the hitchhiker pursues her with his knife, and Leatherface comes out with his chainsaw.

With the end of the film, we see again how abuse often comes back onto the abuser when the hitchhiker, in the middle of the road and his attention consumed with cutting up Sally, doesn’t notice an oncoming truck until it’s too late, and he’s crushed under its wheels. Similarly, Leatherface chases her and the driver, who’s stopped and gotten out of his truck; and after the driver throws a large wrench at Leatherface’s head, knocking him to the ground, his chainsaw digs into his leg. Now Leatherface has to limp.

XVI: Leatherface, the Ultimate Victim

A pickup truck is driving by, and Sally gets in the back. They drive away, her laughing triumphantly. Leatherface will have to go home and tell the old man that not only did the girl get away, able to tell the public about the psycho family, but also that the hitchhiker died.

Leatherface knows he’s going to suffer terrible abuse for his failure to get her. Recall that I called him the most scared of all the characters in this film. He has no victim to take out his frustrations on (in the negative container/contained sense I described above). He will only be able to whimper unintelligibly as his older brother beats him with a stick, like a cruel husband beating his wife (and it’s sadly fitting that Leatherface is dressed like someone’s wife at this moment). All Leatherface can do is flail his chainsaw as he watches her disappear in that truck, him unable to put his despair into words. She escaped his abusive world…he can never do so.

How like the unverbalized frustration of the poor who punch down, and who are so poor, so low, they often don’t even have anybody to punch down on.

“Marble,” a Modern Myth to Encourage the Discouraged

My name is Casey. I have been trapped in a huge block of marble for as long as I can remember; and I have been struggling to break out of it for what must be years, even decades.

A conspiracy of sorcerers put me in this prison. How did they construct the marble in which they encased me? They performed repeated rituals, ceremonies of shame. They made me believe that I deserved to be held forever in this cell of marble, that I am ugly, repellant, of no worth at all. I believed it, and wept in my petrified confinement.

A while back, however, I began to doubt the cruel beliefs my captors put in my head. In my first doubts, I found myself able to do something I hadn’t been able to do in years, decades, even.

I budged.

Just a bit, at first.

Then I doubted a little more, and I could move a bit more.

I’ve continued doubting, and since this growth of doubting has slowly but steadily bloomed, I’ve become able not only of more and more movement inside this casing, but I’ve also been able to make this large block of marble shake on the ground where it’s sat all this time.

How do I doubt? I just keep thinking to myself that it isn’t I who am ugly, repellant, and worthless, but rather that it’s the marble I’ve been encased in that is ugly, repellant, and unworthy.

It seems that everyone outside, looking at this huge block of marble I’m incarcerated in, thinks the marble is beautiful, protecting the world from my hideousness.

But more and more, I know better.

Attempts are made, all the same, by those outside, to make me believe that there’s nothing good in me to make it worthwhile to break free. Once I come out of my fetter of engulfing rock, I’ll realize that I can’t do anything useful for the world, or so they’d have me believe. It’s best that I stay inside, apparently…

No! I must never believe those lies!

You may be wondering how I’ve been able to live and breathe while immobilized in this marble for so long, with no oxygen, food, or even an ability to relieve myself. The explanation is simple: the sorcerers who put me in this predicament used their magic to ensure that I’d never need to breathe, eat, or do any of the normal things that people outside do all the time and take for granted.

The fact that my tormentors are keeping me alive is part of how I know that I must have a secret worth that they don’t want to be known to the world. I have special abilities that they feel threatened by; if I were free to use those abilities, my enemies would be reduced to nothing.

Still, why not just kill me? Perhaps my abilities include a defying of death: maybe they can’t kill me, so encasing me was the best they could do. Perhaps they get pleasure from the idea of so capable a man as I being convinced I’m worthless that my powers would never be used, because I don’t believe in them. They laugh at how I’m so close to greatness, yet so far away, too.

Hence all those voices outside trying so hard to discourage me from trying to break free, all deliberately made audible to me, in spite of my confinement, through the sorcerers’ magic. But I’ll show them all!

Umph! I’ve…got…to break…out!

I can feel the marble block moving, wobbling a bit from side to side. Gradually, as I push left, then right…forward, then backward, I can feel the wobbles get slightly bigger over time. I am making progress!

The space between my body and the surrounding marble was originally so tight that it was pressing into me. With my years of struggling, the tightness is gone, and now there are a few millimetres of space all around between my body and the marble. Tiny pieces of it have broken off and fallen to my feet, erosion from my struggles!

Grains of marble from the outside must be breaking off, too, hence my ability to move the block more and more, and hence the voices of the people trying to discourage me, their voices louder and louder, and more and more agitated at my progress and determination.

I am an angel trapped in this marble, and it must be carved, as it were, until I set myself free! I must become the angel that I already am!

Ungh! I…must…keep…rocking…this…block!

CRACK!

What was that sound?

How big of a crack did I just make?

Instead of small, slow bits of progress, am I about to start making large ones?

I can hear the voices outside, moaning in surprise and…apprehension? Do they fear the coming of my success?

I…must…push…harder! Oof!

CRACK!

That one sounded much bigger. I’ll be free soon!

Hey, there’s a big crack in front of my eyes now. I can see outside, and I can hear the people out there much better. Quite a crowd is gathering, making a lot of noise.

Unh! I’m…gonna…keep…on…shaking…this…thing–Oh! Until…I’m…free!…Aah!

CRACK!

“Don’t do it, Casey!” I hear a male voice warning me. “If you come out of there, you’ll only realize, without any doubt, just how worthless you really are! Just stay in there, and spare us all the irritation of your presence!”

No! I mustn’t listen to voices like that! They’re lying!

Angh! I’m…getting…closer…to…breaking…free!

CRACK!

A huge chunk of the marble just broke off! I can see all the people to my front! There are at least a dozen men and women watching me break out. Some, with worried looks on their faces, are shouting at me to give up. Others, with hopeful looks, are cheering for me!

(In fact, I remember when I had my very first doubt, I heard the voice of a woman trying to encourage me to break out. That might be her voice that I’m hearing now.)

“Come on, Casey!” a woman is shouting. “You can get out of there!”

“Shut up!” a woman beside her is saying. “Don’t encourage the imbecile. He’s dangerous. The coven warned us about him!”

Speak of the coven, and they appear.

Indeed, I can see the group of cloaked sorcerers approaching the crowd; these were the six men and women who encased me in this marble I’m almost out of.

Under their hoods, their shadowy faces are showing great fear. I find this most encouraging!

Nnhk! Gotta…shake…this…thing, and…get…out!

CRACK!

What’s this? A big piece of marble just broke off from behind me! I can turn my head, and I see the crowd from back there now!

The coven is chanting in their ancient, mystic language. I don’t know the meaning of the words, but I know the intention: to cover me in a new, hardened prison, and to make me feel unworthy of ever trying to free myself again.

I must…resist them…Urgh! I must…break out…

CRACK!

Though another piece broke off, a big one to my left, just under my cheek, I can feel a soft, liquid form building up to fill in these holes. I…must…push through them…before…they harden…and become…new marble! I’m…so tired…I don’t have…much strength left…

The coven’s chanting is getting louder and more intense. More of that liquid is filling in all the spaces. I won’t be able…to get out…before it hardens…

“Stop it!” a woman’s voice cries. “Leave him alone! Let him break free! Stop hurting him!”

“Shut up!” a second female voice shouts. “Let him be sealed up! He’s no good to us! He’s a danger! Can’t you see that?”

“No, he’s not!” the first woman shouts. “Free him!”

“The coven says he’s a danger to us all!” the second says.

“He’s a danger only to the coven!” the first says. Out of my half-open right eye, I see her running off. In my exhaustion, I’m barely conscious. She’s come back…with a pick-axe! She’s chipping away at the marble with it! She’s helping me! She’s freeing me!

With her help, I feel valued for the first time in my life. Hers must have been that first encouraging voice I heard so many years ago. Now I have the courage to keep trying. She’s given me new strength. Nnmph! Now…I…can…break…out!

SMASH!

Fiery light is flashing out of me in all directions, now that I’m finally free. My light is burning the coven to a crisp. They are screaming in agony as they slowly die. Their blind supporters are weeping to see my enemies destroyed.

They are but ash now, blown away by the wind.

I’m free, my helper is free…we’re all free.

Free of the coven’s power over us, as their supporters are beginning to realize.

My light is shining for everyone.

Even the coven’s supporters are realizing that I’m not without value.

I am the good that the coven tried to hide in marble. I am the beauty that they called ugliness, because it was they were were truly ugly.

All the people who were lied to about me are no longer ugly. They’re beautiful, too.

We’re all beautiful, and valuable.

We’re free.

False Families

False families are primarily concerned with their public image, as ‘virtuous,’ ‘upstanding,’ ‘admirable,’ ‘moral,’ and ‘loving.’ Maintaining this image is far more important to them than actually striving to live up to such ideals, since doing the latter is, of course, far more difficult.

One doesn’t just put on an act of virtue and goodness, while secretly knowing that one isn’t the good family member one pretends to be. These people lie to themselves as successfully as they lie to the public. Contemplating the truth is much too intolerable, an unbearable blow to their inflated egos; so they must convince themselves that the theatre of virtue put on is real.

Conflicts and feelings of resentment are inevitable, even in the best of families, but the better ones will at least try to resolve these problems as fairly as they can. Toxic families, on the other hand, will find ways of ‘resolving’ these conflicts so that they can maintain an illusion of blamelessness for most of the family, while projecting the unavoidable blame on one, or a few, scapegoat(s).

A healthy family will, paradoxically, acknowledge fault, blame, and ill emotional health in all the family members who are at fault in the conflict, and they will reserve judgement fairly and in proportion to how much fault each member involved has. A false family, or toxic one, or emotionally abusive one (whichever name you wish to use to describe them), will dump all or most of the blame on the scapegoat(s), while absolving of blame other family members who may bear much, if not most or all, of the blame, thus maintaining the illusion of family health for the majority of the members.

A false family has a black-and-white view of the family members. Generally speaking, and with at least relatively few exceptions, certain members are seen as largely good: the narcissistic parent (the ringleader of the toxic family structure) and his or her golden children, his or her flying monkeys. On the other side are those deemed largely ‘bad’: the codependent parent and the scapegoat(s) or identified patient(s). Any reasonable person would know that everyone is a lighter or darker grey between the good and bad extremes, but the group narcissism of the toxic family will admit to little beyond the black and white.

This is the kind of family that I had to endure growing up with. To be sure, I have plenty of glaring faults, but I hardly deserved to be scapegoated because of them. In fact, a reasonable argument can be made that the exacerbating, if not largely the origin, of most of my faults was because of the emotional abuse that I suffered under my parents’ mismanagement of the family.

I have already described in detail, in the links given above as well as such links as these, the whole story of how I was bullied, belittled, lied to, and subjected to gaslighting by my late parents and older siblings (my brothers, R. and F., and my sister, J.). If you have either already read some or all of those posts, or if you don’t care to do so much reading, Dear Reader, then please just go along with what I’m saying to you now: that my having gone NO CONTACT with the family for the past seven years (as of this post’s publication) has been perfectly justified, for the sake of protecting myself against being subjected to any further emotional abuse in the future, something guaranteed from those three surviving siblings. When trying to heal from C-PTSD, one cannot do so while in contact with any of the abusers.

One of the family’s chief rationalizations for bullying me and treating me with contempt is one of those glaring faults I referred to above: namely, my self-centredness (something supposedly based on ‘my autism,’ or really their distorted, outdated definition of autism, which is a mental condition I learned from psychiatrists that I don’t really have, but was rather one of my late mother’s many fabrications). As far as I’m concerned, only my wife has the right to complain of my selfishness (which was really the result of my alienation from an emotionally neglectful family), for unlike the family, my wife is truly selfless.

As I said above, the selflessness of a false family is just that…false. It is an outward show, meant not only to impress and fool the public, but also for the false family to fool themselves into thinking they’re genuinely good people. One only has to use one’s instincts, though, to realize that there’s nothing good about bullies and narcissists. Accordingly, highly sensitive people like me can see through the family bullshit, and they as a result get scapegoated…to protect the lie.

When my mother was dying of breast cancer, she was nonetheless healthy enough to tell me a slew of lies online (see the links above for details), after I’d already known of other lies of hers (e.g., the autism lie mentioned above). When you know someone has lied to you, you cannot trust the liar ever again–this is ancient wisdom. I, living on the other side of the world and already refusing to communicate with her for fear of more manipulating, had no way of knowing if the messages by phone or email about her dying were real, or just another fabrication to make me feel guilty and manipulate me into making a visit to Canada that I vowed never again to make.

My brother R. wanted me to phone Mom, who was in hospital and on her deathbed, to make regular phone calls and chat with her, something I absolutely didn’t want to do, especially given her ever-impenitent attitude. R. wanted me to put on a show of love, which I refused to do.

He later stumbled upon a YouTube video I’d made about seven years before her death, in which I bitterly recited “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin. The combination of my refusal to call her with my recitation of a poem with a four-letter word made him (freshly grieving over her death) so angry that, instead of letting himself calm down and then later asking me, in the comments section, what Mom had done to make me so mad at her, he made a snarky comment to the effect that I’m apparently mentally “disturbed,” and that I should be ashamed of myself for not loving a mother who, apparently, “loved [me] more than anyone else on the planet.”

No attempt was made at an investigation to find out what happened between Mom and me: there was just an assumption that she was ‘all-good,’ and that I am ‘all-bad.” This is the typical attitude of the false family, which idealizes the narcissistic parent and his or her golden children/flying monkeys, and a further vilifying of the family scapegoat.

The way I acted at her death, combined with my continued enforcement of the NO CONTACT rule, is essentially the family’s motive for never trying to contact me since, save for two or three puny attempts by my sister J.–the number one golden child of the family, who is obligated ‘to love’ her younger brother (for the sake of a show of family virtue, remember)–to contact me by email, Facebook, and Twitter. I never responded to this hoovering, of course.

The thing is, for the great majority of the family, save J. and Mom when she was alive, there was never an interest in contacting me, with ever so few exceptions, for the whole time I’ve lived in Taiwan. R., my other brother F., and all the others have never needed my reaction to Mom’s death as a reason never to contact me.

In our family, the word love is meaningless; the words like and dislike, however, do have meaning. Love for them just means family obligation. While love is supposed to be unconditional (i.e., we can be mad at or resentful of family members because of certain faults of theirs, but we won’t stop loving them for that), this family is selective about whom they care about. R., F., and J., and their spouses and kids (minus any new scapegoats intended to replace me and my cousins) are loved and cared for because they are liked.

As for us scapegoats, though J. pays lip service to caring about me (and is convinced that her fake love is genuine, as was Mom), we could all rot in a leper colony for all R. and F. care. I grudgingly respect my brothers’ attitude to me, since at least there’s a dram of honesty in it.

I’ve known the truth of the above for years, but recently I’ve discovered further proof to consolidate the accuracy of my judgement of them. This new proof lies in their total non-reaction to the growing crisis between China and the US regarding my home here in Taiwan.

It doesn’t matter if the family believes the lies and propaganda being spewed from the mainstream Western media about China wanting ‘to invade’ the ‘nation’ of Taiwan, or if they know the truth that I’ve known, which is that the American government has been trying to provoke China into invading, the way the US and NATO provoked Russia for years into invading Ukraine. My home is in danger of becoming a war zone, in which my wife, her family, and I could suffer and die.

…and my ‘morally superior’ family hasn’t lifted a finger to contact me and offer to get us to safety.

[It is totally unfeasible for me to return to Canada, since apart from my estrangement from the family, my limited skill set–teaching English as a second language–will not find me much of anything in terms of employment there; the vast majority of such jobs, teaching immigrants, are presumably already snatched up. My wife and I moving to Canada would almost guarantee us a future of homelessness. In any case, I have high hopes that the American empire will crumble before it even has a chance of bringing about a war with China.]

Now, a number of objections to what I’ve said need to be addressed and put into proper context. I haven’t exactly made it easy for the family to communicate with me–such is the nature of going NO CONTACT. I blocked them, for example, from sending emails to me; and as I mentioned above, I refused to answer J. in her attempts to contact me through Facebook and Twitter.

That said, though, attempts to contact me are far from impossible. Since they know my internet/pen name, they could contact me here in the comments section. They could contact the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, who in turn could contact me by email or phone. The family could phone me themselves! A simple Google search of Mawr Gorshin could bring up a slew of websites where I can be found, and if I never answer their messages, they can pester me over and over again until I finally relent.

It’s not that they can’t contact me. They just don’t want to.

Please don’t misinterpret my meaning, Dear Reader. I’m not saying that I want them to contact me…No! I’d find such attempts at communicating with me to be nothing less than triggering. But this isn’t about what I want: it’s about what they want.

If my mother were still alive, to her credit, she would have stopped at nothing to break through my defences and get to me. My siblings’ attempts have been less than feeble…and they imagine themselves better than I, a mere scapegoat.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this lack of a response proves that they don’t really love me. There is a continuity between this callous disregard for my safety here in East Asia, and back in the day when I was a kid, when F. used to spit on me and hit me, J. played disgusting games with me when I was about eight or nine, and these two and R. shouting one four-letter word after another at me, usually over minor things I’d done to annoy them.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that I am a human being, with a heart and feelings, who has the same basic rights as everyone else. I’ll bet that R. and F. would smile at the thought of me trapped in a war zone…those two fucking bastards! J. calls them ‘brothers,’ by the way. Anyway, all of this only further justifies my continued estrangement from them.

Another objection to the conclusions I’ve drawn is that the family may mistakenly believe that I’m dead (from Covid, presumably–a virus the vast majority of those having died from being either people in their 70s or 80s, or people who had other health problems, neither of which apply to me). After all, J. sent me her direct Twitter message around that time, and as I said above, I never responded to it.

Aside from the overblown media hysteria around Covid, though, why would my not responding necessarily mean I died? Does J. think someone hacked my Twitter account? All she has to do is follow me there, find my many blog articles posted there, and read some of them to know, by my idiosyncratic writing style (and photo at the top!) that it’s really me. My politics have changed radically since the days when we were still talking to each other, but changing one’s political opinions (in my case, from centre-right to hard-left) is surprising, but far from impossible.

But again, this issue leads back to my argument before: if they really need to know if I’m alive or dead, they can just keep pushing and nagging online until I finally respond, or get the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office to contact me. If I’m dead, have they received proof of it? Did they get a death certificate? Has a corpse been produced?

Merely assuming I’m dead is just an excuse not to try to find out for sure. Again, it’s not that they can’t find out for sure. They just don’t think I’m worth the effort…these people who routinely bullied and belittled me when I was a kid, who deliberately undermined my ability to develop self-confidence, and whom Mom never reprimanded for it.

…and it justifies my estrangement from them all the more.

Their reason for not loving me is not because of my faults: everyone has faults, but some people’s faults are put under a magnifying glass (mine and my cousins), while others’ faults are swept under the rug (R.’s, F.’s, J.’s, and our parents’). It’s a vicious double standard, and it’s proof that my family is a false one.

Now, what I want to say to you, Dear Reader, is that if you find yourself the scapegoat of a false family, know that it’s not your fault that they don’t love you (though they may pretend to); it is their fault. They are supposed to love you, and it is their failure, not yours, that they don’t truly love you.

So give yourself heaps of love, to compensate for what they so cruelly denied you, because you’re worth it.

[Postscript: If by chance any of my elder siblings, or anyone else in the family back in Canada, should contact me here in the comments section, my response would be a quote I heard from my condescending sister decades ago: “You’ve left it a little late, haven’t you?” The US has been banging the war drums against China for years now. It’s been a hot item in the news for at least about a year, since Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan last summer…and only now do they contact me, if they ever plan to?]

‘Mama,’ a Psychological Horror Novel, Chapter One

I killed my mother!

Nobody knows it was I who killed her, of course: everybody thinks she simply died of a heart attack; that’s how the doctor says she died. But I know…

I’ll tell you how I did it later, for if I tell you now, you’ll never believe me. In fact, you’ll think I’m crazy for believing such a method would work.

Since you’re probably assuming I’m a terrible person for doing what I did, since matricide is considered one of the worst crimes anyone could ever commit, I should explain my reasons for doing it, in the hopes that you’ll understand me, and not judge me so harshly for my extreme act.

My name is Roger Mark Gunn, and I’m in my mid-thirties. I’ve lived with Mama in an apartment in Toronto my whole life. That’s right: we never moved, and I’ve never been able to find a job that pays enough so I could move out, find a girl, fall in love, get married, and live a normal life. Even if I could have, though, Mama wouldn’t have allowed it, anyway.

The only work I’ve ever done has been as a cashier in her pet food store. It’s been so humiliating having to call out “Mama!” to the back of the store to get her to come to the front every time I needed her to help with a customer. But that embarrassment was among the least of my problems with her.

Most people have fond, affectionate feelings for their mothers. Their mothers truly want what’s best for them; these mothers encourage their sons and daughters to chase after their dreams, and they comfort you when you’re down.

Not so with Mama.

What you have to understand about Mama is that she was not a normal person. She was insane. She was domineering, clingy, and demanding. She messed with my mind. She made me believe that I lack abilities where I really do have them. She undermined my ability to develop self-confidence, and she did this on purpose–the opposite of what a mother is supposed to do!

Worse than all of this, she would tell me that my perception of reality is distorted, that I hallucinate regularly. She started saying such things to me when I was a child, around when I was nine or ten years old. To give her lies an aura of authority, she claimed that psychiatrists had examined me thoroughly, and that I was a diagnosed psychotic. She said they recommended putting me away in an institution, but out of her ‘love’ for me, she saved me from such a fate!

She claimed that she’d done everything out of love for me, that only she knew how to take care of me. I don’t believe a word of any of this, though. I know better.

She was trying to control my life by making me believe that I couldn’t do anything without her, that I’m nothing without her. Well, I’m about to prove her wrong!

What I’ve said so far surely hasn’t convinced you that she deserved to die, as awful as she was to me, based on what I’ve just said. After all, she did leave me a lot of money to live on, so I can live comfortably on my own for the rest of my life. But she was much, much worse to me that what I’ve said so far. Again, I can’t tell you everything just now, since you’ll think I’m crazy. I have to let you know bit by bit, so you’ll be prepared for the worst. Please be patient.

I never knew my father. Mama told me he ran off as soon as he learned he’d got her pregnant, but I’m convinced she was lying. I’m sure she killed him, but in a way that no one would ever suspect her of murder, in a way I’ll explain later, when I think you’re ready to hear the shocking truth.

All through my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, I felt as though there was a terrible void in my life, a huge gap, a hole in which something vital was missing. This missing element was a father, someone to help me make the transition from childhood to adulthood, to teach me how to be a man. Mama took him from me.

All my mental health problems stem from this lack, I’m sure of it. I’ve lived in that apartment with Mama as if no one else existed in the whole world. It was only Mama and me, the two of us looking in each other’s eyes as if each of us were looking at him- or herself in a mirror reflection. It’s as though I existed as an extension of her, and her as an extension of me. It’s as if we were joined at the hip–well, I finally cut myself loose!

There was always this feeling as if we owned each other. No one else was ever allowed to share the attention of either of us. That, I believe, is why she removed my father from our lives, and that is why she always found ways to frustrate my every attempt at making friends.

The guidance of a father would have helped me make a smooth entrance into society. Mama never wanted me to achieve such an entrance; this is why I never made friends at school or in the neighbourhood, why I was always picked on and bullied by my classmates and the other kids in the neighbourhood, and why I could never hold down a job with an employer other than Mama. She ruined my life! She made me into a loser!

I’m sure that my father was really a great man, though she only spoke ill of him, to deceive me, to make me believe she was the only one who truly loved me. She wanted me to remain completely under her control. That is why I had to kill her: to free myself from her tentacles! Since my whole sense of myself was always bound up in her, now that she’s gone, I can finally be free to be my true self!

If only it didn’t feel as if my true self were a bottomless pit of infinite blackness.

I’ve always felt alone, as if there were a huge brick wall separating myself from the rest of humanity. Before, I at least had her to keep me company. Now, as I stand here, at Mama’s funeral, there are all of these people here, including my aunt, her sister, and other family and ‘friends’ whom I barely even know.

Even here, with all of these people, I still feel all alone, in a world that’s almost like a dream.

Oh, no…my aunt is coming over here to talk to me! God, give me strength!

“Roger?” she says to me with a fake smile. “Will you be OK without my sister to take care of you? I don’t like the idea of you living alone in that apartment. Also, there’s no way you can take care of that pet food store all by yourself. No offense, sweetie, but you have a rather feeble grip on reality as it is, as we all know, and you’ll need some help managing the store, so I’m willing to fill in for Anne, being with so much free time of my own these days.” She stops speaking for a moment and frowns. “Are you listening to me, Roger?”

“Yes,” I say coolly. “Do whatever you want.”

She sighs and sneers at me, then she says, “Look over there, Roger. Do you see that man standing by the minister? The one about your mother’s age? His name is Reynold, and this is amazing luck that we found him here and now, but he’s your long-lost fa–“

“Impossible,” I say, not even looking at the man. “My father died decades ago.”

“Roger,” she says. “He approached me just before the funeral started. He told me about his relationship with your mother. He told me details about her that could only have been known by a man who knew her intimately, around the time your mother was pregnant with you. He wants to meet his son.”

“Well, I’m sure his son is out there somewhere in the world,” I say, looking away from her and from the man with the iciest of faces. “Let the man seek him out, for he isn’t me. I mean, look at him.” I gesture over to the bald, frowning man, in his mid-sixties, skinny and with a gut bigger than mine, wearing a dull grey suit. “I’m sure my father was much more of a man than that.”

Now my aunt is frowning at me, then her eyes and mouth are agape, in as much of a shock at my rejection of the man as he is. “Roger, you horrify me,” she says.

I see her walk back to the man, shaking her head and apologizing to him. It makes no difference to me.

Dad is dead.

Just like Mama.

The funeral service is finally over, thank God. Now I can go home. There, I’ll show you all the proof there is to see that she was the kind of person I know her to have been. Then you’ll know why I was perfectly justified in ending her life.

Again, I can’t quite tell you why yet, not until I show you the proof and explain the background, so you won’t think I’m crazy. Come home with me.

For now, the only hint that I can give you is that I’m so justified in my killing of her, even the Bible sanctions it…not that I believe anything in the Bible, mind you, but I mention it to emphasize my freedom from guilt.

The relevant verse is Exodus 22:18, if you’re curious.

Analysis of ‘Wozzeck’

I: Introduction

Wozzeck (pronounced ‘votsek’) is Alban Berg‘s first opera. Composed between 1914 and 1922, and first performed in 1925, it is based on an unfinished drama by Karl Georg Büchner (which in turn was based on the real-life case-history of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a soldier executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress while suffering from paranoia and hallucinations). When Berg saw the first production of the play in 1914, he immediately knew he wanted to set it to music.

Büchner’s play is actually called Woyzeck (after the historical man mentioned above), but due to an incorrect transcription made from a barely legible manuscript, the correct title wouldn’t be known until 1921. Selecting fifteen scenes from Büchner’s unordered fragments, Berg adapted the libretto himself, with three acts of five scenes each, and retaining the essential character of the play.

With its themes of militarism, callousness, social exploitation, casual sadism, alienation, class antagonisms, and madness, Wozzeck is especially relevant for our troubled times today. The opera’s free atonality, dissonance, and use of Sprechstimme (also used in Pierrot lunaire, the song cycle by Berg’s musical mentor, Arnold Schoenberg) vividly evoke the dark atmosphere of the story. When Franz Wozzeck says, “Still, all is still, as if the world died,” and his friend Andres shows little interest in his words (Act I, scene ii), Glenn Watkins said that this was “as vivid a projection of impending world doom as any to come out of the Great War.”

When first performed, Wozzeck was a succès de scandale and received mixed reviews. Since then, it did, however, get a string of productions in Germany and Austria until the Nazis condemned it as “degenerate art” after 1933. Now, it is considered one of the most important operas of the 20th century.

Here is a link to Berg’s libretto (including both the original German and an English translation), a link to Büchner’s play, a link to a 1970 film version of the opera, and here are links to a performance of it, conducted by Claudio Abbado, in Acts I, II, and III. Here is a link to a recording with the score. Notes and text from the booklet of this CD recording were also used in the research for this analysis.

II: General Points About the Music

Of the three famous members of the Second Viennese School–which, in its early twentieth century’s avant-garde abandoning of tonality and eventually making use of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, was comprised of Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern–Berg was actually the most conservative. Schoenberg, the second most conservative of the three, nonetheless also wrote of the experimental technique he called Klangfarbenmelodie (“sound-colour melody”), which both he and Webern used extensively in their music. Webern’s music also tended to be more concise and melodically pointillistic, with wide leaps of, often, over an octave to create a sense of melodic fragmentation.

Berg, on the other hand, achieved a paradoxical fusion of the experimental Expressionistic techniques of Schoenberg with the flowing, lyrical orchestration of 19th century Romanticism. The emotional intensity of this old style, combined with the discordant brutality of musical modernism, is effective in bringing out the bleak world of Wozzeck, fittingly based on a play left unfinished with Büchner’s death in 1837.

Because Berg composed the opera in a free atonal style, he had to use other methods of controlling pitch to direct the harmony, as well as use a variety of other musical techniques to achieve unity and coherence. The most important of these is the use of the leitmotif, of which there are prominent ones for such characters in the opera as the Captain, the Doctor, and the Drum Major. Wozzeck has a motif for when he rushes on and off the stage, and another to express his misery and helplessness. Marie, his beautiful but unfaithful wife, has motifs to express her sensuality.

Elsewhere, we hear the tritone B-F, representing Wozzeck and Marie, the conflict in their bedeviled relationship fittingly expressed through the diabolus in musica. The relationship of Marie and their son is represented with the minor third, B-flat and D-flat; this is an interval commonly expressing sadness, which is fitting given her difficulties as a poor woman raising a child scandalously born out of wedlock. One notable motif is a pair of chords heard at the end of each act, oscillating and almost blurring into each other.

III: Act One

The opera begins with Franz Wozzeck shaving the Captain, who nags and taunts him with talk of going slower (langsam!) and of being “a good man” (ein guter Mensch). The Captain is clearly indicating his bourgeois disposition. It’s far easier to take things one at a time and to be a good man when one has money to give charitably and leisure time with which to take things slowly, and when one doesn’t have to sell one’s labour to survive, as Wozzeck must.

But all he can do is say, “Yes, Captain” (Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!), because as a mere soldier, Wozzeck the proletarian has no power. [Berg was no revolutionary, of course (in fact, the financial success of this opera allowed him to live comfortably off the royalties); but his writing of an opera, whose subject matter clearly manifests the problems of class conflict, during revolutionary years (1914-1922, when the Russian Revolution and its ensuing Civil War happened; also, when the failed Spartacist uprising happened, and when the Italian fascists came to power in 1922 after having crushed socialist movements in the country) makes it impossible not to take note of the political implications of the story.] All Wozzeck can do is suffer in silence at the taunts of his superiors.

The Captain heightens his provocations by mentioning Wozzeck’s illegitimate son, “a child without the blessing of the Church.” Thus, Wozzeck has no morals!

He reminds the Captain of what Jesus said in Mark 10:14, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” Wozzeck’s bastard son is also a child of God, and God is always willing to forgive sinners. The Captain, with his bourgeois mentality, finds this Bible quote to be a strange answer; his attitude thus shows us the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, who see morals only in terms of social status and outward appearance, and who ignore the stresses and pressures that drive the poor to behave in ways that society disapproves of.

Wozzeck tries to get the Captain to understand what these stresses and pressures do to the poor when he begins with “We poor people!” (Wir arme Leut!) This introduces a particularly important leitmotif, D-sharp, B, E, G, the notes of an E minor/major 7th chord, expressive of the deepest despair.

Of course, his words go in one ear of the Captain and out the other, so having finished shaving him, Wozzeck is dismissed and told to go slowly. This first scene has been in the form of a suite.

In the next scene, Wozzeck is in a field with his friend, Andres, cutting sticks. The musical form is a rhapsody: the freer form of such music, with its highly contrasted moods and colour, is fitting as an expression of Wozzeck’s unstable, troubled state of mind at the moment.

He speaks of the cursed earth; one might be reminded of God cursing the earth as punishment on Adam and Cain (Genesis 3:17; 4:11). Andres seems oblivious to what Wozzeck is saying (as was the Captain), and, eyeing rabbits, he speaks cheerfully of wanting to be a hunter. He sings a hunting song.

Wozzeck’s premonitions and catastrophizing get worse: he makes a vague reference to the Freemasons, which sounds like a common form of paranoid conspiracy-oriented thinking similar to anti-semitic ranting. Apparently, it’s always the Jews or the Freemasons who are ruling the world and ruining it for the rest of us, rather than it simply being the capitalist class who is doing this evil. It’s clear that Wozzeck is suffering from mental illness, a growing problem today in relation to the plight of the poor, wir arme Leut!

He speaks of how hollow everything is, a maw, a chasm. One is reminded of the first few verses of Ecclesiastes, that in a world of vanity, futility, meaninglessness, uselessness, and emptiness (or, if you prefer, hollowness), one gains nothing from one’s labour, toiling under the sun, as Wozzeck and Andres do in that field.

As the sun is going down, Wozzeck sees a fire that roars like trumpets, reminding us of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, when the first angel “sounded his trumpet, and hail and fire mixed with blood were hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, along with a third of the trees and all the green grass” (Revelation 8:7). Wozzeck is having visions of the end of the world…”as if the world was dead.”

Many of us proletarians today, as we see the Western imperialists continue to antagonize nuclear-armed Russia and China, and as we see our financial prospects worsening, similarly are having premonitions of the end of the world, and can see the world burning down from wildfires and other problems related to climate change.

In Wozzeck’s case, though, the end of the world is coming about in Scene Three, with Marie, the mother of his child, being tempted into flirting with the handsome and socially higher Drum Major. Naturally, the scene begins with a march, so we’ll hear, specific to this scene, a marching band including woodwinds, brass, and percussion.

Marie, with her son at the window of their home, watches the Drum Major marching with his men on the street. Both she and Margret express their admiration for the man, though the latter taunts the former for her loose ways with the soldiers. Annoyed with Margret’s slut-shaming, Marie calls her a “bitch” (Luder) and shuts the window.

No longer do we hear marching music. She sings a lullaby to her son after putting him in bed (at crucial points in the melodic contour of the lullaby, we can hear the B-flat and D-flat that I mentioned above as representing her relationship with him). She feels the shame of having a reputation in town for being a whore, but again, as with Wozzeck, the stresses and pressures of being poor can drive people to act in ways that society disapproves of. Her eyeing of the Drum Major may be lewd on a superficial level, but on a deeper level, she has hopes that uniting with him will raise the financial status of herself and the boy, the only way a woman during that more patriarchal time could achieve such a social ascent.

The boy falls asleep, and after a brief moment of her being lost in thought (with a flurry of descending and ascending notes played on the celesta), she hears a knock on the window–it’s Wozzeck. He briefly tells her of his troubling visions, but he has no time to stay; he doesn’t even look at their son, which dismays her. She says the line, “Wir arme Leut,” though not in the notes of the minor-major 7th chord mentioned above. We can see here the connection between poverty and alienation within a family, the one causing the other.

The next scene, a passacaglia, has Wozzeck visiting the Doctor, who has him on a bizarre, experimental diet of beans (and later, mutton). As does the Captain, the Doctor bullies Wozzeck, berating him for pissing on the street, thus wasting what could be useful urine samples for the Doctor’s study. He pays Wozzeck a meagre three groschen a day for these urine samples and other forms of cooperating with the experiments.

As does the Captain (with his exhortations to take things slowly and to be “a good man”), the Doctor pressures Wozzeck to have better self-control in regulating his bladder. The Doctor is thus another example of a bourgeois imposing his sense of virtue on a proletarian who, in his poverty, finds such virtue difficult to live up to.

The Doctor brags of his self-control, including the control of his temper. Nonetheless, in his experimentation on Wozzeck, we see a sadism in the Doctor that, if we were to look ahead a few decades after the completion of this opera, would remind us of Doctor Mengele. Wozzeck’s doctor has a fascistic, disciplinarian authority about him, and he speaks gleefully about a revolution in the science of diet.

When Wozzeck tells the Doctor of his visions, the Doctor is delighted to see Wozzeck’s descent into madness. For his declining mental health, he’ll get a raise…of one extra groschen. The Doctor believes he’ll become famous for his theories, thanks to the deleterious effects of his research on Wozzeck!

Scene Five is a rondo. Marie is out on the streets, and her temptation to have an affair with the Drum Major is growing. She sees him approach and shows her admiration for him. He returns the flirting.

He aggressively comes on to her, causing her at first to resist, externally playing hard to get, and internally feeling conflicted over her loyalty to Wozzeck as against her desire for this far more manly Drum Major. The music gets particularly discordant during their struggle, but she gives in to him in the end.

Act One ends with those oscillating chords I mentioned above, played faster and faster until they seem to blur into each other. The notes of the first of the two chords are, from top to bottom, C-flat/G-flat/E-flat/A-natural; and those of the second chord are, again from top to bottom, D-flat/A-natural/F-natural/B-natural. Three quarters of these groups of notes are thus rising and falling parallel major seconds, and the remaining quarter of them are rising and falling parallel minor thirds, undulating like ripples in water.

The speeding up in time starts with eighth and quarter notes, then eighth notes, then eighth notes in triplets, then sixteenth notes, then sixteenth notes in sextuplets, then thirty-second notes, and finally it ends with tremolos. All of this occurs with a crescendo beginning at piano.

It’s significant that this music should have a rippling, wave-like effect, for it can be understood to foreshadow Wozzeck’s fate in the pond towards the end of Act Five.

IV: Act Two

Act Two, Scene One (in sonata-allegro form) begins with a solo cello playing an ascending stack of perfect fifths: C-natural, G-natural, D-natural, and A-natural; then B-natural, F-natural, and C-sharp. After the cello, we hear flute and celesta play that rippling theme of rising and falling (mostly, as last time) major seconds, only now the notes alternate between, from top to bottom, B-natural/F-sharp/D-sharp/A-natural and C-sharp/A-natural/E-sharp/B-natural. These oscillations are in sextuplets and triplets, then in tremolo half notes, with eighth rests between these groupings. This watery, wave-like tune reinforces the foreshadowing mentioned above, since Marie has succumbed to temptation.

She’s back at home with her “Bub,” admiring earrings that the Drum Major has given her. She puts the boy to bed, then Wozzeck suddenly walks in and sees the earrings before she can hide them. These earrings are like the handkerchief that jealous Othello learned was in Cassio‘s possession; the difference here, though, is that where Desdemona was innocent of having an affair with Cassio, Marie really did receive the earrings from the Drum Major, with whom she has had an affair. In any case, Wozzeck will go as mad from his actually unfaithful woman as Othello went mad with jealousy over his only seemingly unfaithful wife.

This time, unlike before, he looks at his sleeping son. He sings, “Wir arme Leut!” again, to the notes F-natural, D-flat, F-sharp, and A-natural…the intervals of that minor-major 7th chord motif. As I said above, this chord has a despairing quality to it, and now Wozzeck has even more to despair about. His whole world is coming to an end, because Marie’s infidelity, which will be most public, will cause him such a humiliation that he’ll fall to pieces.

Still, like a dutiful husband, he gives her the four groschen he made from the Doctor. He leaves, and Marie, though guilty of the sin that Desdemona was only slandered with, has at least a bit of her goodness, in that Marie is consumed with guilt over her infidelity. She ends the scene singing of how “Everything goes to the Devil: man and woman and child [Kind]!” On this last word, she sings a high B-natural descending to an F-natural, that tritone, the diabolus in musica representing her relationship with Wozzeck, which resulted in their Bub.

In Scene Two, a fantasia and fugue on three themes, we see the Doctor rushing by the Captain on the street, the latter, true to his character, urging the former to slow down, like “a good man.” Nonetheless, the Doctor is in a hurry and cannot slow down.

They taunt each other with names: the Captain addresses “Doctor Coffin-Nail” (Herr Sargnagel), and the Doctor addresses “Captain Drill-angel” (Herr Exercizengel). The Doctor begins finding fault with the Captain’s health, as a way to scare him. The Captain is “Bloated, fat, thick neck, apoplectic…” As we can see here, the bourgeois can trouble each other as much as they do the proletariat. Recall Marx’s words: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Then Wozzeck appears before them, and so these two bourgeois steer their taunts away from each other and on to him. They insinuate that they know of Marie’s infidelity to him. Now, he’s not only a cuckold, but a public cuckold. His already fragile mental stability is about to crack even more!

He says that he’s a poor devil, and that she is all he has in the world. So, to lose her to the Drum Major would be to lose everything.

The Drum Major, being like the Doctor and the Captain, that is, of a higher social position than that of Wozzeck, in taking Marie away, is symbolic in his actions of the capitalist who takes from the worker the full fruits of his labour. The capitalist’s surplus value is that stolen value, in the form of unpaid labour, money not given to the worker, here personified by Marie.

A worker’s labour is the only commodity he can give in exchange for money, and his unpaid labour, in the form of surplus value, is stolen from him, just as Marie, all Wozzeck has in the world, is stolen from him.

Feminists might be offended at my referring to Marie as Wozzeck’s stolen commodity, his stolen property; but think of my reference here as a comment on his patriarchal use of her, not as a defence of that use. For one of the many ways the ruling class keeps the proletariat divided and mutually alienated from each other is the perpetuation of sex roles.

So the Captain’s and Doctor’s taunting of Wozzeck, their knowing of Marie’s dalliance with the Drum Major, is like Iago fueling Othello’s jealousy, except that unlike Iago, Wozzeck’s two superiors are being truly honest with him.

Wozzeck thus rushes away in a jealous rage.

Scene Three, largo, brings us back to Wozzeck’s and Marie’s house, on the street in front of it. He confronts her with her infidelity. To his direct accusation, “You–with him!”, that is, with the Drum Major, she brazenly replies, “What if I was?”

He is about to slap her, but she defiantly says he wouldn’t dare touch her. Her own father wouldn’t have dared hit her when she was ten years old. (Othello dared to slap Desdemona in public, though, and she was innocent.) During this argument, though, she says something truly dangerous to herself, something to inspire Wozzeck’s eventual revenge on her: “Rather a knife in me that a hand on me.”

Scene Four is a scherzo, in which Wozzeck sees Marie dancing a waltz with the Drum Major in a crowd, in an inn where people are drinking and partying late in the evening. In other words, her infidelity with the Drum Major is shamelessly public. Wozzeck sees his humiliation right before his eyes!

A special set of musicians is reserved for this scene, a tavern band made up of a clarinet in C, a  bombardon in F (or tuba, if it can be muted), an accordion, a guitar, and two fiddles (with steel strings).

Artisans and soldiers are singing about dancing and the joys of hunting, just as Andres, who is here at the inn, too, was singing of hunting while he and Wozzeck were cutting sticks in the field in Act One, Scene Two. All of this festivity is going on while Wozzeck is losing his mind, while his world is coming to an end. Hunting and drinking, for the artisans, soldiers, and Andres, are manic defences against facing one’s suffering. As we will see, Wozzeck will do some hunting and drinking of his own…but these won’t help him escape his suffering.

As Wozzeck sits there fuming all alone, the “village idiot” (Der Narr), as it were, approaches him. He vaguely senses the joy about him, something he’s too simple to understand; yet he paradoxically can sense something about Wozzeck that the others cannot–he smells blood on Wozzeck. This is more foreshadowing, of course: we all know what Wozzeck is going to do…with a knife.

Scene Five is a rondo. Wozzeck is in his bed, a bunker in the soldiers’ barracks at night. Andres is sleeping nearby, but Wozzeck cannot sleep, for obvious reasons. A chorus singing softly and wordlessly represents the sleeping soldiers.

When Wozzeck complains to Andres about not being able to sleep, the latter, annoyed to have been woken, tells the former to go back to sleep.

To make matters worse, though, the drunken Drum Major enters the barracks and brags of his sexual conquest of so fine a woman as Marie, thus compounding Wozzeck’s public humiliation. The usurper of her bed rubs it in further by picking a fight with Wozzeck, who has no hope of beating such a strong man, and one of such high social and military rank.

It would be easy to judge Wozzeck as a weak and cowardly man, but the point is that there is a power imbalance here–him as a poor soldier, and the Drum Major of so much higher rank–that the former can do nothing about it. Wozzeck’s low military rank is symbolic of the proletarian’s low social rank, just as the Drum Major’s high military rank, as that of the Captain and the higher social status of the Doctor, is symbolic of the ruling class.

Wozzeck cannot hurt the Drum Major, but there is someone of his low social caste whom he can hurt…Marie! Indeed, part of the reason he can’t sleep is that he’s thinking of the knife that she’s put in his mind, the temptation to murder her that he’s been struggling to resist.

Receiving no sympathy from his fellow soldiers for his beating and humiliation, Wozzeck can only repeat the Captain’s words: “One after the other.” Wozzeck, however, doesn’t use the Captain’s meaning, to take things slowly, one at a time, but rather that he suffers one injury after another; for such is the difference between the bourgeoisie’s experience of life, and that of the proletariat.

This is the end of Act Two, which musically has been structured like the movements of a symphony: sonata form, slow movement, scherzo, and rondo. Act Three, however, will be in the form of a series of inventions.

V: Act Three

Scene One, with Marie and the boy at home at night, is an invention on a theme. Plagued with guilt, she is reading her Bible, wishing Jesus would forgive her as He did Mary Magdalene and the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3).

With the boy near her, she tells a story of a poor boy whose parents are dead, and he’s now hungry and weeping day and night. Obviously, this story foreshadows the heartbreaking ending of the opera, where we have full knowledge of the fate of Wozzeck’s and Marie’s child.

She is worried that Franz hasn’t come home in the past couple of days. Next, she reads Luke 7:38, about Mary Magdalene’s repentance before Christ. Marie would be like Magdalene, to anoint Jesus’s feet and be forgiven.

Sadly, she will get no such forgiveness…not from Wozzeck, anyway. For in Scene Two, an invention on a single note (B), he has taken her into a forest by a pond, where he plans to murder her.

She senses the danger she’s in, and she tries to leave, but he won’t let her. As Othello did to Desdemona, Wozzeck kisses Marie before he kills her…she who, redeemed through faith in Christ’s crucifixion, could be seen to have been made as innocent as Desdemona always had been.

They notice how red the moon is, and I assume that it’s a quarter or half moon, because Wozzeck compares it to the “blood-stained steel” of the blade of a knife, right when he draws his, in preparation to stab Marie. The notion of a blood-red moon is associated with the end of the world (Joel 2:31, Acts 2:20, Revelation 6:12). As I said above, his loss of Marie is the end of the world for him, for she is all that he has. He stabs her, she screams and dies, and he runs away fearfully.

The scene ends with two crescendi, from ppp to fff, in octaves of B, in keeping with it being an invention on B. I wonder: why B, of all notes? Given that this moment can be felt to be the emotional reaction to the actual committing of the murder, that point of no going back, B–as the leading tone of the most basic scale, C major, the white keys on the piano–is thus symbolic of the greatest tension, without resolving up to C.

In Scene Three, an invention on a rhythm, Wozzeck is back in the tavern. We hear an out-of-tune piano playing a fast and jaunty polka while he drinks wine and pretends he’s enjoying himself and forgetting his guilty act, a manic defence against his deep sadness. It’s significant that the piano is out of tune, for it represents the pain he feels that he’s hiding behind his fake festivities.

He imagines he’s completing his revenge on Marie by groping Margret. She notices blood on his hand, though, right up to the elbow. He tries to hide his guilt by claiming he must have cut himself, but no one in the tavern believes him. Terrified of being found out, he runs away.

Scene Four is an invention on a hexachord. Wozzeck is back in the forest by the pond, where Marie’s body is still lying. The blood-red moon is still out.

He wishes to erase all evidence of his guilt, first by tossing the knife into the pond; then, thinking he hasn’t thrown it far enough and fearing it will be easily found, he wades into the water to find it and throw it farther in. What’s more, he must wash the blood off of himself in the water, so he wades in deeper.

He imagines the blood-red moon is reflecting his guilt from on high, incriminating him to the town. In his growing madness, he thinks the whole pond he’s bathing in is blood. He submerges himself in this “blood” and drowns himself.

What’s fascinating about this moment is the combination of Shakespearian associations that can be made. First, as mentioned above, Wozzeck is like Othello, killing his love out of jealousy, then killing himself. Second, he’s like Lady Macbeth, mad with guilt and unable to wash the blood from his hands, and committing suicide. Finally, he’s like Ophelia, mad with heartbreak over his love, mad and drowning himself out in nature.

For no apparent reason, the Captain and the Doctor happen to be strolling in the area just after Wozzeck’s suicide. They’ve heard the ghastly sound of Wozzeck’s cry before his death, and the Captain curses: “Jesus, what a noise!” Knowing they’ve heard human moans from the pond, the two bourgeois shudder at the implications (as well as at the blood-red moon), and rush away.

The juxtaposition of two proletarian deaths with two bourgeois witnesses of one of them, the latter two then rushing off to safety, represents the disturbing contrast between the suffering of the former and the privilege of the latter. This scene ends with an invention on…yes…a key (D minor)! It’s ironic how we have here an atonal opera in which–as with those crescendi of B notes–of all moments for there to be a surprising return to tonality (however dissonant it remains), it’s at the realization of the deaths of the two most sympathetic characters in the story, leaving the remaining sympathetic character, the boy, parentless.

We hear a mournful adagio in 3/4 that builds up to a despairing fortissimo climax starting on a D minor chord with an added ninth: two sets of eighth notes playing, top to bottom, E-natural/D-natural/A-natural/F-natural; then all these notes go down by parallel major seconds to give us two sets of eighth notes playing a C minor chord with an added ninth, then a B-flat minor chord with an added ninth. This climax softens to pianissimo, then an upward arpeggio played on the celesta leads us to the final scene.

Scene Five is an invention on an eighth note. The next morning, children are playing “ring-a-ring-a-roses” outside in the sun. Marie’s son is there, too, riding a hobby-horse. One child comes to tell them the news that Marie is dead.

One of the children makes sure to tell Marie’s boy that his mother is dead. He isn’t processing the horrifying news yet, so the other kids run off to the pond to see the body, while he continues riding for the moment, calling out “Hopp! Hoop!” Finally, he snaps out of it and goes after the other children, and the opera ends without our seeing his reaction to the sight of his mother’s corpse.

VI: Conclusion

Whether or not Berg unconsciously intended it, his opera dramatizes the social consequences of class conflict: poverty, alienation, mental illness, the breakdown of family, violence against one’s fellow proletarians (instead of the revolutionary kind against the ruling class), and suicidal despair. The red-blooded end of the world as depicted in this WWI setting is all the more relevant to our late capitalist world, which is looking with dread at a possible WWIII.