Category: capitalism

Analysis of ‘Le Petit Prince’

I: Introduction

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) is a 1943 novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the US that year, and published posthumously in France following liberation, as the Vichy Regime had banned it.

The novella was Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling about 140 million copies worldwide, and thus being one of the best-selling books in history. It’s been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, second only to the Bible among the most-translated works. Le Petit Prince has been adapted into many art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, TV, ballet, and opera.

Here is a link to quotes from the novella in French and in English translation, and here is a link to a PDF of an English translation of the story.

II: Chapter One

Saint-Exupéry begins his tale by discussing a time, when he was six years old, that he was fascinated with how a boa constrictor eats its prey, swallowing it whole without chewing it, and needing six months to digest it. The boy decided to draw a boa constrictor having swallowed an elephant, but on showing the picture to some adults and asking if it scared them, they saw nothing scary about it, since it looked as if he’d simply drawn a hat!

In this moment, we see the beginning of a recurring theme in Le Petit Prince: the folly of adults when compared to the wisdom of a child. The boy tried a second drawing, this time showing the inside of the boa constrictor so the elephant could be clearly seen. Now, the adults advised him to forget about boa constrictors and what they eat, and instead focus on learning geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. The folly of adults is the reversing of what’s important and what’s unimportant, so Saint-Exupéry gave up on the dream of being an artist at the age of six and would eventually become a pilot instead.

In meeting more adults over the years, he never changed his low opinion of them, since as a test, he’d show them his first picture, and they always saw only a hat.

III: Chapter Two

Here is where the story really begins, a fanciful rather than a logical one. Adult Saint-Exupéry had been living alone, with no one to talk to (loneliness is another major theme of the novella), until six years before his telling of his story, when he was flying his plane over the Sahara Desert and it crashed with a broken engine. Again, he found himself alone, with no passengers or mechanics to help him.

He had to fix his plane alone, he was miles away from civilization, and he hadn’t enough drinking water to last a week. This was a life-and-death situation. You can imagine the stress he was going through.

This predicament really happened to Saint-Exupéry and his copilot-navigator, André Prévot, in 1935. Though they’d survived the crash, they faced rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat, with limited food and drink. They both began to have vivid hallucinations. By the fourth day of their ordeal, a Bedouin on a camel found the two and saved them. Saint-Exupéry described their ordeal in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes).

The notion of having hallucinations while suffering in the desert heat can explain Saint-Exupéry seeing the little prince. While the boy is, on the one hand, a projection of the pilot having regressed to a childhood state (to ease his stress), the prince can also be seen as a Christ figure, a sinless child coming to Saint-Exupéry’s rescue, just in time.

One idea that you can glean from all of my posts involving my interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros (i.e., the dialectical relationship between opposites) is that at the moment of the most hellish despair, salvation can come. The prospect of certain death in the desert (hell, the bitten tail of the ouroboros) leads to Saint-Exupéry’s delivery from it (heaven, the biting head of the serpent). This delivery, this salvation, comes to the beleaguered pilot in the Christ-like form of the little prince.

If adult Christ was King of the Jews, then as a child he was a prince, the Prince of Peace, the little prince. We are instructed that we can attain the kingdom of heaven only as a child (Matthew 18:3), and so Saint-Exupéry must get back in touch with his original, naïve childlike nature. This is the purpose of the little prince entering the pilot’s life right at this moment…saving him in the most unlikely way.

On the morning of the second day of Saint-Exupéry’s ordeal, he wakes up to the voice of the boy asking him, of all things, to draw a sheep for him. The importance of this seemingly trivial, frivolous request, interrupting the man from his urgent work, exists on several levels. First, there’s the dialectic of prioritizing the trivial over the urgent, a child’s wisdom versus an adult’s. Second, the sheep makes us think of a lamb, the Lamb of God. Third, the man is being brought back to his childhood love of drawing…but drawing a peaceful, rather than a threatening, animal.

What makes the pilot’s ordeal in the story even worse than that of Saint-Exupéry and his copilot, Prévot, in the real-life ordeal is precisely the absence of a copilot, or anyone else, for that matter. The man is alone in the hot desert, far away from civilization, with a plane needing repairs, and he’s running out of drinking water. He could die, and he has nobody with him. This is the hell of death and loneliness.

Being alone only intensifies annihilation anxieties, leading one all the closer to psychotic panic, or what Wilfred Bion would have called a nameless dread. The pilot is sweltering in oppressive heat; this heat is an example of unpleasant stimuli that Bion would have called beta elements, stimuli that have to be processed, via alpha function, into alpha elements, or processed stimuli that one can cope with. (Read more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts here).

As I said above, the extremity of the pilot’s ordeal has forced him to regress to a childlike state, to a simpler frame of mind that doesn’t have to cope with complexity. Still, though, that complexity has to be coped with, and in his regressed, childlike state, the pilot needs someone to help him process the physical irritants (beta elements, the dehydrating heat) that he can’t deal with all alone. It’s out of the question, of course, that his mother could be there for him, the one who normally does the vicarious processing of her baby’s unpleasant stimuli via maternal reverie. The pilot must resort to something else.

As a result of his helplessness, loneliness, and urgent need to save his life, the pilot projects his inner child out into the external world in the form of the little prince, who is for the pilot what Bion would have called a bizarre object, a projected hallucination from his inner psychic world, sent out of him to keep him company in a desperate attempt to save his life.

With the bizarre object of the little prince come all the other bizarre objects: the tiny planets of the boy and the men the boy visits, the talking rose, the talking fox, and the talking serpent. This childlike fantasy world is the pilot’s escape from his desperation, his ordeal.

Getting him to draw a sheep several times, criticizing each drawing for this or that flaw, and finally accepting a drawing of a sheep ironically obscured in a box, are ways of helping the pilot process his childhood trauma of his original artwork having been rejected by adults. Had he only been encouraged to be an artist as a child and thus to express his emotions freely, he might have pursued that ambition, instead of becoming a pilot (symbolic of trying to fly away and escape everything), and thus finding himself in his current, life-threatening predicament. On a symbolic level, his danger in the desert represents his psychological crisis resulting from having abandoned and betrayed the true self (in Winnicott‘s sense) of his childhood. In this sense, the little prince has truly saved the pilot.

IV: Chapter Three

We get a sense of how small the planet is that the little prince comes from when he tells the pilot that the sheep he’s given him won’t need a rope to restrain it, since if it strays, it won’t be able to wander very far.

The smallness of the little prince’s planet–like that of the planets of the king, the vain man, the drunk, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer–has different levels of meaning. On the one hand, it means the planets are like small islands in a universal ocean, isolated places of loneliness and alienation. Thus, they represent projections of the pilot’s loneliness as well as the loneliness of all of us. The small planets also represent a wish-fulfillment for a man stranded on a stretch of land far too large for his comfort. If only he, like the little prince, could fly away from his world to explore others and escape his danger, taken away with the help of a flight of migratory birds (Chapter Nine), instead of being stuck in a desert with his broken-down plane.

V: Chapter Four

Indeed, the little prince’s planet is as small as a house!

The pilot believes the boy’s planet is an asteroid known as B-612, discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909, whose discovery was ignored by the International Astronomical Congress because the Turk wore the traditional clothing of his country rather than European clothes. When the Turk was in European clothes, though, and he presented his discovery to the Congress again in 1920, the Westerners acknowledged him. We see in this an example of both Western prejudice as well as the addled adult mindset.

The pilot notes more examples of this mindset, in how adults seem to think that numbers and figures pertaining to anything are more important than, say, its beauty. These numbers and figures, of course, often represent monetary values for the adults: ‘Does his father make much money?’ or ‘I saw a house worth a million dollars […] What a pretty house!’ Such a mindset is a reflection of the capitalistic values we’ve all been taught, and so Saint-Exupéry’s critique of such values must have been among the reasons that the pro-Nazi Vichy government wouldn’t allow Le Petit Prince to be published. Fascism is hyper-capitalism: it exists to thwart the growth of socialism–more on that later.

Now that the little prince is out of the pilot’s life (it’s been six years, as of the telling of this story, that the little prince has returned to his planet), and so not only does the man miss the little boy, but he has revived his childhood interest in art, having bought a box of paints and some pencils, and not wanting to be interested in only numbers. He is getting older physically, but the return of the little prince to his planet really means, paradoxically, that the projection of the pilot’s inner child has returned to his heart.

VI: Chapter Five

In this chapter is a discussion of the issue of baobab trees. As soon as the little prince is aware of the growing of a bad plant like a baobab on his little planet, he must destroy it at once. For if he allows any baobabs to grow freely, they will take over his entire planet and the roots will burrow their way down. And on a small planet like his, the baobabs will wreck it entirely.

Researchers have contended that the baobabs represent Nazism’s attempt to dominate and destroy our Earth. Small wonder the Vichy government wouldn’t let Saint-Exupéry’s novella be published, and only upon France’s liberation from Nazi occupation would the story be published there.

Note that it isn’t enough to uproot this or that baobab, and then be content that one’s work is all done. The little prince tells the pilot that one must regularly go to work, every day after washing and cleaning, spotting the baobabs and distinguishing them from the similar-looking rosebushes, and pull the baobabs out as soon as they’re spotted as such.

The same vigilance must be applied to fascism…though few have heeded the warning since the end of WWII. The defeat of Nazi Germany, more the sacrifice of the Soviets than of Western Europe and North America by a long shot, was merely a setback for fascism. The far-right soon regrouped and acted clandestinely, seeming no different from the rosebush-liberals of the postwar world.

Ex-Nazis found lucrative employment in the US via Operation Paperclip, for no one was more effective at fighting ‘those lousy commie Reds’ than fanatically anti-socialist fascists during the height of the Cold War. These ex-Nazis worked in NASA, NATO, and West Germany, causing tensions in East Germany that necessitated the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, also known as the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, to keep Nazi espionage out, as well as to prevent brain-drain, or the loss of skillful engineers, scientists, etc. to the capitalist West through tempting salary offers.

Then there were Operations Aerodynamic and Gladio.

After all of that fascist terrorizing of the European left came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the use of Ukrainian fascists by the US and NATO to provoke Russia into a needless and dangerous war, and the rise of Trump via Zionists like Biden. This is why we can never stop being mindful of baobab fascism.

But I digress.

Saint-Exupéry may have been born to an aristocratic family, but that doesn’t necessitate elitist, let alone fascist, sympathies. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince; he was also an anarcho-commmunist. Friedrich Engels was a bourgeois; he was also Karl Marx’s trusted friend and colleague.

But I digress again.

VII: Chapter Six

The little prince loves to watch sunsets, which on his tiny planet come forty-four times a day! Here on Earth, though, the boy will have to wait and wait.

The frequent sight of sunsets (and therefore also of sunrises) implies that the little prince has a far more conscious sense of how cyclical life is than we do. He watches sunsets when he is sad, implying that they have a therapeutic value for him. Seeing the coming darkness will bring to mind that the light will soon return.

We on Earth, on the other hand, must wait much longer for both the light and the dark, giving us the illusory feeling that both the good and the bad are closer to being permanent states of existence. The boy knows better, though.

VIII: Chapter Seven

The little prince wants to talk to the pilot about flowers, and if the sheep will eat flowers, but the pilot is terribly busy and stressed trying to repair his plane. The boy’s incessant questioning feels so annoying in its triviality.

When the boy asks what a flower’s thorns are for, the man snaps at him that it’s because flowers are cruel, which the prince can’t believe. The pilot’s words seem to imply that the little prince is being a cruel flower himself for pestering him in his life-or-death situation.

The boy is shocked that the man doesn’t think flowers are important, and that he is being just like any other adult, bereft of understanding. Recall that the little prince, as a Christ-figure, is trying to get the pilot to understand that, in order to save himself, the pilot must be as a child, to be an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), and therefore in agreeing that flowers are important the man is imitating the prince and being like a child.

The little prince speaks of a man on a planet he’s visited who thinks that doing sums is the only important thing in the world; this man has never smelled a flower or looked upon a star. He’s swollen with pride, like a balloon. He sounds like the businessman we’ll learn about in Chapter Thirteen, he who imagines all the stars out in space are his possessions, his accumulated wealth. If so, he counts the stars, but never looks on them. In other words, he has all the inverted values of a capitalist. He doesn’t care about beauty; he only cares about numbers as money-values.

The pilot feels ashamed to seem like a man similar to this businessman.

IX: Chapter Eight

The little prince tells the pilot about a special seed that was blown onto his planet from some other place. It gave birth to a new kind of shoot, making the prince look it over very closely. Was it a new kind of baobab? No.

It grew into a beautiful flower that captivated the boy’s heart. She was a speaking flower, and one that is rather vain, her words annoying him. She wanted him to attend to her needs–watering her, and putting a screen around her to protect her from gales. He feels that one shouldn’t listen to flowers, but rather just look at and smell them, and admire their beauty.

Apparently, the flower, a rose, was inspired by the author’s wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who was from El Salvador, the country that inspired the little prince’s planet, with three volcanoes like those in her country, too (including the Santa Ana Volcano). I suppose we’re meant to assume by all of this that his wife was kind, yet petulant and vain as well.

The little prince’s leaving his planet and the rose behind, later to encounter the vast field of roses on Earth, is meant to represent Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity to Consuela, presumably during his travels by plane. In all of this, we can see again how the little prince is a projection of the pilot’s idealized version of himself, and is therefore also in turn a projection of Saint-Exupéry.

X: Chapter Nine

The little prince has left his planet, apparently, with the help of a flight of migratory birds, obviously symbolic of a plane for Exupéry to fly, and therefore a wish-fulfillment for the man stranded in the desert. The leaving can also represent the loss of innocence upon having grown up and having to face the adult world.

Before leaving, though, the boy’s had to be responsible and make sure his planet has been left in the best condition possible, which meant cleaning his three volcanoes, two active and one extinct, as well as pulling out the last of the baobab shoots and making sure his rose was safe from harm.

She says she won’t need the glass dome he’s used to put on her to protect her. She’ll enjoy the cool night air, and her thorns will protect her from any wild animals. Just as he is maturing and getting more responsible and self-reliant, so is she.

XI: Chapter Ten

In his travels in space, the little prince visits a number of asteroids not unlike his own in essence. The first of these has a king on it, and every other asteroid also has a solitary man living on it, each man in his own way demonstrating the foolishness of the adult mindset.

This adult absurdity is put into full effect here with a king who, all alone on his asteroid, rules over nobody. We see what a bad thing authoritarianism is when it’s presented in an absurd way. The king’s commands are pointless, illogical, and unenforceable. Quite an ironic position to get from an author who was born into an aristocratic family.

If the king can’t forbid the little prince to yawn, then he’ll command the boy to yawn. If the prince is too shy to yawn, then the king will command him sometimes to yawn, sometimes not to.

The king wants respect for his authority, and hates to be disobeyed, yet he is consummately ineffectual, thus demonstrating all by himself just how invalid regal authority is.

If the boy asks the king if he may do something, such as to sit down or ask a question, then the king commands him to do these things instead of simply permitting him to do them. The king is alone on his asteroid, yet he insists he rules over everything, even the stars, which he imagines must obey him in everything. In a while, we’ll be introduced to the businessman, who imagines the stars are his property.

The king says that authority rests on reason, and that he demands obedience because his orders are reasonable…yet the examples given above demonstrate how his orders are anything but reasonable.

The little prince wishes to leave the king’s little planet, yet the king forbids him to, offering to make the boy his minister. There being no one else on the asteroid, though, means that he as “minister” will have no one to judge. The king says the boy then can judge himself. The insists on leaving, yet the king offers to make him his ambassador. The prince leaves.

XII: Chapter Eleven

The second planet the little prince visits is inhabited by a vain man, who imagines the approaching boy to be an admirer. The prince considers the vain man’s hat to be an odd one, yet its owner says he raises it to anyone who praises hm…yet no one ever comes to his planet.

The vain man asks the little prince to clap his hands, which the boy does, causing the vain man to raise his hat “in a modest salute,” as if he were receiving applause for having put on an impressive performance.

The vain man, like the king, is demonstrating the absurdity of adults’ narcissistic affectations of greatness, when no such greatness is at all in evidence. He asks the boy if he thinks him “the handsomest, smartest, richest, and wisest man on the planet”…yet he is the only man on the planet, just as the king is alone on his planet, ruling over nobody.

Adult narcissism seems to stem from loneliness.

The prince leaves the planet.

XIII: Chapter Twelve

He arrives on a planet where a drunk lives. The little prince learns that this man drinks to help him forget how ashamed he feels…because he drinks!

The sadness of the drunk drives home the idea that it’s the loneliness of all of these adults that drives them to do the absurd things that they do. Hence, each man lives alone on his planet. The boy was alone on his, too, yet at least he had the sense to leave and look around, to find people.

Accordingly, he leaves the drunk’s planet, too.

XIV: Chapter Thirteen

The little prince arrives on the planet of the businessman, who is in the middle of doing sums. We see here especially how numbers are meant to represent monetary values, as I mentioned above, since the businessman is counting the stars.

He imagines he owns them simply because he was the first to think about owning them. He sees a difference between his owning them and a king ruling over them; we could see in this ‘difference’ a satirizing of the difference between capitalism and feudalism.

The businessman imagines that his ‘owning’ of the stars will make him rich…so he can ‘buy’ more stars! The little prince notes that the businessman’s avarice is based on the same kind of circular reasoning as the drunk’s shame is based on. One gropes for things only for the sake of groping for them.

The notion of justifying one’s ownership of a thing on the basis of having ‘discovered’ it is extended by the businessman into the realm of imperialism and settler-colonialism. He says, “When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours.” We all know what happened when Christopher Columbus discovered land that “belongs to nobody.”

The businessman’s ‘discovery’ of the stars, those islands in the sea of space, and his subsequent ‘owning’ of them, amassing his wealth through them, is the author satirizing capitalism by demonstrating the absurdity of accumulating capital for its own sake, claiming ownership of things that don’t belong to you.

He justifies his ownership of the stars further by calculating their totals, writing the totals on a little piece of paper, and putting the paper in a drawer to lock them in. This locking-away of the paper is his “bank.”

Like the king, the vain man, and the drunk, the businessman is all alone on his planet, engaging in his absurdity to compensate for his loneliness. The alienation caused by capitalism, fittingly, is felt most keenly by him. He pays little attention to anybody or anything other than his calculating.

The little prince observes that his own ownership of volcanoes and a flower are far more meaningful because he actually tends to their needs. The businessman, on the other hand, does nothing of use for the stars, just as any capitalist does little more than accumulating profits and overseeing those he overworks and underpays, his workers, who are the ones who are actually making the products and who thus should manage themselves and earn the full fruits of their labour.

The little prince leaves the businessman’s planet.

XV: Chapter Fourteen

The next planet the little prince comes to is one inhabited by a lamplighter. This planet is the smallest of them all, with only enough room for the lamplighter and his street lamp.

This man doesn’t seem to be engaging in absurd acts on first inspection, though, as has been the case with the previous four men, for lighting a street lamp does in itself have meaning. Still, his work is discovered to have plenty of absurdity in it.

The lamplighter’s planet is so small, and it has been rotating faster and faster over time, that morning and evening fall almost immediately the one after the other, so he must light up and put out the street light with hardly any rest in between.

And why? Because these are his orders.

Still, the boy sees good in the lamplighter, for “he cares for something besides himself.” The lonely little prince could also see a friend in the lamplighter, yet sadly, his planet is too small for both of them to live on, so the little prince leaves.

XVI: Chapter Fifteen

The next planet he lands on is one with a geographer, an elderly man who writes long books and imagines the approaching boy to be an explorer. Recall that geography has been one of the pilot’s studies, so when we discover the geographer’s absurdities, we will see another example of our narrator poking vicarious fun at himself.

One would think that this geographer would have an encyclopedic knowledge of every nook and cranny of his little planet, but he knows of no oceans on it, nor of any mountains, cities, rivers, or deserts. The reason for his ignorance, he says, is that he has no explorers to discover all of these things for him. He is only supposed to receive the explorers’ information, ask them questions about it, and write it all down.

Considering the little prince to be an explorer, the geographer is eager to hear the boy describe his planet. The prince tells of his volcanoes and his flower, though the geographer is not concerned with the latter, since it is “ephemeral.” Geography books are concerned only with what lasts forever on a planet, the geographer insists.

Similarly, he is not concerned with whether a volcano is extinct or if it lives. What matters to him is the mountain itself, which does not change. If the geographer records changing things in his books, then they’ll be out of date, sooner or later, and he can’t have that.

The little prince is saddened to learn that that which is ephemeral is “that which will die.” Since his flower is ephemeral, he fears for her death. In his heart, the boy knows better than the man: that which will die is far superior to that which is “everlasting,” since the ephemeral’s value is its rarity in the brevity of its life.

The geographer recommends that the little prince go next to the Earth, since good things have been said about the planet. So Earth is where the boy goes.

XVII: Chapter Sixteen

Ours is no ordinary planet, for instead of having only one king, one vain man, one drunk, one businessman, one lamplighter, and one geographer, there are many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and/or millions of each of these kinds of men on Earth. So many adult fools, all occupying one planet.

The narrator discusses the many lamplighters of the world before the invention of electricity.

XVIII: Chapter Seventeen

The narrator notes, yet again, another absurd thing that people often do: they lie to sound smart. While he acknowledges that people occupy very little space on Earth, grownups will think he’s lying about that, since they in their pride would prefer to believe that they take up a great deal of space here. “They think they are as large as baobabs.” As I discussed above, we should all know what that kind of poisonous pride can lead to.

When the little prince arrives on Earth, he’s surprised to find no people at all. Well, he is in the middle of a desert, after all. On a planet with so many people, the boy is still lonely.

He soon finds himself in a conversation with a snake. Since as a Christ-figure, the little prince could thus be a kind of second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:47, for example), then it is fitting that he have a conversation with a ‘second serpent’–not one that will tempt him (via Eve) into sin and death, but one that will give him genuine knowledge and wisdom.

The boy learns from the serpent that, while it is surely lonely to be in the desert, “It is also lonely among men.” One could be surrounded in a sea of people, yet still feel lonely if one doesn’t have any friends. Many people here on Earth have that experience. The boy’s encounter of many, each living alone on his own tiny little planet, is symbolic of that loneliness, isolation, and alienation we all feel, at least from time to time. The absurd behaviour of those men on their asteroids can be seen as at least representative of trauma responses to their loneliness.

The serpent says other things to suggest his links with the Biblical one. He says he’s “more powerful than the finger of a king”, suggesting he’s in a way like Satan, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He also says, “Whoever I touch I send back to the dust that created them” (Genesis 3:19). This is a good serpent, though, and he won’t hurt the little prince, for he is pure and comes from a star. He is concerned about the boy, and he can help him.

XIX: Chapter Eighteen

The little prince walks across the desert and finds a flower with whom he has a conversation.

He asks the flower where the people are, but the flower has once seen a caravan go by, and it believes there are only six or seven people, all blown about by the winds, so who knows where they are. The people’s lack of roots “causes them many problems.”

That’s what we need: roots to hold us in place!

XX: Chapter Nineteen

The boy goes up to the top of a high mountain. Before, he knew only his three tiny volcanoes, going up just to his knees. He imagines he’ll be able to see the entire planet from this tall mountain, but he can see only “sharp, craggy peaks.”

He calls out, and hears only an echo for his answer. To hear only himself is like meeting the pilot, a lonely mirror of himself.

XXI: Chapter Twenty

This is the chapter in which the little prince, as I mentioned above, encounters a garden of roses. These roses look just like his flower, the one he left on his little planet. He’s saddened by how their likeness to his rose, his true love, makes her no longer unique, but common. He sees five thousand roses here!

Recall how I mentioned above that his flower represents the author’s wife, Consuela, and that these many flowers represent his extramarital affairs. Consuela, incidentally, had affairs of her own, which I suspect Saint-Exupéry knew of, or at least suspected, hence she, like the many roses here, must have seemed disappointingly “common” to him.

Since the little prince is an idealized version of Saint-Exupéry, then the replacement of the women in his life with flowers is an attempt to smooth over and mitigate his sins, as well as those of Consuela. We see, in the weeping of the little prince over his “common rose,” a touching moment revealing how, in spite of Saint-Exupéry’s naughtiness (and Consuela’s), he still loved her.

XXII: Chapter Twenty-one

As the little prince has been weeping, a fox appears. The two have a conversation, and the boy, feeling lonely, wishes to play with the fox.

The fox insists, however, that the prince tame it first. By “tame,” it means that the boy must “make a connection” with it, thus they would need each other, and be unique to each other. The boy thinks of his rose, and he tells the fox he thinks she’s tamed him. In this taming, it is apparent that his rose became “unique” to him…unlike now.

The fox doesn’t like its dull life because all it does is hunt chickens and is hunted by men, each of both types being all identical, lacking uniqueness, and thus their lives are boring; but if the little prince could tame the fox, then its life would be so much better. The boy’s and the fox’s lives would have meaning, because taming would make them connect with each other, and give each other uniqueness.

The little prince says, however, that he hasn’t the time to tame the fox, for he must look for friends and try to understand the ways of the Earth. The fox says it would be better to tame and be friends with it, for people, having no time for understanding, would rather buy things in shops. One cannot buy friendships, so people don’t have friends anymore…what a trenchant comment on how modern capitalism causes alienation.

To tame the fox, the boy will have to be very patient. Since ‘taming’ in this story essentially means making friends with others–calming down their wildness and making them civil with you–we see how important patience is in building relationships…a skill we have been losing more and more as we fetishize commodities in the shops mentioned above. It’s easier to have things than it is to have people, and to have people have us.

“Words can cause misunderstandings,” says the fox, which is part of why having patience in relationships is so hard.

And so in taming the fox, appearing for it at regular times and thus making it happy, the little prince has made friends with it and made it unique, not like a hundred thousand other foxes. Similarly, his rose is unique because of its taming, so it isn’t like all those other roses that seem so common. Because of this understanding, he can feel good about his rose again. One imagines that, in real life, this understanding must have helped Saint-Exupéry to reconcile himself to his wife, in spite of their troubled marriage.

We see most clearly through our hearts, the fox tells the little prince. Seeing through the heart must be the basis of a child’s wisdom, while seeing through the eyes seems to be the basis of an adult’s folly. What’s more, the boy’s rose is important because of the time he’s spent with her, the taming process.

The fox is believed to have been inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, and she is the one who apparently gave the author the wisdom of seeing clearly with one’s heart. It’s ironic that the source of some of the novella’s wisdom, if it’s the true source, came from a paramour.

XXIII: Chapter Twenty-two

Next, the little prince meets a railway signalman. As the trains race past from one side to the other, the boy wonders why they’re in such a great hurry, to which the man answers that even the passengers don’t know why. The prince asks if the passengers were unhappy where they were before they took the train, and the signalman tells him, trenchantly, that one is never happy wherever one is; in other words, traveling anywhere will never bring happiness–one cannot find it by merely going out there…one must be content where one already is first. The little prince might well have just stayed on his planet with his rose. Oh, the folly of the pilot’s many flights!

One interesting point that the railway signalman makes is that the adult passengers are following nothing, just sleeping during the train rides, while it’s their children who have their faces pressed against the windows. The boy notes that only children know what they are looking for, implying the folly of the sleeping adults, who have let their sense of curiosity wane.

XXIV: Chapter Twenty-three

The little prince meets a merchant who sells small smart pills that can quench one’s thirst. If only the pilot were here! The little prince would use the time saved by taking the pills to go to a water fountain.

XXV: Chapter Twenty-four

As of this point in the boy’s telling of his story to the pilot, the latter has used up all of his drinking water. He is desperate, in his stress, to get water and repair his plane, so he has no use of the boy’s stories!

Since the little prince mentioned going to a water fountain, fortuitously just in time, rather than indulge in the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment of taking one of the merchant’s water-pills (whose saving of time is a further wish-fulfillment, alleviating the pilot’s anxiety about urgently finding water), he simply takes the pilot to look for such a fountain. They search until night falls, and thirst is making the man a little feverish.

At one point, the little prince remarks about how beautiful the desert is, and the pilot must agree. Then the boy says that the beauty of the desert comes from how a well is hiding within it.

The pilot has an epiphany on hearing this second observation. He realizes that what makes anything beautiful–a house, the stars, a desert–is something that stays invisible, hidden.

The boy falls asleep, and the man carries him. He realizes how valuable the little prince is. He looks at the boy and understands that what he sees is just a shell, but that what’s important about the little prince is invisible, hidden.

We see with our hearts, not with our eyes.

The little prince has tamed the pilot, who is no longer frantic about fixing his plane, and is patient in his growing thirst. Instead of being lonely, the pilot has a friend…if only a hallucinated projection of himself. He and the boy are unique to each other. The pilot understands that relationships are more important than things.

And it is at this point, at daybreak, when he has discovered, at last, a well.

XXVI: Chapter Twenty-five

The little prince seems to be recalling his conversation with the railway signalman when he says that people go on trains without knowing where they really want to go. They go in circles and get frustrated. It isn’t worth it. As I said above in my comment on Chapter Twenty-two, it doesn’t matter where one travels if one doesn’t have happiness. Was it worth the trouble for the boy to leave his planet? Have any of the pilot’s plane trips been worth it, if he’s been so lonely?

When they operate the well to draw water from it, the boy says, “The well is now awake, and it is singing.” He wishes to drink, too, but he’s always aware of beauty before his material needs.

As the boy drinks, the pilot comes to understand what the prince has been looking for: not just the nourishment of the water, but also forming bonds with people while seeking such material needs, and appreciating beauty along the way.

The little prince gets a picture of a muzzle for his sheep, drawn by the man so the boy’s flower will be safe from being eaten when he returns to his planet. Then the pilot must return to his plane and finish repairing it; after that, he must go back to the boy, as he in turn had to do to the fox, for this is part of being tamed: remembering your relationships with others.

XXVII: Chapter Twenty-six

The pilot returns to see the little prince, who is sitting on the top of a dilapidated old stone wall, with his feet dangling from it. The pilot notices that there is a yellow snake at the foot of the wall, one that could bite and thus kill the boy in less than thirty seconds. The prince tells it to go away, so he can get off of the wall. The pilot is getting his pistol out to shoot the snake, but it slithers away quickly.

He wonders about the boy speaking with snakes, but instead he learns that the little prince knows he has repaired his plane. So he can go home…and so can the boy.

The pilot knows already that he’ll miss the little prince when he is gone. He longs to hear the boy’s laugh. The prince has given the man so much wisdom; the boy has reawakened the child in the pilot.

Because of the child, the man has a way of valuing the stars that other adults haven’t. For scientists, the stars are trouble; for the businessman, they are wealth. For the pilot, because he knows the little prince is among them, the stars laugh for him.

The boy has given him the gift of happiness, of friendship, and of the end of loneliness. He doesn’t want to leave the prince.

XXVIII: Chapter Twenty-seven

Six years have gone by since the little prince left Earth.

Since he forgot to draw a leather strap for the muzzle for the sheep, the pilot wonders if the sheep has eaten the rose. Perhaps it’s safe, protected under its glass dome…or maybe there’s been an occasion when the boy has forgotten to put it on the rose, and the sheep has eaten it!

Whether the sheep has or hasn’t eaten the flower, everything changes if the answer to this question is yes, and this is important in a way no adult will ever understand, for it’s about caring deeply about a child’s happiness.

Saint-Exupéry ends his tale by twice drawing the spot in the desert where he met the little prince, and also where the boy left him. Thus, it is both the happiest and the saddest place in the world for the pilot.

Recall what I said in my commentary on Chapter Two, about the ouroboros, and that the head biting the tail represents where extreme opposites meet in a dialectical sense. In this instance, I mentioned heaven and hell: back in that chapter, hell led to heaven, the stress of facing certain death in the desert led to the pilot’s encounter with the Christ-like little prince; by the story’s end, though, happiness has led to sadness, in how the pilot has experienced a kind of enlightenment through the boy, and yet now he deeply misses the boy’s company.

After Buddhist-like enlightenment, the pilot feels himself thrown back into the samsara of attachment, wanting his little prince back. He thus asks his readers, if they should see the boy there in the desert, to let him know of the boy’s return, to comfort him.

XXIX: Conclusion

The complexities of life, the songs of innocence and of experience, make us adults forget the simple truths we knew as children: be kind to people, help those in need, appreciate friendships, weed out the bad things before they get worse, and prioritize what is beautiful over material gain. Don’t let pride turn you into a fool.

Thus it makes perfect sense that Saint-Exupéry wrote a novella, to remind adults of the above values, in the form of a children’s story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, France, Editions Gallimard, 1946

Big Business Affairs

Outing
a CEO and
a CPO who
are making
the beast with two
backs is a cold play
indeed. Nonetheless,
these top people
have been far too
close for far too
long. It is high
time that they were
broken up……..They have
kept us,…………..down below,
apart for………………far too long.
It’s time……………………..that they
knew what………………we’ve always
known: the…………………….loneliness,
isolation, and………………estrangement.

Analysis of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 play by Tennessee Williams, an adaptation of his short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game.” COAHTR is one of his most famous plays and was his personal favourite. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.

Set in “a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” (Williams, page xv), COAHTR explores themes of social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity vs the truth, family dysfunction, sexual desire, and death. Much of the writing uses eye dialect to capture the feel of the local southern accent of the US.

The original stage production starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret (“Maggie the Cat” of the play’s title), Burl Ives as Big Daddy Pollitt, and Ben Gazzara as Brick, Margaret’s alcoholic husband, with Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. the 1958 film adaptation kept Ives and Sherwood in their roles, but had Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret and Paul Newman as Brick.

Here is a link to quotes from the play, and here is one to quotes from the 1958 film adaptation.

A number of social issues dealt with in this play–family dysfunction, greed, superficial displays of love and morality, the marginalizing of blacks and homosexuals, etc.–can be seen to centre around one big social issue in particular: class. Big Daddy owns the plantation home mentioned above, and he’ll die soon, so many in the family are hoping to get their grubby hands on his property when he dies.

The set of the play is the bed-sitting room of the plantation home. The style of the room hasn’t changed much since it was the home of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, two old bachelors who shared the room and, it is strongly implied, if not stated more or less explicitly, were gay (Williams, page xv).

Since Williams himself was gay, COAHTR, as with A Streetcar Named Desire, has a gay undercurrent mixed into the plot, something excised from both film adaptations for obvious reasons. Brick, a former football hero turned sports commentator, has become an alcoholic over his grieving from the suicide of his close friend, Skipper, who had a homosexual attraction to Brick that Brick rejected.

This issue is an example of marginalizing in the plantation home, as is the use of black servants (e.g., Lacey and Sookey), who are in no way developed characters and are just there to do whatever their employers, the white Pollitt family, want them to do. In the film, during a scene in the basement of the house, Brick complains to Big Daddy that he’s so out of touch with people, as a man occupied only with money, that he doesn’t even know the servants’ names!

Brick’s grief over Skipper’s suicide has poured over into his marriage with Margaret. He won’t make love with her, meaning they’re childless and therefore won’t produce an heir to pass Big Daddy’s plantation onto. Maggie the Cat is frustrated with this situation, since she knows that Mae, Sister Woman, and her husband, Gooper (Brother Man, Brick’s brother, played by Pat Hingle in the original production, and by Jack Carson in the film), with all their spoiled brat children, whom Maggie calls “no-neck monsters” will inherit the plantation instead, an inheritance that that big part of the family greedily covets. Even worse, though, is Maggie’s sexual frustration…yet she doesn’t want to leave Brick.

She is the cat on a hot tin roof: her feet are burning on it (unfulfilled sexual desire), but she can’t jump off (can’t leave Brick and the rich Pollitt family), because if a cat jumps off a roof, it will injure itself. Maggie the Cat left a childhood of poverty to marry into the Pollitt family, so leaving Brick will mean going back into poverty (jumping off the roof and injuring herself). In this predicament, we can again see how class is the centre of everything in COAHTR.

As of the beginning of the play, we understand that Brick, almost always with a glass of an alcoholic drink in one hand, is hobbling around on crutches. This is because, prior to the beginning of the play, he, drunk the night before at the high school athletic field (page 4), tried to run and jump hurdles, only to fall and break his ankle. In the film, we see him do this. He was trying to relive his old jock hero days, and he failed miserably.

The symbolism here is apt: Brick, a pun on break, is a broken man, broken by his alcoholism and his bittersweet memories as an athletic hero of his old high school days, memories made all the more bitter by Skipper’s tragic end. He can’t move on with his life because of his emotional brokenness, so he limps on crutches from his physical brokenness, with only booze to help him forget the pain.

As for Maggie, the play begins with her in the bedroom (while Brick is in the bathroom finishing a shower), complaining because one of those “no-neck monsters” has dirtied her clothes with a hot buttered biscuit, so she has to change. An equivalent scene is shown near the beginning of the film, just after the one with Brick breaking his ankle.

Maggie’s hatred of those “no-neck monsters,” whose fat little heads and fat little bodies have no connection where she could put her hands and wring their necks, is based of course on her envy of their existence, as opposed to her and Brick’s childlessness. If only Gooper and Mae were the childless ones; then Maggie and Brick, having kids, could get at Big Daddy’s property!

As for Big Daddy, whose birthday is about to be celebrated, and everyone coveting his property is thus kissing his ass, there have been worries that he is dying of cancer. He understands that this is not so: he apparently just has a spastic colon, so he should have plenty of years left to live.

The ‘spastic colon’ story isn’t true, though. He’s been told this story to spare him the pain and allow him to enjoy his birthday. The family will break the hard truth to him and to Big Mama (Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production, and Judith Anderson in the film) at a later, better time. So the ‘spastic colon’ lie is the only well-intentioned one of the story…though Big Daddy will be no less upset to know the truth of his medical condition than Brick is about all of the “mendacity” in the world.

Though Gooper and Mae are Brick’s and Maggie’s enemies, Big Daddy dotes on Brick (page 4), as King Lear does Cordelia. Indeed, in some ways, COAHTR can be compared to King Lear, with Big Daddy corresponding to the old king giving away his land to his daughters, who in turn correspond to Big Daddy’s sons, Gooper (Goneril and Regan) and Brick (Cordelia). Gooper and Mae (the Duke of Cornwall?) put on acts of affection towards Big Daddy in their covetous attempt to get his property, as Goneril and Regan do to King Lear, with their pretty speeches of love for him at the beginning of that play; while Brick, not interested in Big Daddy’s property, sticks to the blunt truth, as Cordelia does.

One must find it hard to believe that Brick has no urge to sleep with Maggie, who is attractive enough that, according to her, at least, “Big Daddy harbours a little unconscious ‘lech’ fo’ [her]…” (page 5). She notes how “he always drops his eyes down [her] body…drops his eyes to [her] boobs an’ licks his old chops!” When Brick finds her comments “disgusting,” she dismisses his attitude as that of “an ass-aching Puritan”, and that Big Daddy’s adoration of her “shape…is deserved appreciation!”

Even if Maggie’s words here are just narcissistic wish-fulfillment, there’s also the choice of beauty queen Taylor to portray her in the film. Richard Brooks, who directed the film adaptation and co-wrote its screenplay with James Poe, had difficulty figuring out how to make it convincing that a man might not want to go to bed with a woman of Taylor’s beauty. This would have been especially difficult with the homosexual undercurrent censored from the story.

Brooks tried to portray Brick’s refusal to have sex with Maggie “because he holds her responsible for Skipper’s death,” but such an attitude is far from convincing. As far too many women have known (and suffered), a man does not have to feel love and affection for a woman, and also desire her sexually. He can have that desire while also feeling the utmost loathing and contempt for her. He can use sex deliberately to hurt her, and a man like Brick can treat even the raping of his wife as “His conjugal right. Her connubial duty.”

Now, while it’s never explicitly stated anywhere in the play, it’s strongly implied that Brick’s relationship with Skipper was more than just a close friendship. Brick may have rejected Skipper’s sexual advances, but that doesn’t mean Brick never felt the urge to return those feelings physically. As a play written by a gay man in the 1950s, long before Stonewall and contemporary gay liberation, COAHTR is going to reflect the social mores of the time, to which Williams would have been more than usually sensitive.

If Brick was gay, it would be only natural for him–in a society that morally condemned homosexuality with a virulence and disgust for “queers” that would make today’s homophobes seem sensitive in their prejudices by comparison–to be more than a little conflicted about his sexuality. Brick jumping into bed with Skipper, even if kept secret, would have been far less believable.

The film further dodges the gay undercurrent in a manner comparable to how the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire does with the suicide husband of Blanche DuBois: he’s portrayed as weak and cowardly, rather than homosexual. As I said in my analysis of ASND about Blanche’s husband, Skipper is all the gay stereotypes without the gay. And again, removing the homosexuality only makes the reason for the suicide unconvincing. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar observed, and they feel a lot of shame…but do they kill themselves over it? They’re too scared of getting hurt or dying…aren’t they, by definition?

In her jealous suspicions that Brick and Skipper had a sexual relationship, Maggie provoked Skipper into trying to take her to bed ‘to prove that he was a man,’ but he couldn’t go through with it, only to reinforce her suspicions and his shame, hence his suicide (page 66).

As I said above, this taboo subject is an example of marginalization, made even more so in its being censored out of the movie. Other examples of marginalizing in the 1958 adaptation are, at the beginning, the kids’ marching band with Confederate flags, the above-mentioned black servants, and a little girl, one of the “no-neck monsters,” going around with a toy pistol and wearing a Native American headdress, a white girl who’s been raised to have no respect for aboriginal culture, having fun playing ‘cowboys and injuns.’

These forms of marginalization, combined with the Pollitt family dysfunction and coveting of Big Daddy’s property, all rooted in class divisions, are manifestations of social alienation. Maggie’s a cat on a hot tin roof because of her and Brick’s mutual alienation; Big Daddy may be fond of Brick, but he finds Big Mama, Gooper, and Mae to be annoying, just as Maggie feels about the “no-neck monsters.” There aren’t any real friendships here. Even Gooper often tells Mae to be quiet.

In Act One, Maggie’s wondering why Brick has looked at her a certain way that “froze [her] blood.” He says he wasn’t conscious of looking at her. She says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier–than living entirely alone!–if the one that y’love doesn’t love you…” (page 8). That is alienation.

At one point, Brick drops his crutch, and he asks Maggie to give it to him. She’d have him lean on her shoulder, but he just wants his crutch (page 11). Alienation. Finally, she gives it to him in exasperation.

She’d like him to leave the booze alone until after Big Daddy’s birthday party is over, but he’s forgotten all about it, so estranged is he from his family (page 12). He, of course, never bought a birthday present for Big Daddy, so Maggie’s bought one for Brick to give his dad. Brick isn’t even willing to write ‘Love, Brick’ on the birthday card, so averse is he to being untruthful.

He speaks of himself and his wife having made conditions by which he’ll agree to stay on living with her. She complains of not living with him, but rather of occupying the same cage with him.

Mae interrupts and complains about an archery set left around her precious children, blaming Maggie for having exposed her kids to the ‘danger.’ Then, Mae brags about the show her kids put on, with music and dancing. Big Daddy loved it, apparently (page 13). Maggie comes back by taunting Mae that her kids all have dogs’ names–Dixie, Trixie, Buster, Sonny, and Polly (this last apparently a parrot).

After Mae leaves the bedroom to attend a resuming of the kids’ show, Maggie complains to Brick of being like a cat on a hot tin roof, to which Brick replies that she can simply jump off the roof and land, as all cats do, on all fours, uninjured. What Brick means is that she can take a lover to deal with her sexual frustration (page 15), but of course she doesn’t want to do that for the reasons I gave above. She insists she loves him too much to leave him, and wishes he’d “get fat or ugly or something so [she can] stand it.”

Soon, Big Mama comes over to tell Brick and Maggie the good news that Big Daddy doesn’t have cancer, and he only has a spastic colon. Big Mama’s annoyed with the locked bedroom door, not being concerned with Maggie’s or Brick’s right to privacy (that is, she doesn’t respect boundaries…a typical problem in dysfunctional families–page 16). This would explain why the bratty kids come running into the bedroom with impunity.

Big Mama asks Maggie if Brick is still in much pain from his broken ankle (page 18), which is a metaphor for what seems his impotence. Not long after, Big Mama shows concern over whether or not Brick and Margaret are happy in bed, obviously putting pressure on the couple to produce grandchildren for her and Big Daddy (page 20). Once again, there is no respect for the couple’s boundaries or privacy.

When we accept the play’s strong implication that Brick is a closet homosexual (as opposed to the film’s senseless censoring of what was clearly Williams’s main theme of exploration, making him dislike the film), then not only is his not sleeping with her explicable, but also his urging her to find a lover. If she can get pregnant with a bastard child they can pass off as their own, then the pressure for Brick to get it up for her will finally be off.

Brick married Margaret for the same reason many gays married back in those days: for appearance’s sake. It’s yet another example of the kind of mendacity that Brick complains about.

Now, Maggie is as determined as Gooper and Mae are in getting Big Daddy’s estate when he dies, which they all know will come sooner than the ‘spastic colon’ story lets on. In fact, the Cat is so determined to get it that, at the end of the play, she lies that she’s with child in order to get in Big Mama’s and Daddy’s good graces. She plans to pressure Brick into getting the job done by depriving him of his liquor.

The sanitized film version shows Brick content to go along with getting the job done. Williams’s original ending–before Elia Kazan, director of the Broadway production, insisted Williams make changes to Act Three, which among other changes included a more sympathetic Maggie (pages 92-93)–is far preferable, in preserving a sense of the family’s dysfunction by having Brick passively acquiesce to her wish “to make the lie true” (page 91).

She insists that she loves him, and he “[smiling with charming sadness]” says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” His latent homosexuality would make this original ending (as opposed to Kazan’s urged rewrites or those of the film) far more believable; it would also bring home all the harder just how tragic this story is. It’s far from the straight ‘family values’ ending we get in the film; instead, gay Brick is being forced by the scheming Cat to sire a family so she can get at Big Daddy’s property. Brick has to be another Gooper. He’s being crushed by her mendacity.

While in much of Act Three of the play, Brick is in the gallery (as opposed to the bedroom where the bulk of the play is set), Big Daddy not reappearing at all until Kazan insisted on him coming back, another of the changes made to Act Three, in the film, there’s a lengthy scene of the two men in the basement (after a spell outside in the rain gets them wet) towards the end. Now, this basement scene is meant to create a sense of reconciliation between the two, to prepare us for Brick’s willing agreement to sleep with Maggie. As such, it’s another example of the film sanitizing the play to make it more ‘family-values’ oriented, taking away much of the bite of Williams’s social critique.

The faults of this scene’s inclusion, however, don’t mean that it’s entirely without merit. Its exploration of Big Daddy’s character and motivations dovetail with how his social rank and wealth result in alienation.

He speaks of how all his wealth has allowed him to buy lots of gifts for his family, supposedly proving how much he ‘loves’ all of them. Brick expresses his disgust at such ostentation masked as generosity. One cannot buy love. Brick says that Big Daddy owns his family rather than loves them. Capitalism alienates people by making commodities out of them.

Big Daddy hopes his plantation empire will live on after his death through his heirs, Gooper and Brick. Brick denies this possibility because of the inherent alienation in a bourgeois family that treats its members as property. And we all know how capitalism leads to empire, in various forms…and look at all the toxic families that exist out there.

Big Daddy speaks of his own father, a hobo who hopped trains with his then-young son and left him nothing but a suitcase with a uniform worn in the Spanish-American War. Big Daddy brags of how he built up his plantation from nothing,…though any Marxist worth his salt knows the real way business empires are built: with the blood, sweat, and tears of an exploited working class. Success has made a failure of Big Daddy’s home.

To go back to comparisons between COAHTR and King Lear, Big Daddy–upon learning that, indeed, he does have terminal cancer, and that the ‘spastic colon’ story was a white lie meant to allow him to enjoy his birthday–goes into a rage, shouting “Lying! Dying! Liars!” at the family that gave him his false hope (at the end of the original Act Two, or at the beginning of the Act Three revised for Kazan, whichever). Like Lear, Big Daddy is upset over having to confront the ultimate loss, that of his life, which Lear loses onstage at the end of the final scene of Act Five.

As I explained in my analysis of the play (link above), Lear loses everything, one by one: his kingly authority, his one hundred knights, the ability to trust his daughters, shelter, his sanity, his one true daughter, Cordelia, and finally, his life. In knowing he’s losing his life, Big Daddy is losing it all in one fell swoop. When Mae gets Gooper’s briefcase (page 106) so he can get at the legal papers pertaining to what he sees as his and Mae’s rights to his father’s estate, Gooper and Mae are demonstrating their “avarice, avarice, greed, greed!” (page 107), as Maggie judges (not that she’s really any better), that Big Daddy’s lost his ability to trust them.

If only, in all of this alienation, class conflict, and loss, Big Daddy could have a moment to reflect as Lear does in his own loss:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (Act III, Scene iv)

In Williams’s original version, Big Daddy sympathizes with Brick, in spite of prevailing prejudices against homosexuality: if only he could extend that empathy to the poor, as Lear does.

Of course, just as Lear is, for a while, happy to have regained Cordelia after realizing she is the one true daughter, so is Big Daddy happy to have regained something (even though it’s just a lie): Maggie is apparently pregnant with Brick’s child–“this girl has life in her body” (page 115). In the hope of having life in an heir he’d rather pass his estate on to, Big Daddy imagines he won’t be losing life–and all his property–after all.

How sad that the man fooled by lies is still letting himself be fooled by them. And in linking his life and happiness to his private property rather than to people whom he could help with it, people he’s alienated from, he sadly also won’t show the heavens more just.

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1955

Analysis of ‘Jaws’

Jaws is a novel by Peter Benchley, published in 1974 and adapted the next year by Steven Spielberg into a movie that starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, and costarring Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton.

While it is more usual to say that a book is better than its movie adaptation, it is almost universally felt that the reverse is the case with Jaws. The novel’s characters are generally felt to be unlikeable and unsympathetic, and so the changes made to them for the film are justified. Also, while the film streamlines and simplifies the plot to focus on the shark threat, the novel does a detour in the middle to make it into a character study, focusing on their conflicts.

Now, while I would agree that the film is far more entertaining than the novel–indeed, the film established the notion of the summer blockbuster–there are important thematic elements in the novel, only lightly touched on in the film, that deserve a more thorough exploration, so I’ll be focusing on the novel a lot here…without neglecting the film, of course.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to an audiobook of the novel, whose quirky AI narrator makes lots of amusing mispronunciations.

While the great white shark of the film is just a menace to be defeated, the shark of the novel, somewhat like the white whale of Moby-Dick, is symbolically a force of nature ready to fight back against a most predatory human race. Just as the crew of the Pequod hunt and kill whales as their way of making money (e.g., to get the oil), so do the people of the fictional town of Amity use the beaches and swimming as a way of making money, which can be seen as a human muscling in on the fish’s natural territory.

So the people in the novel are as much predators in their own way as the shark is. Indeed, predation in general is a major theme of the novel, something stripped away to a minimum in the film. When making the film, Spielberg famously said he’d been rooting for the shark as he was reading Benchley’s novel, since the characters were so unlikeable. I would argue, though, that the unlikeability of the characters was the whole point of the novel.

A careful reading of the book demonstrates a critique of capitalism that Spielberg and his fellow moviemakers were trying to shy away from…and in making not only the first summer blockbuster, but also a well-loved, classic film that has since raked in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide (the result of an aggressive marketing campaign that had included such merchandise as a soundtrack album, T-shirts, beach towels, blankets, toy sharks, etc.), they succeeded most admirably in making the film all for capitalism, rather than against it.

The film, while scary, gave viewers a sense of hope, whereas the novel is much darker in tone, giving us a sense of how much nastier we can be than sharks. Small wonder people like the movie so much more than the book.

I will go into the capitalist critique later on, in particular as regards the…business relationships…of Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), something removed from the film. For now, though, consider the reality of such things as the polluting of our oceans, which harms so much of marine life because proper disposal of garbage is more costly and eats into profits. Also, there’s the hunting of sharks for their fins to be eaten as a delicacy. Indeed, Benchley later regretted how the Jaws phenomenon led to hostility to a marine animal that doesn’t attack humans all that much, thus making him preoccupied with marine conservation and protecting sharks. As I said above, man is every bit the predator that sharks are, if not much more so.

An understanding of that reality can help us to see how, on a symbolic level, people going out to swim in the waters of Amity Beach are intruding on the territory of marine animals. So while in the movie, as well as in the novel, young Christine Watkins may be innocently skinny dipping, then to die a violent death, that is just our human point of view. From the shark’s point of view, too, she’s just its prey…killing her is of course nothing personal. But the shark, often called “the fish” in the novel, represents the vengeful wrath of nature against her human predators. On a couple of occasions in the novel, a resident of Amity claims that the shark is God’s agent of retribution for the town’s sins.

When police chief Martin Brody (Scheider) learns of the killing of Watkins, and that it was probably a shark attack, he wants to close down the beach to prevent any more attacks. The problem is that the summer tourist season has come, and the Amity economy depends almost entirely on tourism. Because of this problem, Vaughn and the town’s selectmen want news of the shark attack to be kept secret. And so the editor of the local newspaper, Harry Meadows (played by Carl Gottlieb, who also did rewrites of Benchley’s original script for the film, and whose role as Meadows was little more than a cameo, as opposed to Meadows’s much more substantial part in the novel), gives no reports of the attack.

Issues of class difference having an impact on the novel first become apparent in the dissatisfaction of Ellen Brody (Gary) with her marriage to Martin. Her family background is further up in terms of social class than his, so her having become the wife of a police chief feels as though she’s ‘married down.’ As a result, she feels alienated from the Amity community, who seem ‘beneath’ her, and when she meets Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss), an ichthyologist from a class echelon similar to hers–and whose older brother she once dated, years before knowing Martin–she develops a sexual interest in him. Needless to say, none of this is in the movie.

What must be understood here is that the unpleasantness of these characters (her lust, Hooper’s snottiness to Martin, his jealous suspicions of Hooper with his wife and resulting antagonism to him, etc.) is all part of the novel’s critique of class conflict and alienation, all products of capitalism, which in turn is an important part of the overall theme of predation in the novel. Recall, in this connection, Einstein‘s words: “the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”

Because no one yet knows of the danger of the shark, some people go out to the beach for a swim. Brody is there, too, watching over the area just in case. A little boy named Alex Kintner goes into the water and is eaten by the shark; in the film, his blood is splashing with the water, the shock of it vividly captured in the famous dolly zoom of Brody’s reaction to the killing.

Because of technical difficulties with ‘Bruce,’ the mechanical shark used in the film, its appearance had to be limited. Spielberg was able to turn this problem into a virtue, however, by instead suggesting the shark’s presence: filming from its POV, using shadow, and having John Williams‘s famous music, with the E-F-E-F-E-F-E-F in the cellos, double basses, etc. The result was something incalculably scarier, with the sense of approaching danger.

When Alex’s mother (played by Lee Fiero) learns that Brody had known of the shark danger, yet let the beaches stay open, we see her approach him and slap him. In the film, her reaction is gentle compared to the rage she shows him in the novel, and it’s another example of how the film makes the characters more likable and sympathetic.

Still, despite Brody’s attempts to have the beach closed, especially since he’s racked with guilt over Alex’s death (Brody has sons of his own: two in the film, and three in the novel), Mayor Vaughn insists on keeping the beaches open for the sake of the summer season and the health of the town’s economy.

Now, in the film, Vaughn seems to be a well-intentioned, but short-sighted and foolish mayor, dismissing the shark threat and trivializing it in comparison to the, to him, far greater urgency of keeping the town’s economy healthy. In the novel, though, things get far more sinister and darker when we learn of his business dealings with the mafia.

In many posts, I’ve described the presentation of the mafia in film as symbolic of capitalists, since I consider the exploitation of labour to be criminal. The mafia’s criminal actions are illegal, with mainstream capitalists, their criminal actions are legal. In the Jaws novel, though, the mafia are literally capitalists, who have bought up local property at cheap prices and are hoping, during the summer tourist season, to sell it at much higher prices to get a nice profit.

So the mafia is pressuring Vaughn, who in turn is pressuring Brody, to keep the beaches open, with no regard whatsoever for the safety of the swimmers. The mafia at one point even kill the Brody family cat, which Brody angrily tries to blame on Vaughn. Now, Vaughn, incidentally, also needs money from the tourism to pay off some debts. So in all of these issues, we can see not only a sense of predation far greater than just that of the shark, but also how Benchley’s novel is a critique of capitalism.

In man’s muscling into the marine animals’ territory to make a profit, we can see how one of the residents of Amity considers the shark to be an agent of God’s retribution against the wicked.

Quint (Shaw) is introduced in the film far earlier than he is in the novel, which is just before he, Brody, and Hooper go out hunting for the shark. At a town meeting, where a $3,000 bounty is placed on the shark, the eccentric Quint, after scratching his fingernails on a chalkboard where a shark has been drawn (suggesting his Ahab-like hatred of the great white marine animal), he offers his own shark-hunting services for $10,000.

Other shark hunters go after the shark, but end up catching a different one, a tiger shark. At about 6:47 in this set of deleted scenes, we see not only their shark hunting, but also their rowdy competition with each other, hitting the butts of their rifles against other boats, throwing bait at rivals in other boats, foolishly taking their dogs in their boats, and recklessly firing their rifles into the water. Though the film managed to remove much of the novel’s human predation, this deleted scene demonstrates at least an attempt to compensate for those removals.

Because the shark seems to have been caught and killed, Vaughn confidently assures everyone it’s OK to come to Amity Beach and have a good time in the water. He reminds us that amity means “friendship,” though for those who know the town of the novel, the unlikeable characters imply that the town would be more aptly named ‘Enmity.’

Indeed, the sense of unfriendliness and alienation is so keenly felt in a reading of the novel that at times it’s to be noted even in the narration itself. Homophobic slurs pop up occasionally, and racist stereotypes are presented in the insistence that rapists in the town must be black. I suspect, in all fairness to Benchley, that these elements aren’t meant to be a reflection of his character, but are meant to be present in whoever is narrating the story, presumably a resident of Amity.

To get back to the film version, we note that people are on the beach again, though at first they’re nervous about going into the water. Vaughn has to urge an elderly couple to go in, to prod all the others to go in also, by imitative conformity. Brody has people patrolling the water, watching it like hawks in case the shark that had been caught was the wrong one.

Around this time, we see a TV news reporter saying a cheesy line about how Amity Beach has a cloud over it in the shape of a killer shark. This, by the way, is a cameo by none other than Peter Benchley himself (a former reporter for the Washington Post)…and one wonders if the clichéd line he speaks is meant to be a dig at the writer’s prose.

After a prank pulled by a couple of boys in the water, a false alarm that allows for some temporary relief in the tension, the shark really makes an appearance, killing a man, whose dismembered leg is seen floating down in the water, his blood mixing with it. Later, Vaughn is finally showing some remorse over his trivializing of the danger and his overconfidence that there was no more shark to worry about.

Around this time in the novel, Ellen has seen Hooper again, and with a tense dinner party in the Brody house, her predatory seduction of him begins. Martin, sensing the chemistry between them, is getting drunk and making things awkward for everyone.

After the party, she arranges to meet Hooper in a restaurant for lunch, and the flirtation between them continues. At one point, she makes an odd comment about having rape fantasies. While it is true that some women have these (though they’d be more accurately described as fantasies of being ravished or of having ‘good, rough sex,’ the word ‘rape’ being used here for its connotations rather than its denotative meaning, since ‘rape’ by definition is something one does NOT want to be subjected to), one cannot but be suspicious of the inner motives of a male novelist putting such fantasies in the mind of one of his female characters.

Still, as unseemly as such fantasies may be in Ellen’s mind, they do, in a way, fit in with the general theme of predation. If we see sexual predation and seduction as forms of sexual sadism, then ‘rape’ fantasies could be seen as examples of sexual masochism. Ellen, in this sense, would prey on Hooper and be preyed on by him. In this connection, note what Freud once said: “A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.” To paraphrase Freud, a predator is always at the same time prey. The shark will certainly be the prey of Brody, Hooper, and Quint.

Anyway, Ellen and Hooper will go to a hotel after their lunch date and prey on each other, as it were, in bed. Martin, in the meantime, will try to reach both of them by phone that afternoon, and being unable to do so, will feel his jealousy swelling in him.

Other examples of what could be called predation in Amity include some local scammers trying to take advantage of tourists, who want a glimpse of the notorious shark they’ve heard about in the media; the scammers will trick the tourists into buying unneeded tickets for admission to the beach! Brody finds out about this, and realizes he has to apprehend the scammers.

Finally, after a boy narrowly escapes being eaten by the shark, Brody closes the beach and convinces the town’s selectmen to hire Quint. Now, as we know, insanely jealous Brody and snotty rich kid Hooper are not likable (as opposed to their portrayal in the film, of course), but neither is the Quint of the novel, who disembowels a blue shark and uses an illegally caught unborn baby dolphin as bait, angering ichthyologist Hooper. Once again, we see man as much more of a predator than sharks are.

Now, while in the film there is some friction among the three men on Quint’s boat, the Orca (aptly named after the killer whale that is the natural enemy of the great white shark), such friction is expressed in a generally light-hearted manner. Recall Dreyfuss’s Hooper making faces at Quint after being told he can’t admit when he’s wrong.

In the novel, however, the friction among them gets much nastier, and this contributes to their unlikeability. As I mentioned above, neither Brody nor Quint likes snotty rich kid Hooper, and in this we see the alienation caused by class differences, caused in turn by capitalism. On top of that, Brody’s rising jealous suspicions of Hooper having played around with Ellen (also, as we’ve seen, a product of class differences) fill him with so much rage that at one point he physically attacks Hooper, strangling him for a moment.

While in the movie, the men go out in the Orca one time and confront the shark at the end, in the novel, they go out on four separate trips, each time returning to shore at the end of the day. They never see the shark on the first day, but they do on the second, and Brody is amazed at the size of it. In the film, his amazement can be related to the scene when he’s ladling chum into the water, the shark suddenly appears, shocking him, and he backs up and says the famous line to Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” (Incidentally, Scheider improvised the line.)

The third day is not only when Brody and Hooper have their fight, but also when Hooper brings the shark cage and, unlike in the film, he dies underwater in it when the shark attacks him. Now, he was originally supposed to die in the film that way, too, but footage filmed of a great white shark attacking the cage (with no one in it) looked so compelling to Spielberg that he wanted to use it, and this meant rewriting the scene so Hooper instead would escape and swim to safety on the ocean floor, then resurface with Brody, and together they swim to shore at the end. Besides, the problems with ‘Bruce’ were a constant source of changes to the story.

The fourth and final day, of course, is the final confrontation with the shark, both it and Quint dying, though the latter dies in a more Ahab-esque way, and the former in a far less…explosive…way. But I’ll come back to that in more detail later.

While in the film, there is some friction among the three men, there’s also a lot of camaraderie, which adds to their likability. This is especially so in the night-time scene on the Orca, when they have a few drinks and engage in male bonding in the form of Quint and Hooper comparing scars on their legs.

And it is at this point that we come to one of the most important film contributions to the story: Quint’s recollections of what happened to the crew of the USS Indianapolis. This incident really happened in 1945; the ship delivered the components of an atomic bomb to Tinian in a mission so secret that when the ship was sunk by Japanese torpedoes while on its way to Leyte, the Philippines, the navy was late to learn of the ship’s non-arrival in Leyte.

The surviving crew at the time were left adrift over an ordeal of several days, leaving them without food or water, to suffer from exposure to the elements that resulted in such problems as hypothermia. Then there were the shark attacks, which of course are the focus of Quint’s telling of the story, as well as the source of his Ahab-like hate of sharks.

Just as Captain Ahab, in his rage, tells his crew of when the white whale bit off his leg, so does Quint speak, though in a calm, sombre voice, of his trauma and fear from that ordeal in the water. The scene adds depth to his character, to help us sympathize with him, and also to add an Ahab relation to him in a way that Benchley’s attempts at such a relation come off as contrived and superficial in comparison.

There’s another thing that the Indianapolis story adds to Jaws: the element of capitalism’s muscling in on the sea, causing nature to get revenge on it in the form of shark attacks–God’s retribution on the sinful, as that Amity resident sees it.

The sending of the atomic bomb components to Tinian, “the Hiroshima bomb,” as Quint calls it, was of course part of the plan not only to defeat Japan in WWII, but also, as I explained here, to give the Soviets a great big scare. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was meant to demonstrate the military superiority of the American empire to the world. As we Marxists know, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, WWII was an inter-imperialist war between Anglo-American imperialism on one side and fascist imperialism on the other.

The nukes didn’t just kill between one and three hundred thousand Japanese; they were also an outrage against nature. The shark attacks, thus, are a symbolic revenge.

In the novel, after Hooper dies, Brody believes the shark can’t be killed and tells Quint he doesn’t think the town can pay him anymore. Quint, however, decides he’ll go after the shark with or without the money, so determined is he in his Ahab-like drive to kill it.

In the final confrontation, the shark attacks the Orca, causing it to sink. In the novel, after harpooning the shark several times, Quint gets his foot entangled in the rope of one of the harpoons he’s hit the shark with, and as the shark goes back into the water, Quint is pulled in with it and he drowns, in true Ahab fashion. All he’d have to say, to make it perfect, is, “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee…”

This link with Moby-Dick is feeble and anticlimactic compared to Quint’s spectacular death in the movie, since we know of his trauma from the Indianapolis incident being reawakened as he kicks in terror and slides down to the shark’s eager mouth to get that fatal bite in the belly.

While the shark’s confrontation with Brody in the novel is, again, anticlimactic, at least it’s more realistic than the spectacular blowup at the end of the movie. Benchley hated the changed killing of the shark so much that he got kicked off the set when they were to film it. Brody’s shoving of a pressurized tank into the shark’s mouth, then firing a bullet into the tank, would not have caused it and the shark to explode; still, Spielberg felt a more dramatic ending was more important than realism, and from the point of view of the movie’s commercial success, he was right.

As for the novel, though, the wounded shark moves closer and closer to Brody, who is afloat on a seat cushion now that the Orca has sunk, and he’s resigned to his fate. But the shark, right up close to him now, just…dies. It succumbs to its harpoon wounds, and sinks down to the ocean floor with Quint, his leg still stuck in the harpoon rope.

Then Brody, like sole-surviving Ishmael, starts swimming to shore–the end!

This is the way the novel ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Again, it’s not an exciting ending, it’s certainly an abrupt ending for the novel, but that was Benchley’s point. This is reality: people aren’t generally very nice (sorry, Dear Reader!), and problems aren’t normally solved in a dramatic, Hollywood fashion.

Jaws the movie is a great moment in cinematic history, to be sure, and is thoroughly entertaining, but it is so because it’s a capitalistic crowdpleaser. Jaws the novel, on the other hand, is an exploration of the darker, predatory nature of man as well as, if not much more so than, of sharks, of which the one in the novel is just a symbolic projection of ourselves.

Predictably, the phenomenon of the film led to the sale of Jaws-related merchandise as I mentioned above, as well as sequels that got worse and worse until being totally ridiculous. Then there were attempts to capitalize on marine animal terror with different movies, like Orca. So the first Jaws film may be justifiably far more beloved than the novel, but it also proved Benchley’s point about the predatory nature of capitalism.

Analysis of ‘American Beauty’

American Beauty is a 1999 satirical black comedy film directed by Sam Mendes in his feature film directorial debut. Written by Alan Ball, the film stars Kevin Spacey, Mena Suvari, and Annette Bening, with Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper, and Allison Janney.

The film received widespread critical and popular acclaim, grossing over $350 million worldwide and winning five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Spacey, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. It was also nominated for and won many other awards and honours, mainly for directing, writing, and acting.

Retrospective appraisals of American Beauty, however, have not been as positive. Its themes have seemed trivial since 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey have not helped the film’s reputation, either, especially given their disturbing parallel to the lecherous, teen-obsessed character he plays in the movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to its script.

I find it interesting to do an analysis of a film praised before the 21st century, and one whose praise has dwindled since the beginning of the 21st century, because I find the change in values between these times so well encapsulated in this change of attitude toward the film.

What were considered deep themes in the movie–rebellion against the psychological imprisonment imposed by social conformity in the American middle class, finding beauty where it’s least expected, living a more meaningful life, etc.–now seem fairly trivial and superficial. What seems to have brought about our change in attitude toward these themes, our depreciation of their worth, is our change in attitude toward the liberal mindset.

It takes someone like the people in this suburban middle-class neighbourhood to see depth in these themes, whereas someone raised in poverty, or in the Third World (oppressed by Western imperialism), would regard them as little more than First World problems. We the audience are meant to sympathize with Lester Burnham (Spacey), the beginning of whose lecherous, predatory attraction to underage Angela Hayes (Suvari) is the inciting incident in the story that propels his character arc from psychological imprisonment to liberation and finally to redemption, when he finally stops his predation on her, just before mounting her, on learning she’s not the sex goddess he thought she was, but just a virgin.

It took such world-shattering events as 9/11 (with its resulting perpetual war, curtailing of civil liberties, mass surveillance, etc.) and the global financial crisis of the late 2000s to make us realize how hollow and superficial the bourgeois liberal values of this film are. The idea that one can take such a flip, light-hearted attitude towards Lester’s creepy designs on a girl, when he seems to go to heaven after being shot…the sight of which gets an awed reaction from Ricky Fitts (Bentley).

The movie begins by acknowledging Lester’s creepiness through his daughter, Jane (Birch), complaining to Ricky about it, and even seeming to consent to have her boyfriend kill her dad. What immediately follows is a shot of a tree-lined street, bird’s-eye-view, in the American suburbs. A voice-over of Lester saying this is his neighbourhood, and that he knows he’ll be dead within a year, suggests it’s his spirit looking down from heaven and remembering that last year of his life. Lester–a pun on lecher?–is in heaven–forgiven so easily? And who is his killer? Is it Ricky, or someone else?

Next, the film establishes Lester’s dull, pathetic life as of the beginning of that last year, when he-as-angel imagines he’s “dead already.” He’s in a psychological prison, symbolized first by the shower door he’s seen behind, where he masturbates–the best time of his miserable day–and second by the image of columns of data on his computer screen at work resembling jail bars, with his face reflected on it among the columns, making it look as if he were incarcerated in his office at his miserable job as a media executive.

It’s significant that, when we’re introduced to his wife, Carolyn (Bening), she is seen cutting one of many red roses (American Beauties) she’s been growing on the fences around their house. Red rose petals are a recurring motif in the film, associated with Angela’s sexuality and therefore Lester’s sexual resurrection. His neurotic, control-freak wife has been sapping him of his energy for years, or so he imagines. Her clipping of the roses is therefore symbolically apt.

After we see her with the roses and chatting with one of the Burnhams’ two next-door neighbours (Jim and Jim are a gay couple played by Scott Bakula and Sam Robards), there’s a scene with Jane in her bedroom at her computer. She’s wearing a sweater with a motif of red roses, and being a typically insecure teenager, she’s looking into getting breast enhancement.

That the rose motif ties Angela in with not only Lester’s wife but also his daughter–with all of the sexual overtones either discussed above or implied and understood–should tell us all we need to know about Lester’s filthy mind. His being trapped in the capitalist world should be enough for us to sympathize with him, but his idea of how to escape that trap–lusting after a girl his daughter’s age (implying unconscious feelings he may have about Jane, in that red-rose sweater and wanting to have larger breasts!), smoking Ricky’s weed, and replacing his media executive job with a much lower-paying one and with far fewer responsibilities–causes our sympathy to wither away.

His obsession with an underage girl, combined with his defiant attitude at work towards his “efficiency expert” boss, Brad Dupree (played by Barry Del Sherman), who’d have Lester justify why he shouldn’t be fired, makes me describe American Beauty as a cross between Lolita and Office Space. In this combination we see the psychological conflict of the liberal mindset (link above): the superego makes moral demands for progressive social change and freedom from capitalist exploitation (Office Space), while the id wants satisfaction of base, morally objectionable desires (Lolita).

When Brad tells Lester about the “need to cut corners” in the business to “free up cash,” since profits are more important than workers’ needs, of course, Lester reminds Brad of when the company’s editorial director, Craig, used company money–$50,000–to pay for the sexual services of a prostitute. This upper-level man gets to enjoy that and have his reputation protected from scandal, while lower-level workers like Lester have to fight to save their jobs.

When Brad says, “It’s just business,” we might be reminded of a famous line in another movie about capitalist and political corruption–The Godfather. Of course, Lester considers his need to write out a report justifying his job to be “kinda fascist,” as he says to Carolyn when they’re driving home; and then, almost immediately after, they notice they have new next-door neighbours moving in, on the opposite side of the Burnham house to the Jims. This new family are the Fittses, whose father, Col. Frank Fitts (Cooper), as we’ll eventually learn, is “kinda fascist,” too.

We learn that the family who’d lived there before and moved out were mad at Carolyn for having cut down a sycamore that both their and the Burnhams’ property shared. Her cutting down of the sycamore reminds us of her cutting the rosa American beauties. Just as those flowers are superficially beautiful, but are susceptible to the fungi diseases mildew, rust, and black spot (symbolic of the superficial enjoyment of luxuries and material pleasures associated with capitalism, which mask the evils of imperialism and poverty–recall in this connection the song “American Woman,” by the Guess Who, and sung by Lester in his car later on in the film as he’s smoking a joint), so is the chopped-down sycamore symbolic of the pain of being in love.

Romeo visited a sycamore grove when he was sad, lovelorn, and wishing to be alone in his rumination. Desdemona, fearful of her increasingly jealous husband, Othello, sang “a song of willow,” which began, “The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree…” (Act IV, Scene iii) ‘The Willow Song’ is about someone in love who dies of a broken heart when the love object proves untrue. Sycamore can also be a pun on “sick amore,” or “sick in love”…or in the case of Lester’s taboo infatuation, a “sick love.”

So in this cut-down sycamore, we see more of the Lolita-oriented symbolism, a variation on those clipped red flowers, a killing of Lester’s sexual energy by his psychologically castrating wife. Small wonder he masturbates so much, and as Angela will later observe, he and Carolyn haven’t had sex in a long time. Incidentally, Angela’s last name is Hayes, rather like Dolores Haze in Lolita.

Note also how, on the one hand, Lester is obsessed with Angela, Jane’s friend, but on the other, he has barely spoken to his daughter in months, as she herself complains to him at dinner. His infatuation with her friend could be interpreted as an unconscious displacement of incestuous feelings for Jane (recall the rose motif on her sweater).

Consider how, if you watch the film carefully, Jane wears less and less makeup as the story progresses, while Angela remains fully made up throughout. The implication is that Jane’s desirability is being transferred, displaced, from her to Angela. And when Lester sees Angela for the first time, during the cheerleader dance routine to the music in the high school gym (‘On Broadway’), both she and Jane are in the same uniform, dressed identically, and heavily made up. All of this just makes Lester’s desires all the creepier.

So instead of directing his energies towards doing something about the exploitative capitalist system (as Milton symbolically does by burning down the Initech building, his place of work where he’s mistreated so badly as to work for no paycheck, in Office Space), Lester lets those energies of his be distracted by and redirected towards the immature grafitication of his libido. Such is the typical liberal mindset. Tom Hanks’s Charlie Wilson is similarly hedonistic in a movie that glorifies using the mujahideen to weaken the Soviet Union, ultimately leading to the Taliban.

Because of this liberal acquiescence towards not just the gratification of desire, but also to self-absorption and to the bland and the conformist (instead of rising up in solidarity with one’s fellow workers to overturn the system), we shouldn’t be surprised to see the Burnhams’ new next-door neighbours as having a head of the house with fascist tendencies. Recall that even the Jims, the gay couple on the other side of the Burnhams’ house, are also fully enmeshed in bland bourgeois conformism, the kind that would tolerate, if grudgingly, such fascist tendencies.

Note what Stalin once said back in the 1920s: “Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that ‘pacifism’ signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, ‘pacifism’ is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.”

American liberalism, especially ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the age of the Clintons, is to the right of social democracy, making it even closer to fascism. We thus shouldn’t be surprised at the contemporary liberal embrace of Ukrainian fascists, as well as liberals’ enabling of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

To get back to Lester’s watching of the cheerleader dance in the school gym, we must keep in mind that, from his point of view, Angela is too far away from him to be seen in any detail and therefore to become the object of so sudden and intense an infatuation with her. In that uniform and all made up, she hardly looks any different from his daughter, apart from Angela’s blonde hair and Jane’s brown hair. It’s thus easy to see how he can go from unconsciously lusting after Jane to consciously lusting after Angela.

Since it’s his own daughter he so incestuously and shamefully wants, that is, his own flesh and blood, this lust is symbolically narcissistic, as is his habitual masturbation. This ‘having sex with oneself’ is in turn symbolic of his narcissistic self-absorption and solipsism, which brings us back to my point about the liberal mindset: one is too egoistic to care about the problems of the rest of the world in a meaningful way, thus enabling fascism to creep into our world.

So underneath the surface of physical beauty and the desire to have it, and other sources of superficial happiness, is a moral decay. Hence, the name of the movie, referring to a flower of surface beauty, but with root rot.

Examples of this superficial beauty or happiness hiding a deeper ugliness or unhappiness include Carolyn’s embrace of toxic positivity: first, she–being a real estate agent–chants the affirmation, “I will sell this house today,” then after all the work she’s put into cleaning the house and trying to sell it, failing to do so with client after client, she bawls like a baby at her failure.

Another example is Angela’s physical beauty masking her ugly, narcissistic personality. She constantly bad-mouths Ricky as a “mental-boy” and others whom she imagines to be envying her for her ‘success’ as a model, shouting “Cunt!” at one of them. She isn’t even the sexually experienced hottie she presents herself to be.

There are also instances of ugliness or misery that…could be seen…as masking beauty or happiness, or at least they are presented in the film as such or as possibly so. Col. Fitts’ homophobia is an ugliness that masks what is finally revealed at the end of the film: his suppressed homosexual feelings that he hides through reaction formation. If he’d stop hating himself for those feelings and be honest about hem, he might see a beauty in himself and find true happiness.

Ricky has a reputation for being mentally ill, since his father, the colonel, has had him put in psychiatric hospitals, and also because Ricky has an odd habit of filming things he thinks are beautiful, but which most people would never deem as such–a dead bird, a plastic bag drifting in the wind (Ball’s apparent inspiration to write American Beauty), and a homeless woman frozen to death. Actually, to get to know him, he’s one of the most laid-back guys ever.

So there’s a recurring theme of people or things not being what they seem. In fact, as time went on, people came to realize that this movie isn’t what it seemed: not so deep, not even really finding beauty in the unexpected.

As I’ve been trying to argue here, the acts of rebellion–against bosses, against a domineering wife, against appropriate expressions of sexuality (either those genuinely appropriate or merely deemed so)–aren’t the edifying ones they’re presented as. Finally, the sentimentalized ending, portraying a redeemed, angelic Lester looking over his neighbourhood from heaven, right after his getting a bullet in his head and all the other awful things I’ll discuss below, seems terribly inappropriate.

And yet these inappropriate and trivial themes make sense in a film that, intentionally or not, allegorizes liberal self-absorption as paving the way for fascist violence. Since we’ve seen these things happen in real life in the decades since the release of American Beauty, perhaps these trivialities aren’t so inappropriate after all.

When Lester first sees Angela in that cheerleader dance–what, as I said above, was too far away to be seen in any significant detail, and thus was just any teen girl as a variation on Jane–he’s seeing, as a displacement of Jane and therefore of his own flesh and blood, a metaphorical mirror of himself, a Lacanian ideal-I. His drive later on to exercise, lift weights, and smoke Ricky’s pot (to be cool), to be desirable to Angela, is part of his drive to live up to the ideal-I, for desire is the desire of the Other, for recognition by the Other, to be desired by the Other.

Just as Angela is a mirror reflection of Lester’s narcissistic ideals, so is Ricky, Lester’s “hero” for quitting his catering job so insouciantly so he and Lester can smoke pot outside the building where a party is being held for Carolyn and other real estate agents like “King” Buddy Kane (played by Peter Gallagher and who incidentally is her mirror reflection of her narcissistic ideals, her ideal-I). It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that Lester, in imitation of his teen hero, should quit his job so insouciantly, too.

The point is that with Angela and Ricky as Lester’s two teen ideals, the metaphorical mirrors in whom he sees himself whenever he’s with either of them, he is, at heart, an overgrown teenager whose interactions with those two have reawakened his repressed immaturity. That’s what he means at the beginning of the movie when he says he’s “lost something,” but “it’s never too late to get it back.”

This immaturity of his shows itself not just in his predation on Angela, but also in his masturbating and fantasizing about her, his pot-smoking, his quitting of his media job to replace it with the low-paying, low-responsibility fry cook job, and in his impulsive buying of the 1970 Pontiac Firebird. And just as he’s planning on cheating on his wife with his feminine ideal-I, so is his wife going to cheat on him with her masculine ideal-I, the “King” of real estate.

To shift away from Lacanian to Jungian psychology, in Lester’s designs on Angela, he is symbolically connecting with his anima; in Carolyn’s desire to be with Buddy “the King,” she is connecting with her animus. Now, while normally such a connection, symbolic or not, with a repressed side of one’s psyche is a positive development in one’s mental health, Mr. and Mrs. Burnham’s narcissistic, self-absorbed motives vitiate the hopes of such improvements.

Lester sees himself in Angela and Ricky, and likes what he sees. Col. Fitts also sees himself (as we learn by the end of the film) in the two Jims at his front door when they introduce themselves to him and welcome him to the neighbourhood…but he does not like what he sees. He’s disgusted to realize that by ‘partners,’ the Jims do not mean ‘business partners,’ but partners in the bedroom. Lester’s lust and teen hero worship reflect his narcissism and immaturity; the colonel’s homophobia reflects his self-hate and shame.

The Jims’ welcome gift to the Fittses includes flowers, what are a motivic link to the rosa American beauty and the chopped-down sycamore tree. They’re an expression of love to be rejected.

Angela is Lester’s Jungian anima, Buddy is Carolyn’s Jungian animus. The Jims, and by extension what the colonel sees, however incorrectly, in Lester and in his son are his Jungian Shadow, the ego-dystonic part of himself (his suppressed homosexuality) that he’ll never accept…even up to when he kiss’d Lester ere he kill’d him.

Now, Ricky is Lester’s Shadow, but a Shadow the man eagerly integrates. One thing to remember in all of this is how Ricky goes from doing unwanted filming of Jane, initially upsetting her, to being her boyfriend. Ricky’s being Lester’s Shadow is thus all the more insightful…and disturbing…given what I said above about Lester’s desiring Angela as a displacement of his repressed incestuous feelings for his daughter.

In stark contrast to Lester’s nagging, domineering wife is the colonel’s timid, almost catatonic wife, Barbara (Janney). A housewife whose spotless house seems unbearably filthy and messy to her neurotic eyes, she seems to have mental problems rooted in, apart from the miseries of housekeeping and a borderline fascist husband, a near-nonexistent sex life. One imagines his copulating with her to conceive Ricky to have been nothing other than painful.

Ricky goes home one night to see his mom and dad in the living room watching TV. We should not be surprised to see her watching This is the Army, a movie only her husband would be interested in watching. Seeing military men on the screen, the colonel is looking in a metaphorical mirror, seeing his ideal-I as a macho he-man rather than the ‘Jim’ that he secretly is.

It’s significant that we see a shot of Ronald Reagan back in his acting days. As we know, it was Reagan who, with Thatcher in the 1980s, helped bring today’s neoliberalism into full force, with all that nonsense about ‘small government’ (translation: bust unions and cut taxes for the rich, but build up a large deficit, in no small part due to military spending) and the “free market.”

This shift to the right in the decades since then–with increased income inequality, the killing of welfare, the allowing of mergers and acquisitions in the American media so that now six corporations control 90% of it and therefore determine most of Americans’ access to information, and the economic instability since the Great Recession (to say nothing of the endless wars since 9/11)–has helped create the conditions that have resulted in the fascist leanings of the Trump administration, the use of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine to provoke a needless, avoidable war with Russia, and the Gaza genocide. Col. Fitts’s enjoyment of an army film with Reagan in it is, thus, most apt.

To get at the colonel’s own fascist leanings, something that can be found in a lot of people in the armies of many countries, we need only see the scene in the film when Ricky has taken Jane into his house and shown her his dad’s plate, on the back of which is a Nazi swastika in the centre. The colonel would easily see the putting of pink triangles on gay men as a good thing.

To return to Lester and Ricky smoking pot outside the building where the real estate party is happening, it’s interesting how Lester picks, of all subjects to be talking about with Ricky, the scene in Re-Animator when Dr. Carl Hill (played by David Gale), a decapitated, reanimated corpse, performs forced cunnilingus on Megan Halsey (played by Barbara Crampton)…or as Lester so crudely puts it, “the head goes down on that babe”. When we consider the age difference between the lecherous old doctor and pretty young Megan, it’s easy to see how Lester would identify with the doctor. Being “dead already,” Lester is something of a reanimated corpse himself.

When Lester later wants to buy more pot from Ricky, he’ll use “Re-Animator” as a code word for the pot so the colonel, in earshot, won’t know what the movie is meant to represent. Still, “Re-Animator” is an apt way to describe a substance Lester is using to bring himself back to life with, to bring back his lost youth and coolness.

During this scene, when the colonel has been washing his car by the road in front of his house, and he has seen Lester jogging with the Jims, he suspects that Lester is of similar sexual inclinations with them, and he is therefore a little uncomfortable with Lester going up to Ricky’s room to get “Re-Animator.” The colonel is seeing his own secret sexuality in everyone except himself.

Before that scene, the night when Lester and Carolyn have come home from the real estate party (and he’s still enjoying his buzz), Jane and Angela are there, the latter enjoying the narcissistic supply she’s getting from his sexual interest in her and wanting to encourage it. This is one of those moments when women have legitimate suspicions about the motives of a male writer (Ball) characterizing a pretty teenage girl returning the sexual curiosity of a man old enough to be her father, one she hardly knows, one with few charms of his own for her to be interested in.

Such a mutual sexual interest is utterly implausible. It’s a mere male sex fantasy, and a creepy one, at that.

As inappropriate as such a movie premise is, though, I find it fitting that Lester’s lustful motivation to work out over the rest of the year and to smoke pot is entangled with the colonel’s growing suspicions that his son is having a homosexual relationship with Lester, however incorrect they may be, leading ultimately to the colonel killing Lester. I see an allegory here of liberal self-absorption and pleasure-seeking leading to fascist violence, which wouldn’t have happened if that liberal energy had instead been used to fight for social justice.

We should consider, in this connection, the implications of Lester driving around in his car while smoking a joint and singing along with “American Woman.” From the lines he’s quoting in the scene, one would think he’d be reconsidering his creepy attraction to one underage American female in particular, but of course, he isn’t.

Other lines from the song that are not heard in this scene, but ones far more pertinent to the meaning of the song lyric, involve not needing the “war machines” or “ghetto scenes” of the US. The writer of the lyric and singer of the Guess Who, Burton Cummings, has denied that the song is political; but knowing the words quoted above, I’d say he’s just sheepishly trying to avoid offending his potential American audience and thus lower sales of the music.

In any case, it’s significant that Lester neither quotes the unmistakably political passage nor takes to heart the other parts of the song, those about the dangerously seductive allure of the US and what it stands for–politically, economically, and culturally. Such obliviousness, while singing along stoned, is key to understanding not just what’s wrong with the America that the film is satirizing, but also what’s wrong with the film itself.

In this scene, Lester personifies the liberal who indulges in pleasure (for his id) while paying lip service to an acknowledgement of the issues of injustice in the world (for his superego), by singing along to the song while stoned.

Later on, after Carolyn has dealt with her own sexual frustration by sleeping with Buddy in a hotel, he tells her about another way she can release her stress: by going to a firing range downtown and shooting a gun. Nothing, apart from sex, will make her feel more powerful, he promises her.

Later on, she’ll go there and fire a gun, finding it to be just as fulfilling as Buddy promised it would be. The gun is a phallic symbol, the firing of it obviously symbolic of orgasm. She feels so powerful shooting it, as opposed to the powerlessness of being in an unhappy, loveless marriage to an immature, irresponsible husband who is now forcing her to be the main breadwinner of the family. In her toxic positivity, she’d have no one rain on her parade, but he does so all the time.

This phallic symbolism is in turn symbolic of giving her a kind of power traditionally given only to men–hence, her fulfillment in firing the gun. If this interpretation seems offensively phallocentric to you, Dear Reader, then consider this aspect of the movie to be yet another of its many faults, as with the misogyny of Carolyn’s ‘bitchiness’ and the sympathetic portrayal of a lecherous ephebophiliac.

Yet another fault of American Beauty is the scene when Ricky, walking home with Jane, tells her about his having filmed a homeless woman who froze to death. Jane rightly notes how incomprehensible it’d be to film such an awful thing, but Ricky thinks “it was amazing.”

Ricky claims that the “amazing” thing about seeing the homeless woman’s dead, suffering face, its “beauty” is that “God is looking right at you. And if you’re careful, you can look right back.” Perhaps Ricky really is a psycho after all. Or maybe this is just the privileged bourgeois liberal mindset that doesn’t have to worry about freezing to death from having no home. Such people can afford to see “beauty” in the suffering of the poor.

Later, after taking her home and showing her his dad’s Nazi plate–again, with an attitude of mere curiosity, not moral repugnance–he shows her “the most beautiful thing [he’s] ever filmed”…that stupid image of the white plastic bag floating about in the wind, this insignificant image that Ball thought was so profound.

Ricky imagines that this meaningless bag, drifting in the air, is a sign that there’s “this entire life behind things…an incredibly benevolent force…” telling us there’s “no reason to be afraid. Ever.” Well, when you live in an upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhood, far away and safe from the horrors of Third World poverty, Zionist oppression, and other forms of the kind of imperialist violence that would soon lead to 9/11, you might believe in such a sentimentalized kind of divinity…even if your dad beats you from time to time.

It’s easy to see “so much beauty in the world…[that you] can’t take it…” if you don’t ever have to worry about freezing to death when homeless. Recall that even when his dad disowns him and kicks him out of the house for supposedly being gay, Ricky has no fears of homelessness; he’s even confident enough to take Jane with him, because he can simply sell dope to make ends meet.

This sentimentalized “God” that Ricky talks about is a variation on Carolyn’s toxic positivity, which is also represented in her cornball choices for music to listen to at dinner, much to the annoyance of Lester and Jane. Carolyn will play this phony upbeat music while complaining and bullying the two of them…hence, toxic positivity, as when Ricky sees “beauty” in a homeless corpse or a man with a bullet in his head.

In her bedroom, and after a family fight, Jane looks out her window and sees Ricky filming her again. Instead of feeling uncomfortable about it, she removes her shirt and bra for him. Since he is, as I mentioned above, Lester’s Shadow, and she is as underage as Angela, we can see how indirectly creepy her indulgence of Lester’s incestuous lust is–seen through Ricky’s camera.

And what happens immediately after? Ricky’s father barges into his bedroom and hits him, furious that Ricky sneaked into the room with the Nazi plate. Once again, we have a scene that allegorically juxtaposes overindulgence in physical pleasure with a fascist kind of repression. Though the filmmakers probably never intended this, we see in this scene how indulgent liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is often quite close–next door, even–to fascism.

After Lester, at his fast-food job by the drive-thru window, has caught Carolyn with Buddy in her Mercedes together and has put two and two together about them, she has to deal with her now-disintegrating marriage. Driving home on that rainy night, at the climax of the film, she is listening to a motivational tape telling her she’s “only a victim if [she chooses] to be a victim.” She also has her pistol for the firing range, a Glock 19, in one hand. Toxic positivity, in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, the colonel has become convinced that Ricky is having a sexual relationship with Lester, having seen the two together in the latter’s garage, the two of them positioned in a way that seems, from the colonel’s incomplete perspective, that Ricky is performing fellatio on Lester (actually, Ricky is bent over rolling a joint by Lester’s legs, while Lester is leaning back in a bowl chair).

This is the night that Lester is to be killed. Who will do it? Ricky, as suggested at the film’s beginning? Carolyn, with her Glock? Or the homophobic colonel? The answer is far from surprising; it’s disappointingly predictable…another plot weakness.

Jane and Angela are in the Burnhams’ house, arguing over whether or not Angela should let Lester have her. Jane not only objects to Angela screwing her dad (an indirect, displaced screwing of Jane, as I’ve described above), but also her talking about Jane’s presumably by-now-sexual relationship with Ricky (Lester’s Shadow, once again implying an indirect sexual relationship between father and daughter). It’s as though Jane can intuit her father’s unconscious desires for her, and also senses that his otherwise surface emotional distance from her is an unconscious reaction formation against those desires.

What’s striking here is how there are several sexual relationships going on, or appearing to be going on, or about to be going on, with varying levels of approval or disapproval. Ricky’s seeming gay relationship with Lester is looked on with horror by the colonel; Carolyn’s adultery with Buddy is accepted by Lester, since his relationship with her is “just for show”; Jane’s relationship with Ricky is regarded bawdily by Angela, who also rejects him as unfit for her, him being such a “psycho” and a “freak”; and Lester’s would-be sexual liaison-to-be with Angela is treated semi-sympathetically in the film, when this is the one that should be condemned the most, by far.

We’re about to see two families fragment into pieces over sexual relationships, real or imagined, actual or potential. Both mothers are going to end up alone: Barbara will lose Ricky from having been disowned by the colonel, who surely will be charged with Lester’s murder soon after this night ends, and therefore she’ll lose him, too; Carolyn will lose her husband and Jane, who’s going to run away with Ricky, since I doubt she’ll grieve much over her pig of a father, and Ricky probably won’t stick around long enough to learn that his dad is Lester’s killer. Carolyn can console herself with Buddy…to an extent.

And Lester, the selfish root cause of so much of this mayhem, gets to look down as an angel from heaven on the neighbourhood, full of “gratitude for every single moment of [his] stupid little life.” Toxic positivity, once again.

When Lester makes his move on Angela–who feels hurt and vulnerable after Ricky has called her “ordinary”–he’s taking advantage of her vulnerability…well, to take advantage of her. He’s being the consummate creep, a total sexual predator on a minor, and what does it take to get him to snap out of it and behave like a decent human being?

Just as he’s getting her out of her clothes, she tells him this is her first time to have sex.

She is no longer the sex goddess he’s imagined her to be. She’s just a child…like his daughter.

He now realizes, on at least some level, that he has repressed his incestuous feelings for Jane, and his repression has returned in the unrecognizable, displaced form of Angela. His guilt and shame have finally surfaced, and he cannot go through with having sex with her.

Does this sudden repentance redeem him, though? Of course not! He should have expelled from his mind the thought of having Angela from the very beginning, no less so than that of having his daughter. We all have dark desires in our private thoughts, even the best of us do; but the better among us will never act on those desires, not even entertain the idea of acting on them. That’s the difference between the Lesters and the decent people of the world.

What’s worse is that we now know that Spacey in real life acted on his dark desires, for example, getting drunk at a party back in 1986, and aggressively coming on to Anthony Rapp, then 14 when Spacey was 27. Since then, he’d been recognized as one of the most celebrated actors of recent times, just as Lester is portrayed sympathetically in the film, rather than condemned. Only since the #MeToo movement has Spacey been forced to take responsibility for his many gropings and sexual advances, just as American Beauty has been reassessed, its critical reputation having sunk. It’s sad when an actor of Spacey’s obvious, enormous talent is discovered to be someone to be looked down on rather than up to.

What should be considered a real low point in the film is how only at the end does Lester realize what he was doing was wrong, and instead of feeling and demonstrating a due amount of shame and remorse, he acts as though he’s on the cusp of nirvana, or to use a Catholic metaphor, he’s received sanctifying grace! Instead of feeing a great need to atone and earn forgiveness, he’s grateful for his “stupid little life.” That bullet in his brain is hardly a punishment, since as Ricky observes in amazement and near-religious awe, Lester’s facial expression shows bliss and peace of mind.

Just before the colonel, who feels shame for sexual feelings he needn’t blush at, pulls the trigger to kill Lester, the man who should be feeling shame for his inappropriate lust is looking lovingly at an old photo of himself, Carolyn, and Jane as a little girl. He feels great, as he’s told Angela, when he should be weeping at that photo and whispering “Sorry” to Jane, since his lust for Angela was redirected from his unconscious incestuous feelings for Jane.

Two families have been torn apart by lust and violence, and the movie has a liberal ‘feel good’ ending. This is what I mean by toxic positivity: just trivialize human suffering and imagine that some kind, gentle, and genial God is watching over everybody and judging nobody, not even judging those who surely deserve it.

Liberal self-absorption and overindulgence in pleasure, rather than rising up against our exploitative economic system, is what ultimately leads to fascism–just see what’s happened between the 2000s and 2025. The Burnhams and Fittses living next door to each other is apt. That American Beauty was celebrated before 9/11, then negatively reassessed after 9/11 and the Great Recession, is also apt, since the traumas caused by those two cataclysmic events have woken us out of our liberal torpor.

In a way, though, American Beauty is a most fitting satire of our contemporary lives, since the film embodies so many vices that ought to be satirized. We just have to refrain from sympathizing with Lester, for if we do sympathize with him, then the satire’s on us.

Analysis of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a 1958 novella by Truman Capote. It was adapted into a film by Blake Edwards in 1961, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, with Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam, Buddy Ebsen, and Mickey Rooney. The film differs from the novella in many significant ways, as will be discussed below.

The novella is so short, not even a hundred pages, to go by the edition I have, that ‘novella’ seems to describe a story too long for BAT, and ‘short story’ is too short for it. Since, as is the case with my copy, the story is often published with three short stories–“House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory“–I’ll make a number of references to these stories whenever they share comparable or contrasting themes with BAT.

The novella is as short as it is, but the film is almost two hours long, suggesting a much longer story. Neal’s character, Mrs. Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson, is nowhere to be found in Capote’s story.

The unnamed narrator of the novella is named Paul Varjak (Peppard) in the film. He and Holly Golightly (Hepburn) develop a love relationship that is absent in Capote’s story (in fact, true to the writer’s own sexuality, the unnamed narrator–it is implied–is gay, therefore making his story at least somewhat autobiographical, since the narrator is as much a writer as Capote was).

The regrettably racist caricature of a Japanese, in the klutzy Mr. Yunioshi–played by Rooney in yellowface–isn’t in Capote’s story, either, though Yunioshi is referred to with a racial slur–a “Jap”–by Joe Bell, a bartender near the beginning of the story.

The film ends with a typical Hollywood rom-com cliché, with Varjak getting the girl and kissing her in the rain; while in Capote’s story, there is a far more ambiguous and uncertain ending, with Holly leaving the narrator and going off, out of New York City and into the world.

As for the casting of Holly for the film adaptation, Capote was hoping for Marilyn Monroe to play the part, and he was angry that the part ended up going to Hepburn (though he came to like her performance, all the same). Given that Holly is a romantic dreamer of a girl, chasing wealthy men, I find Capote’s preference of Monroe to play her strange and ironic, when Monroe, having married Arthur Miller at one point, demonstrated left-wing sympathies that may have contributed to her having been murdered, as opposed to the official suicide story of her death. The only thing Monroe had in common with Holly was the blonde hair (well, bleach-blonde, in Monroe’s case), and so brunette Hepburn had blonde streaks added to her hair.

The opening scene in the novella is nowhere to be found in the film, which during the credits shows Holly window-shopping outside a Tiffany’s store. We come to understand that Holly loves being in Tiffany’s because the luxury jewelry store is the only place where she can feel a sense of safety, peace, and calm in her turbulent world. She imagines that nothing bad can ever happen there.

She denies that she likes Tiffany’s for the jewelry (Capote, page 35). While it may not literally be the jewelry that she likes so much about the store, surely it’s the sense of a luxurious life that Tiffany’s represents that gives her that safe, serene feeling.

Holly is a socialite who, as a kind of “American geisha,” dates wealthy men and accepts cash gifts from them; she also aspires to marry such a man. If it isn’t about the wealth that makes Tiffany’s so appealing to her, then why is it that store, of all stores, that gives her that feeling of peace and security?

Material abundance, of the sort that a luxury jewelry store can easily represent, can give one a great and obvious sense of security, of safety and therefore of calm, peace, and serenity, that nothing bad can happen. Thus, Tiffany’s is a capitalist paradise. After all, money isn’t everything, but having one’s basic material needs taken care of certainly gives a sense of peace of mind, so material abundance ensures that peace of mind all the more.

Why does Holly want to “wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s” (page 35)? Why breakfast at Tiffany’s, which at the time sold only jewelry, and not food (the Blue Box Café first opened in 2017)? Consider the origin of the word ‘breakfast’–a breaking of a fast. So it’s the ending of a period of going without food.

The implication here, symbolically understood, is that one is going from rags to riches, from fasting or starving to abundance, all in one fell swoop. Such has always been Holly’s ambition: to go from her humble beginnings as Lulamae Barnes, married in her teens to a veterinarian named Doc Golightly (Ebsen) in Texas, to her now glamorous life in New York City, renamed Holly Golightly and chasing rich men to subsidize her now high-maintenance lifestyle, and thence, she hopes, to marriage and solid security with such a rich man, who would be Tiffany’s personified.

What we have here is a traditional woman’s version of the American Dream: social mobility through marrying up. The story takes place before the Sexual Revolution, and so women were still chained to the fetters of traditional sex roles, meaning they had to get their access to wealth through successful men…if they were young, pretty, and desirable enough…which Holly assuredly is, at the age of about eighteen or nineteen.

Beyond this dream of chasing wealth, though, is the pursuit of what Lacan would have called an ultimately unfulfillable desire. Tiffany’s symbolizes a nirvana one can never attain, though Holly will never stop trying, romantic dreamer that she is. She can never settle for an ordinary life, and that’s why she leaves New York City and the unnamed narrator for the unknown at the end of Capote’s novella. She may not have married José Ybarra-Jaeger (José da Silva Pereira in the film, played by José Luis de Vilallonga), the rich Brazilian diplomat, but she does go to Brazil in search of a similar dream.

This endless seeking out of more and more to satisfy a desire that can never be satisfied, is not only the essence of what drives Holly to do what she does (symbolically, what Lacan would have called jouissance), but also her unfulfillable desire can be paralleled to capitalism’s endless pursuit of profit (i.e., the Marxist notion of surplus value and Lacan’s plus-de-jouir, or “surplus enjoyment”). Hence, Tiffany’s can be seen as a capitalist paradise.

It is common for people to dream about striking it rich rather than doing the hard work of fighting for workers’ rights and reducing income inequality. Hence, even in today’s world of the obscenely wealthy few vs the impoverished many, we still have all this simping for billionaires going on. Holly can be seen to represent such people, on at least some level.

We can contrast her lifestyle among the affluent in New York City with the uniformly poor in “House of Flowers,” set in Third World Haiti, “A Diamond Guitar,” set in the austerity of an American prison, and “A Christmas Memory,” about a family so poor that the narrator, when a boy and close to his older female cousin, had to save up every penny they could get over the year to pay for the ingredients they needed to make Christmas fruitcakes (page 144). While Holly dreams of the security that comes from wealth, so many others just struggle to survive.

Capote’s novella begins with bar owner Joe Bell telling the narrator about photos of a black man holding a wooden sculpture of a woman’s head, and the woman looks exactly like Holly. Yunioshi is the one who found the wooden head while traveling in Africa, and he informed Bell of it.

It seems that Holly’s been to Africa some time since the end of the narrator’s story about her. Bell imagines she’s “got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.” (page 8) In this incident, we see again the contrast between being a girl from the First World Who aspires to wealth, and people in poverty with much more humble dreams, as those in Capote’s aforementioned three stories.

The story about her in Africa causes the narrator to recall his story about her from years before, back in the 1940s. Though she had dreams of wealth, she lived in a modest brownstone apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Yunioshi, in an apartment on the top floor, complains about Holly ringing his bell and waking him up to open the door for her.

This scene corresponds with the beginning of the film after the opening credits, though as I said above, the novella doesn’t portray Yunioshi as a spastic racist Asian stereotype, bumping into things, and having buck teeth sticking out of his face. Blake Edwards films are full of slapstick, but it’s sad that he stooped to this low for cheap laughs. In all fairness to Rooney, though, when he realized how offensive his performance was, he expressed the deepest remorse and publicly apologized to Asian communities. Edwards was similarly contrite.

Anyway, the narrator has seen her for the first time during this altercation with Yunioshi (page 11). He describes her as having “an almost breakfast-cereal air of health” (page 12). In this context, we note that a man who’s just “pick[ed] up the check” for her, one of those male pursuers of hers who pay for things for her in the hopes of getting…something…back from her. This picking up the check is the so-to-speak breakfast–the end of her poverty–that she hopes will one day lead to Tiffany’s.

From then on, she isn’t ringing Yunioshi’s bell, but the narrator’s, and they haven’t met yet (page 13). He learns more about her nonetheless, such as her cat (which is never named) and her playing the guitar, something she sometimes does sitting out on the fire escape as her hair dries (page 15). We’re reminded of the scene in the film when Hepburn is there, strumming and singing “Moon River,” with music by Henry Mancini.

When the narrator finally does meet her, it’s out by his window. Coming into his room, she explains that she’s trying to get away from another suitor. She notes the narrator’s resemblance to her brother, Fred, and so, feeling a brother transference, she wants to call him Fred. Note how she doesn’t go by her real name (Lulamae), she doesn’t call the narrator by his real name (which we never learn in the novella, and as I mentioned above, is given as Paul Varjak in the film), and the cat is never given a name (except “Cat” in the film).

At the end of the film, Holly contemplates their no-name status when justifying to Varjak why nobody belongs to anybody, and saying that she doesn’t know who she is. Namelessness, thus, represents social alienation, between people and in one’s own species-essence.

Linked with this alienation from within and without is how OJ Berman (Balsam) characterizes Holly: “She is a phony,” and “She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony.” (page 27) Berman is a Hollywood talent agent who has groomed Holly in the hopes of making her into a movie star. She believes all the nonsense she says about herself, and his grooming of her, which has included French lessons to help her get rid of her original hillbilly accent from Texas, has been part of the process of creating her phony personality as a café society girl. (page 29)

To get back to her meeting of the narrator, he tells her he’s a writer. He also tells her that it is Thursday, which reminds her that she has to go to Sing Sing and meet a mafia man incarcerated there named Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. She’ll get the “weather report” from him: a coded message to transmit information about such criminal activities as the narcotics smuggling that she’ll get entangled in and arrested for towards the end of the story. She’ll give that “weather report” to Sally’s lawyer, Oliver O’Shaughnessy, every week.

As I’ve pointed out in many other posts, I regard mafia men in movies and fiction as representative of capitalists in general, since as a Marxist I regard capitalism’s accumulation of surplus value to be a theft of the value that workers put into the production of commodities; therefore, capitalism in general is criminal activity, whether legalized or not.

Holly’s regular involvement with Sally, therefore, is part of her own simping for the rich, which in turn is part of her dream of finding that peace and security that comes from wealth, as represented by Tiffany’s. The chaotic and troubling world from which she wishes to escape into a capitalist paradise is the capitalist hell of poverty, which she naturally fears. One is reminded of what Belle says to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol as an explanation for his own pursuit of wealth: she says to him, “You fear the world so much” (Dickens, page 50).

To get back to OJ Berman and whatnot, he first appears at one of Holly’s many parties, in which she hobnobs with rich and socially important people like him. In the film, you can spot a couple of Asians in the background, extras with no dialogue: they seem to be there as if to say, ‘Look, the filmmakers are not saying that all Asians are like Yunioshi.’ The inclusion of these two non-caricatured Asians hardly compensates for Rooney’s performance, though.

One presumably wealthy man that Holly shows interest in is Rusty Trawler. He’s thrice divorced, but he’ll end up marrying someone else (page 66). Rusty also seems to be a Nazi sympathizer, for according to a set of clippings from gossip columns about Holly and Rusty, “he attended rallies in Yorkville“, he’d “sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn’t” (recall that the narrator’s reminiscences about her take place during WWII, when her brother Fred is serving in the army), and Winchell always referred to [Rusty] as a Nazi (page 33).

Yes, Holly, in her pursuit of that capitalist paradise of peace, symbolized by Tiffany’s, is even willing to marry a fascist if he has money. Supporters of capitalism are willing to lean that far right, if need be.

Her wish to marry money runs deeper than mere gold-digging, though. The transactional relationship between men and women as a result of sex roles (he gives her money in exchange for at least the hope of sex) is, of course, profoundly alienating, exacerbated by modern capitalism. She opts for this transactional relationship with men (while also having something of a bisexual attraction to women, using the word “dyke” in a non-derogatory sense, and hinting at this sexuality in the stripper scene in the film) because, as I mentioned above, deep down, she cannot relate to people in a deep, meaningful way.

Her platonic friendship with the narrator, therefore, is an ideal escape from the usual ‘I give you something, so you give me something back’ trap between men and women, because recall, it is strongly implied, if you’re paying attention as you read, that the narrator is gay. Holly observes that if a man likes neither baseball nor horses, “he don’t like girls.” (page 34) The narrator likes neither; he’s even tried riding a horse with her in the park (pages 77-78), and he loses control of his mare and falls off. Also, when saying she’ll never rat out Sally Tomato in exchange for the cops dropping the charges against her in her connection with him, she addresses the narrator as “Maude,” slang at the time for a gay man or a male prostitute (page 91).

He has no sexual interest in her, a girl whom, recall, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play, therefore Holly’s something of a sex goddess. He is, nonetheless, fascinated with her in the way a gay man might be with a beautiful woman or a talented female singer like Judy Garland, that is, adoring her for aesthetic reasons rather than sexual ones.

To get back to Rusty, when the narrator has learned that he’s married for the fifth time, according to a newspaper (page 66), he assumes that Holly is the bride, and he’s most unhappy to have learned of this. Later, he realizes that it isn’t Holly whom Rusty has married, but Mag Wildwood, a fellow socialite, friend and sometimes roommate of Holly’s, and a model with a stutter (page 67). He goes “limp with relief” to have learned of this.

On a Monday in October 1943, he is with Holly in Joe Bell’s bar drinking Manhattans (pages 47-48). Then, after lunch in a cafeteria in the park, they avoid the zoo, since Holly can’t stand to see anything in a cage; oddly, for Christmas she’ll buy him a beautiful bird cage and make him promise never to put a living thing in it. (page 53) She sees herself as a free bird.

On that Monday in October, they pass a Woolworth’s, and she wants him to go in with her and steal something (page 49). He goes in reluctantly, and she eyes some Halloween masks. The two of them put on masks and walk out of the store wearing them. After they’ve run off for a few blocks (they’ll wear the masks all the way home), she tells him how she used to steal things when she had to or wanted to, and she still does it every now and then. The scene is replicated in the movie.

That a young woman who attracts wealthy men in the hopes of one day marrying one, and who feels peace of mind only in a luxury jewelry store, would engage in shoplifting from time to time makes perfect sense to me. She embodies the self-centered materialism of capitalism; capitalists accumulate their wealth by stealing the fruits of workers’ labour.

In the film, the shoplifting scene comes right after a scene with the two in Tiffany’s, then in the public library. Note the contrast between the private property of the jewelry store and the 5 and 10 store where they steal the masks. Sandwiched in between in a place for the public, one she significantly doesn’t know about. As a lover of all things connected with capitalism, Holly is fully aware of those places that are private property, but she’s a bit of a fish out of water in public places.

Eventually, that dull, unromantic life she’s tried to run away from tries to find her and get her back. Such a life is personified in Doc Golightly (Ebsen), who’s been snooping around near the brownstone building and getting the narrator’s attention (pages 57-58). This is after the narrator has had a falling-out with her, over a slur he’s made about her way of getting money from men (page 56).

Doc is a personification of the cage she never wants to be trapped in. His appearance and the falling-out between her and the narrator sandwich her bird cage gift that he puts in front of her door: then she rejects it as much as he has, having put it “on a sidewalk ashcan waiting for the garbage collector.” (page 56), then it’s taken back by him into his room. She’ll reject Doc the cage again when he tries to take her back with him to Texas.

Oddly, her revulsion against animals in cages is disregarded by the moviemakers when we see a shot most deliberately taken of a bird in a cage in Holly’s apartment, early on in the film, during that party scene. We see Balsam as Berman looking at the bird. Is Holly supposed to be enigmatically contradicting herself here? Or is it a wish-fulfillment on the filmmakers’ part to put Holly in a cage, as we see when she decides to stay with Varjak at the end of the movie?

When the narrator first meets Doc, he imagines that the man, being so much older than Holly, is her father rather than her husband (page 59). Doc married her when she was just going on fourteen, making her the stepmother of kids he’s had from a previous marriage, kids older than she was! (page 60) Doc claims she had no reason to be unhappily married to him, as his daughters did all the housework and she didn’t have to lift a finger (pages 60-61).

As a horse doctor, he presumably has been able to provide a decent life for her. But the point is that, beyond how cringe we today would find such a marriage to a girl so young, Holly is a romantic who wants to rise up above the mediocre and the ordinary, to the heights that capitalism promises (but rarely delivers) and to those pleasures that jouissance wants (and never fully delivers). Hence, she left him, and despite his pleas for her to come back, she never will.

Still, when Madame Sapphia Spanella, another tenant in the brownstone, sees Holly and Doc embracing, she assumes he is another of Holly’s johns and is morally appalled. Holly thought she’d see her brother Fred before being surprised by Doc (page 64). Later, after Rusty’s married Mag, Holly learns of Fred’s having been killed in action, and she smashes everything in her apartment in a rage of grief. Spanella is as horrified now to know of this tantrum as she was scandalized before with her and Doc. As it turns out, not everyone in the past of otherwise self-centred Holly is contemptuously tossed aside. Elsewhere, now that Rusty is unavailable, she now has a new rich man: the Brazilian diplomat, José.

After Fred’s death and the arrival of José into her life, Holly is changed in many ways. She’s nowhere near as sociable as she once was, José has replaced Mag as her roommate, she generally never mentions Fred anymore, and she no longer calls the narrator “Fred” (page 71). The only times she ever leaves her apartment are on Thursdays to see Sally in Sing Sing.

Because she imagines she’ll soon marry José, she’s developed a “keen sudden un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking,” thus making her buy a number of things that it doesn’t seem quite like her to buy. She’s bought two Gothic ‘easy’ chairs from the William Randolph Hearst estate, and given his tendency to have flirted with fascism around this time, though, perhaps this purchase in particular isn’t all that un-Holly-like (page 71). She’s also trying to learn Portuguese so she’ll be comfortable living in Rio when her husband-to-be takes her there (page 72).

Now, since Holly is taken to having rich men pay her way, whether they be husbands or not, it is apposite to point out that in the movie, Varjak also has someone paying his way. This is the wealthy Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson (Neal), his “decorator.” The inclusion of this character has a way of equalizing things between the sexes; it’s as if the filmmakers, in spite of preferring to put Holly in the ‘cage’ of a relationship with Varjak, don’t wish to leave the receiving of cash in exchange for sex to be stereotypically the exclusive domain of ‘gold digging women.’

After the fiasco with the horses, the narrator finds “photographs of Holly…front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror.” (page 79) She’s been arrested in a narcotics bust connected with Sally Tomato (page 80).

The narrator imagines it must be Spanella who is to blame, given how she always complains to the authorities about Holly in a way we see Yunioshi do in the film (Yunioshi is also the one in the film who gets the cops on Holly for the drugs).

Joe Bell, who also likes Holly, wants the narrator to call her rich friends to help her out (page 83). The narrator tries Rusty and Mag, who turn on Holly, not wanting their names at all to be associated with her. Calling Doc in Texas is out of the question–Holly would never want that. Then the narrator tries Berman, who says she’ll be out on bail (pages 84-85).

When the narrator goes to find her in her apartment, though, she isn’t there. He does find a man in her home–José’s cousin, who has a message from José for her (pages 85-86). He wants to break off the marriage plans, because, like Rusty and Mag, José doesn’t want his name, family, and reputation to be stained by association with a girl mixed up with drugs. The narrator finds Holly in a hospital room, where she’s been since the arrest. There he reads her José’s letter (pages 87-88).

Now, she’s heartbroken to know that José has dumped her, that he’s just another “rat like Rusty” (page 88), but she’s not going to let that stop her from going to Brazil anyway. The narrator tries in all futility to stop her from jumping bail, for she won’t “waste a perfectly fine ticket” (page 90), and she won’t testify against Sally Tomato, even though she admits that she is “rotten to the core” (page 91).

I’m not interested in the sentimentalized, rom-com Hollywood ending of the film, so I’ll stick with the novella’s ending. Holly really does leave New York and the gay narrator, and she even gets rid of the cat, putting it outside the car taking her to the airport and telling the cat to “f___ off!” when it won’t leave her. (page 95)

Some may think of Holly favourably as a feminist free spirit for leaving the narrator, as opposed to her choosing to stay in her ‘cage’ in a patriarchal relationship with straight Varjak. But when we read the ending of Capote’s version, in which she isn’t freeing herself from a relationship with a gay friend–who has no wish to dominate her as a husband might–and where she doesn’t want to take responsibility for her involvement in a mafia racket or even for her cat, we realize that the narrator is right when he says to her, “You are a bitch.” (page 95)

She tosses the cat aside because of her fear of commitment, her wish never to be chained to anyone or anything, not caring at all about who or what she’s hurting as a result of abandoning them–Doc, the cat, or her friend the narrator. She is just that self-centred, on an endless quest to satisfy her insatiable thirst for jouissance, that surplus-value plus-de-jouir that connects her desires with capitalism, hence her trip to Rio when she’s lost her José.

Still, the narrator will find the abandoned cat and take care of it (page 97). He gets a postcard from her, saying she’s been to Buenos Aires, liking it there far more than Brazil. She’s “joined at the hip with duhvine Señor. Love? Think so.” He’s married and with “7 brats,” though (page 97). In other words, she’ll use him for his money, for as long as the relationship lasts. Then, as we learned from the beginning of the novella, she’ll pursue her elusive jouissance somewhere in Africa. The narrator just hopes that Holly, like the cat that in many ways is a double of her, has found a place where she truly belongs (page 98).

As I said above, the three stories in my edition of the book that fallow BAT—“House of Flowers,” A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory”–all share certain themes with the main story, and I think they’re all worth mentioning before I end this analysis. These themes include: platonic relationships and/or friendships with implied homosexual elements, the breaking-away and ending of said friendships with the aim of attaining personal freedom, and whether or not marriage is a kind of prison.

In the first of these three stories, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ottilie is a beautiful, strong-willed prostitute, parallel to Holly as an “American geisha.” But where Holly hopes to marry a rich man and experience the capitalist paradise of peace and freedom from the “mean reds,” a paradise symbolized by Tiffany’s, Ottllie’s marriage to the aptly-named Royal Bonaparte, a marriage in the Third World, a harsh contrast to the opulence of New York City, it is a nightmare in which she is tyrannized by her new grandmother-in-law, the also aptly-named Old Bonaparte…a witch. Her new home is the cage Ottilie is trapped in, “like a house of flowers” (page 109).

In such historically impoverished countries as India and China, it was common for women to be treated like abject slaves by their mothers-in-law, since in a patrilineal society, a married woman leaves the family of her flesh and blood to live with her husband’s family, who don’t regard her as their own flesh and blood. So, the contrast between the First World and the Third World is apparent in regard to a woman’s marriage: one as, on the one hand, at least a dream of marrying up into Tiffany’s heaven, vs on the other hand, marrying into patriarchal hell.

In “A Diamond Guitar,” it’s been said that Mr. Schaeffer is parallel to Holly for being, like her, a dreamer; but I must disagree and say that he corresponds to the narrator of BAT, and that it’s Tico Feo who corresponds to Holly, and for several reasons. Tico Feo is a young man with blond hair (like Holly, young and blonde); the boy tells a lot of lies (as Holly is a “phony”), he plays the guitar, as she does, and like her, he eventually frees himself from the Alabama prison he and Schaeffer are stuck in (and just as Holly jumps bail and leaves the narrator in NYC, so does Tico Feo abandon Schaeffer in the prison).

Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship isn’t at all physical, but “they were as lovers” (page 130), just as Holly and the narrator of BAT have a platonic relationship, but he is so fascinated with her as almost to be in love with her. The narrator in BAT expresses himself artistically as a writer; Schaeffer does so by carving dolls.

In “A Christmas Memory,” there’s another platonic male-to-female relationship, but this time in the form of a boy and his much elder cousin. Both characters are unnamed, though she calls him “Buddy,” and he, the narrator, calls her simply “my friend.” This kind of naming and non-naming is similar to how the unnamed narrator of BAT is addressed as “Fred” by Holly (recall, not her real name, either), implying a transference of her brother-to-sister relationship with the real Fred that parallels the familial relationship of cousins “Buddy” and his “friend.”

So we can see a number of parallel themes and motifs in all these stories, including also Capote’s autobiographical elements in at least three of the four stories, through the implied homosexuality in the narrator of BAT, the platonic homosexuality of Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship, and how “Buddy,” the boy in “A Christmas Memory,” dramatizes much of Capote’s childhood. We see the superiority of platonic relationships over transactional, sexual ones, and we also see the yearning to escape from one’s cages–literal ones, metaphorical ones, and ones made of flowers.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, London, Penguin Essentials, 1961

Analysis of ‘Sleuth’

Sleuth is a 1972 mystery film directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, with a script by Anthony Shaffer, based on his 1970 Tony Award-winning play. The film stars Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, both of whom got Oscar nominations. Mankiewicz’s final film, Sleuth received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with an Oscar nomination for Best Director, too, as well as one for Best Original Score.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, a link to the script, and links to the full movie (in case any of them are pulled from YouTube).

Hints to what the dominant themes of the film are–theatricality, deception, mind games–are already given during the opening credits…provided one already knows better. Fictional actors’ names are listed, meant for roles that do not exist onscreen. These include ‘Alec Cawthorne’ as Inspector Doppler, who is actually played by a disguised Michael Caine; also, ‘John Matthews’ as Detective Sergeant Tarrant, ‘Eve Channing’ as Marguerite Wyke, and ‘Teddy Martin’ as Police Constable Higgs, all characters only referred to by Andrew Wyke (Olivier) and Milo Tindle (Caine), the only two people ever seen throughout the film. The reason for this deception was that the production team wanted to reveal as little as possible to the audience to maximize the element of surprise.

Another hint of the theme of deception at the end of the opening credits (as well as at the end of the film) is the framing of the visuals in a theatre stage with curtains. It’s hardly necessary to show such a framing in the cinema–as opposed to a stage production of Sleuth–unless the very idea is to stress that what we’re seeing isn’t real.

The film begins with Tindle driving into Wyke’s country manor house, a vast area of property indicating how obviously wealthy Wyke, a bestselling writer of crime fiction, is. That Wyke considers the enjoyment of his genre of writing to be “the normal recreation of noble minds” is a further association of him with the aristocracy, something against which middle-class Tindle, who “[doesn’t] know very much about noble minds,” will be sharply contrasted.

As Tindle is walking about outside trying to find Wyke, he can hear the latter reciting his prose aloud into a tape recorder. Wyke is among hedgerows designed like a labyrinth, and Tindle cannot locate the voice until Wyke moves some hedge, which has been like a wall separating the two men.

When they meet, introduce themselves, and shake hands, Wyke welcomes Tindle to “Cloak Manor,” the name of his home and yet another early indication of the film’s theme of subterfuge.

Wyke notes how “all detectives were titled,” as is the sleuth of his novels, Lord Merridew. His sleuth, far cleverer than the comparatively dimwitted and frequently baffled police detectives of his novels, represents an idealized version of his egotistical, elitist self. This is so in spite of Wyke’s claim that we are living in a “classless society,” a bizarre assertion to be made in capitalist England, when not even any of the socialist states of the twentieth century, for all of their accomplishments, ever achieved classlessness, let alone the giving-up of money or the withering-away of the state.

Snobbish Wyke would never allow his fiction to be adapted for television, which for him is “no recreation for noble minds.” Wyke leads Tindle inside, where he is now to be acquainted with Wyke’s many automata, including a sailor named Jolly Jack Tar, who laughs at Wyke’s jokes. These automata, or fake people, once again reinforce the themes of theatricality and deception.

Finally, Wyke gets to the point of why he’s invited Tindle to his home. He knows that Tindle has been having a sexual relationship with his wife, Marguerite, for some time, and so he, in all bluntness, asks about Tindle’s wish to marry her.

Normally, a man would be furious to learn that his wife has made him a cuckold, especially a man as narcissistic as Wyke obviously is. Nonetheless, he pretends not to be angry, and instead acts as though Tindle’s affair with her is an excellent opportunity for Wyke to get rid of her by having Tindle take her off his hands. Then, Wyke can be free to live with his mistress, a girl named Téa.

Wyke needs first to know of Tindle’s family background. Tindle’s answer indicates humble beginnings: his mother was a farmer’s daughter from Hereford, and his father was an Italian watchmaker who immigrated to England in the 1930s and anglicized his original name, Tindolini.

Now, just as Wyke has disingenuously claimed that ours is a “classless society,” so does he claim that, in response to learning of Tindle’s (lapsed) Catholic background, “we’re all liberals here,” and that Wyke has no prejudice against Catholics, lapsed or not. Here, “Catholic” can be seen as a metonym for ‘Italian,’ an ethnicity against which Wyke is decidedly prejudiced, as he’ll soon demonstrate.

Changing the family name from Tindolini to Tindle was meant to make the family become English, something Wyke doesn’t seem to think is possible. The fact that Tindle’s father went broke from being nothing more than a watchmaker reinforces the class divide between him and Wyke, but it must be emphasized that none of this divide makes Tindle in any way a proletarian, and it’s important to understand this fact to make sense of the class analysis of this film.

Tindle owns two hairdressing salons, one in South Kensington called Casa Tindolini, and another in Brighton. Therefore, Tindle is petite bourgeois, as contrasted with Wyke as a member of the gentry. So the nature of the class conflict as allegorized in Sleuth is not between capitalist and worker, but between big capitalist and little capitalist; and as Marx once observed, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, p. 929)

The film’s liberal bias is to have us see Tindle as the poor underdog, and therefore to have us sympathize with him. If we’re paying attention, though, by the time we get to the end of the movie, we’ll realize that Tindle is every bit as cruel in his humiliating games as Wyke is. It’s the nature of the bourgeoisie, petite or haute, to step either on those below them (Wyke), or to step on those above them in their ascendancy to the top, as Tindle is attempting to do in either cuckolding Wyke, getting money for Wyke’s jewels, or playing games of revenge on him.

Now, I mentioned earlier that Wyke pretends not to mind Tindle’s sleeping with Marguerite, but sooner or later we have to see Wyke’s narcissistic injury come out. He makes a few crude references to her copulating with Tindle, offending him and making him want to leave the house in a huff. Wyke manages to deescalate the situation by pretending to reminisce about the woman he used to love, remembering how “intolerably tiresome” she is now, and asking if Tindle can “afford to take her off [Wyke’s] hands”.

As a mere petit bourgeois, of course Tindle cannot afford the luxurious life that Marguerite has been accustomed to as Wyke’s wife. Tindle will have to help Wyke defraud the insurance company that has covered the jewelry Wyke bought for her. Wyke will recoup his losses from the insurance claim, and Tindle will get enough of a cut to subsidize her now-high-maintenance lifestyle.

Note how Marguerite’s very existence is coupled with all the expensive things to be bought to ensure that she’ll stay with Tindle and not go running back to Wyke for support. This is because she is a much an object to Wyke (and to Tindle, as Wyke imagines) as the expensive things are objects to her. In capitalism, people are as commodified as things are.

This brings us back to my point about the liberal bias of this film, which makes us see Tindle as the poor underdog, when, though nowhere near as wealthy as Wyke is, he’s as much a capitalist as Wyke is. Marguerite is Wyke’s property, and Tindle is appropriating that property for himself, as part of his ambitious upward mobility.

The actual underdogs of Sleuth are so marginalized that we never see them onscreen. They’re only referred to in Wyke’s and Tindle’s conversations: the women (Marguerite, Téa, Joyce, Wyke’s maid, his secretary) and the servants (Wyke’s gardener, etc.). They’re invisible because they hardly matter. The sexual objectifying of Wyke’s two women, in fact, is so complete that their very names sound like puns on drinks–tea, or thé in French, and margarita.

Wyke wants Tindle, disguised, to ‘break in’ and ‘steal’ the jewels, all as deception to defraud the insurance company. Though Tindle has his worries about the crime going wrong and him being charged, Wyke will reassure him that they can pull it off safely.

The two enter a room with a pool table and play a brief game of billiards as the topic of Wyke’s sexual relationship with Téa is broached. Note the sexual symbolism of the men’s handling of phallic pool cues, knocking balls into yonic holes, as Wyke insists upon his his sexual prowess…at his age, in about his mid-sixties, to go by Olivier’s age as of 1972. Such bragging is, of course, reaction formation and denial of Wyke’s actual impotence, as revealed by the end of the film, rather like how his professed liberal lack of bigotry is reaction formation and denial, as well as his supposedly not being infuriated at having been cuckolded by Tindle.

Since we’re dealing here with a young man and another old enough to be the father of the first, the two having possession, in one sense or another, of the wife of the second man, we can see in them transferences of both the Oedipus and Laius complexes. Both men, as we learn later on in the film, would be rid of the other, if not actually, then in their games’ representation of actuality, to be free to have Mama-Marguerite. Wyke may not love her anymore, but she still ‘represents’ him (i.e., she is his ‘property’), as he’ll tell Tindle with his pistol pointed at the terrified man’s clown-wig-covered head.

The reason so much of Wyke’s wealth is put into jewelry, by the advice of his accountant, is to avoid being “virtually castrated by taxation.” Having Tindle fake the grand larceny of Wyke’s wife’s jewels in order to collect the insurance money is thus one capitalist helping another to cheat the ‘socialist’ taxman in his attempt at Wyke’s “emasculation.” Wyke is thus protecting his family jewels [!].

Marguerite and the servants are all away for the weekend, during which the entire film is set, so now is the perfect opportunity for Tindle to do the fake break-in and theft. Tindle’s worries about the criminality of the act are trivialized by Wyke, who notes how “all good moneymaking schemes in England have to be [criminal] these days,” a trenchant comment on capitalism. After Wyke reassures Tindle of the safety of the scam, as well as promising him that his cut will be 70,000 pounds, in cash, tax-free, Tindle agrees to do it.

Part of the reason for the disguise, which will be a clown costume (part of Wyke’s secret plan to humiliate Tindle), is to have him wear large shoes to hide his actual footprints. Tindle follows Wyke, who leads him down–with a further demonstration of his racism by ‘slanting’ his eyes with his fingers and imitating an Asian accent–to a room holding a number of disguises, including of course the clown outfit.

As they go down there, Wyke tells Tindle of how, before television, people used to amuse themselves with “treasure hunts, charades, games of infinite variety.” Just as the modern media lies to us with its corporate agenda, so did these games deceive, as Wyke’s and Tindle’s especially will, we’ll soon see. Take whichever form it will, the capitalist class tries to deceive us, engages in make-believe, manipulates us, just as Wyke does to Tindle, then later, vice-versa.

They rummage through Wyke’s old dressing-up basket, trying out a number of disguises before deciding on the clown one. Instead of “an old pair of sneakers and a sock,” Wyke insists on the disguise having a “sense of style,” some “amateur aristocratic quirkiness,” which once again links the ruling class with the film’s theme of theatricality and deception.

All costumed up, Tindle goes outside to get a ladder to put up on a wall leading up to a second-storey window for him to break into. Since he’s about to steal Wyke’s jewels (symbolic, on one level, of emasculating him–nicking his family jewels and cuckolding him), Tindle is also, as it were, climbing the social ladder, going from middle class to upper class, as he hopes.

This going up the ladder is difficult for him, as he’s “not very good at heights,” and he hopes that Wyke will hold the ladder steady for him. This is comparable to how difficult-to-well-nigh-impossible it is to move up from class to class, in spite of such fantasies as “the American dream.” Of course, Wyke won’t help Tindle, because this fake burglary must be simulated sufficiently to approximate reality so as to satisfy the police. Wyke also won’t help Tindle because it’s only natural that the upper class won’t help the middle class rise.

As Tindle is clumsily trying to go up the ladder in those big, awkward clown shoes, Wyke is inside pretending to be a female servant hearing Tindle’s noises outside. Wyke is speaking in a falsetto woman’s voice: this is one of a number of examples of Wyke pretending to be someone else, often imitating other accents. It’s part of the film’s theme of theatricality, fakery, and pretense.

Once Tindle is inside again, he must vandalize the place in a search for jewels whose location he pretends not to know about. When he finds the safe and blows it open with explosives, he discovers a red ruby necklace. Wyke never wanted to see it around Marguerite’s neck, feeling it made her “look like a blood sacrifice.” Again, the association of jewels with balls makes his aversion to the blood red colour symbolic of castration anxiety.

Tindle, on the other hand, wishes his father could see the rubies, for the poor old man never knew what success was. Wyke, as Tindle’s father transference, thus is part of a family romance, Tindle’s wealthy dream-father, as opposed to his broke real one.

Now that the jewels are pocketed, the explosion is meant to wake Wyke up, and a struggle between the two is to ensue. Tindle has to leave a wound of some kind on Wyke to convince the police. Since it would be rather difficult to hit Wyke hard enough without hitting him too hard, he suggests having Tindle tie him up; then he imitates the cleaning woman’s voice, imagining her to have found him all tied up and working on one of his stories. More of his theatricality and pretense.

Just before Wyke throws in the first plot twist and has Tindle understand that the whole fake jewelry burglary has just been the former setting the latter up to be shot and killed with the burglary as a pretext, Wyke does a number of things to foreshadow this twist. First, with the pistol in his hand, Wyke fires at a jug in Tindle’s hand, frightening and enraging him. Then, he makes “a bad Italian joke” about it being “open season all year round for…seducers and wife stealers,” as well as deliberately claiming that Italy, not England, is Tindle’s “country of origin.” In connection with Wyke’s elitist bigotry against even other Europeans, note that his surname is a pun on white.

While his intention to kill Tindle is as much theatricality and deception as is the fake burglary, or even the intention of defrauding the insurance company, his hatred of Tindle is real. It’s bad enough for Wyke that he’s being cuckolded, his wife and ‘property’ stolen from him–the narcissistic rage he feels from that alone is unbearable; but that the other man, of all men, is even just half a “wop” or “dago” (the same way being only part-Jew is tantamount to being a full-Jew to a Nazi) is enough to require a tit-for-tat humiliation. Sleuth being an allegory of class antagonisms, we see in Wyke vs Tindle how capitalism, even between haut and petit bourgeois, is all about abasing the competition to glorify oneself.

This is why Tindle must be ‘killed’ while fully dressed in his clown costume, right after he’s tearfully begged Wyke not to kill him. Tindle must be brought down because, as a mere petit bourgeois “half-dago,” he’s “a jumped-up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place” (a line loosely quoted, by the way, in The Smiths‘ song, “This Charming Man”). Just before shooting clowned-up Tindle in the back of the head, Wyke says, “Farewell, Punchinello,” a reference to Pulcinella, a clownish character from commedia dell’arte, and its English descendant, Punch.

The scheme to kill Tindle with legal impunity from the apparent attempted burglary is, as I’ve said, all just one of Wyke’s many games of humiliation, not at all real, more theatricality and deception. The firing of a blank from his phallic gun suggests Wyke’s impotence, his own private feelings of humiliation projected onto Tindle.

After the game is over, and Tindle, having come to from fainting and having gone home, we see Wyke at home alone, gratified from the narcissistic supply he’s got from humiliating Tindle and listening to old recordings of Cole Porter songs like “You Do Something to Me” and “Anything Goes.” In the former song, “that voodoo that you do so well” reminds us of the deceptive ‘magic’ of Wyke’s games. His old-fashioned taste in music reinforces the sense of the Generation Gap between him and Tindle.

This gap between crusty old conservatives and young liberals is emphasized in the lyric to “Anything Goes.” The breaking of the old Victorian taboo of “a glimpse of stocking,” as well as the switch from “better words” to “four-letter words” (as had only about a half-decade before Sleuth‘s release been allowed in films, and before that, “the end of the Chatterly ban”), reflects a social rift that distracts us from the ongoing rift between capitalist and worker.

“Detective Inspector Doppler” arrives at Wyke’s home, saying he’s there to investigate “the disappearance of a Mr. Milo Tindle.” Now, to those who’ve never seen the film or the play, Doppler is a third character just introduced to the story, played by “Alec Cawthorne” and not by Caine disguised in a clever makeup job to make him look like a middle-aged man, almost Wyke’s age. The theatricality and deception are as much for us, the audience, as they are for Wyke. Tindle’s disguise is so complete, it even includes his use of a rhotic accent.

As “Doppler” does his investigation, he gives off the impression that not only is Wyke genuinely guilty of having killed Tindle (we haven’t yet seen Tindle as himself since the firing of the pistol, so for all we first-time viewers know, that was a real bullet fired), but Wyke has also carelessly left out circumstantial evidence for “Doppler” to find. Actually, Wyke’s denials to “Doppler” of being guilty of murder are real, for Tindle sneaked into the house to plant the incriminating evidence (blood on the bannisters, Tindle’s clothes “all screwed up on the floor of a wardrobe”) while Wyke was out of the house for the day.

In playing this game on Wyke, Tindle isn’t just getting revenge for himself; he’s also avenging the sullied reputation of police detectives, who are routinely looked down on in Wyke’s fiction as “baffled” and not particularly intelligent. It is always the noble, titled Lord Merridew who, as the brilliant sleuth, solves the case.

Wyke here is demonstrating his elitism once again, with Merridew representing the gentry, and those “baffled” police inspectors representing the common masses, as Tindle is thought of as representing. What must be remembered, though, is that just as Tindle is a member of the petite bourgeoisie and is therefore no less a capitalist than Wyke, the police, of whatever modest means they may be, represent and defend the interests of the capitalist class. So Tindle’s humbling of Wyke through the clever detective work of “Doppler” is not the working class one-upping the bourgeoisie, but rather a capitalist doing this to a fellow capitalist.

Of course, in spite of Wyke’s looking down on common cops, just as with his denial of prejudice or Othello-like jealousy, he denies that condescension by claiming that “Merridew would have been proud of [Doppler]” for being so diligent in his tireless attempts to contact Tindle by phone. Now, Tindle knows this compliment to be fake, but in keeping with the theatricality and deception going on with both men, “Doppler” says the compliment is “praise indeed, Sir,” and claims to enjoy Wyke’s fiction.

Wyke enjoys the narcissistic supply he gets from hearing that “Doppler” reads his work, but his ego trip is short-lived when he isn’t allowed to finish naming his favourite of all of his books, The Case of the Crucified Communist (the title of which sounds like a capitalist’s wish-fulfillment), before “Doppler” resumes talking about the Tindle case.

As the evidence against Wyke seems to be mounting, he and “Doppler” go outside to where the dirt has been freshly dug, implying that this is where Wyke has buried Tindle’s body. Wyke tries to maintain his innocence by saying his gardener has been “aching for an opportunity to slander his employer.” In this quote, we see not only an example of class conflict, but also one of the marginalization of a worker, one only spoken of, not ever seen.

“Doppler,” on the other hand, defends gardeners and has nothing but praise for how perceptive he finds them to be. Note here how Tindle, in taking the side of gardeners, is again associating himself with the poor, downtrodden working class, as liberals are wont to do; though as a bourgeois himself, Tindle is no more a worker than Wyke is.

Finally, the pressure rises on Wyke until the circumstantial evidence against him seems so strong that “Doppler” makes to arrest him. Wyke is now feeling a stress and fear comparable to Tindle’s when he thought he was about to die. Then, “Doppler,” behind Wyke, pulls off his face makeup, wig, etc., to reveal Tindle underneath it all.

Now, the first-time viewer sees that not only was the fake burglary artifice, but so was Tindle’s death and the very existence of Doppler, a veritable doppelgänger for Tindle. Wyke is now as enraged as Tindle was to discover his fears were all for nothing.

Tindle is not yet satisfied in his lust for revenge, though. He’s got more tricks in store for Wyke, including the next game, immediately to be played on the old man.

He insists, though, that this game he’s about to play on Wyke is not pretend. He claims that he’s actually murdered Téa and planted four pieces of evidence about the house that will incriminate Wyke, and that the police will show up in a matter of minutes, find the evidence, which is all hiding in plain view, and charge Wyke with the murder.

To agitate Wyke all the more, Tindle claims he has had sex with her, her willing to it, before strangling her to death with one of the four pieces of evidence. Wyke has been assuming that Tindle is having him on (as he should), until he phones Téa’s home, getting her roommate, Joyce, to answer the call and tearfully confirm that Téa has, indeed, been murdered.

Now that Wyke is convinced the murder is real, he frantically goes about searching for the four objects: a stocking, a shoe, a false eyelash, and a bracelet. After finding and disposing of the four things, Tindle reveals that no cops have arrived as he’s led Wyke to believe. It turns out that Têa and Joyce were happy to help Tindle get even with Wyke, for Wyke has often played games of humiliation on them, too. Wyke personifies the ruling class that humiliates the marginalized with phony set-ups, targeting marginalized people like women.

Téa, for example, is so marginalized that it takes quite some time, since knowing of her ‘murder,’ for Wyke to express any pity for her, a callousness that Tindle notes. Women like her, Marguerite, and Joyce are never seen and never heard…silenced, in effect. They are represented only in the words the two men use to refer to them.

Similarly, people of colour are marginalized in the presentation of this story, even to the point of them being marginalized, as Tindle imagines they must be (and probably correctly so, given Wyke’s obvious racism), in Wyke’s novels. Tindle assumes that blacks don’t “play much of a part in the books [Wyke] write[s]…Except for the odd, eyeball-rolling darkie, to take his place alongside the swarthy Yid, the oily Levantine, and others.” The point is that Shaffer’s marginalizing of workers, women, and people of colour by not presenting any of them physically on the stage or screen is to indicate how slightly they have been regarded in real life.

To get back to the ending, where Wyke realizes that the danger of the cops finding the four pieces of evidence is all faked, Tindle hits him with one final bit of humiliation…and this time, it’s all too real. He tells Wyke that Téa, having actually met Tindle in the house while Wyke was away, has told Tindle that Wyke is impotent and hasn’t done it with her for over a year.

This narcissistic injury is too much for Wyke to bear. He cannot risk Tindle circulating this tidbit of gossip, not even just to Marguerite. Now the pistol must have only real bullets. Tindle’s murder cannot be faked this time. The firing of a real bullet into him is symbolic of Wyke’s phallus working properly.

Tindle insists, though, that since he’s told the police about the faked burglary story after Wyke’s faked shooting of him, and…maybe…the police will stop by the house, Wyke won’t be able to use the burglary story to justify shooting Tindle. Since Tindle’s been lying the whole time, Wyke nonetheless figures he doesn’t need to believe him this time, so as Tindle is walking toward the front door with Marguerite’s fur coat (a further theft from Wyke), he gets shot in the back.

Shortly afterwards, the police do show up, as promised, by the front door. Wyke is truly screwed now, and just as Tindle’s fake murder has turned real, so is the fake danger of Wyke being arrested now real. As Tindle is dying, he activates all the automata in the room, particularly Jolly Jack Tar, notable for his hearty guffaw as demonstrated a number of times throughout the film, and now laughing with Tindle at Wyke.

If only that gun could have been, with a blank, as impotent as Wyke’s biological gun is. then he could tell the cops, “it was just a bloody game.”

The movie ends with a shot of the theatre and a quick drop of the curtains, giving off a Brechtian alienation effect to remind us that Sleuth is just a bloody play. It’s as unreal as any of the games Wyke and Tindle have played on each other.

The emphasis on the unreality of the story is to suggest that who Wyke and Tindle represent–gentry vs petite bourgeoisie, conservative vs liberal, or the opposing mainstream political parties representing these two factions, whichever–are more play-acting in their vying for power than they are really competing. We always focus on these two groups, while ignoring the politically marginalized people represented by their absence on the screen or stage.

The political tap-dance the two groups do is a distraction from the people we should be concerned about–workers like the gardener, cleaning lady, and secretary; women like Marguerite, Téa, and Joyce; and people of colour like blacks, Levantines, or in any case anyone not of Anglo-Saxon stock, like Jews…or Italians, for that matter.

We see these two mainstream groups battling it out in debates on TV, keeping the spectrum of the otherwise lively debates strictly circumscribed, so as to ensure that certain touchy issues–like poverty, income inequality, endless war, student debt, homelessness, genocide, government surveillance, etc.–are kept out of the debates, since their inclusion might threaten the capitalist/imperialist structure that the ruling class wants kept intact.

Accordingly, the two sides’ debates are all just theatre, all fakery and deception, all “just a bloody game,” like the ones Wyke and Tindle play on each other. For if the debates were real, they’d actually be relevant to the common people. And we can’t have that, can we?

Violence?

There have been times when–showing support to Luigi Mangione and his shooting of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, net worth of about $43 million, whose company got rich off of denying health insurance claims to those who desperately need the money–I have been scolded online for promoting “vigilante violence.”

A couple of things should be taken into consideration before scolding me in this way. First of all, Marxists like me see Luigi, who actually has right-leaning political views, as a symbol of the kind of revolutionary uprising that is so urgently needed in a world of growing wealth inequality, endless wars, genocides, environmental destruction, and fascist authoritarianism.

In posting memes on Facebook about how Luigi had done nothing wrong and should be freed, and that we need more Luigis right now, I was not advocating vigilantes randomly shooting anyone in a wild rage, or pulling a Charles Bronson on street thugs. I’m talking about using Luigi’s example to galvanize the people to take back our world from the greedy oligarchs.

Standing up to those oligarchs does not mean following phonies like Bernie Sanders or AOC, who are just Zionist sheepdogs that lure progressives into voting Democrat. I’m talking about building a mass workers’ movement to fight for the rights of the poor, to educate, agitate, and organize, and to rise up and take over our governments by force–to smash the capitalist/imperialist system and build socialism.

The second, and far more important, issue here is this: how are we to confront violence? Which forms of violence are to be condoned, and which are to be condemned? For I can assure you, Dear Reader, that many forms of violence in the world are being condoned, not just by the rich and powerful, but also by their useful idiots among the masses (i.e., the MAGA crowd on the right, and the liberal supporters of Biden et al). Such thoughtless support of a most violent political and economic status quo is why the uprising I’m advocating is so necessary.

Whenever people criticize me for showing solidarity with Luigi, people who are “pretty sure” that supporting “vigilante violence” is “not cool,” I find these people, affectionately known as “normies” or “shitlibs,” curiously silent about pretty much all other forms of violence that exist on a much greater scale and appear far more often than just some angry young man with a backpack and a pistol with “delay, deny, depose” etched on the cartridge cases used during the shooting. These smug people don’t seem at all to care about the reality of structural violence.

Social structures and institutions that harm us by preventing us from having our basic needs or rights met are forms of structural violence. Family violence, oppression from sexism or racism (e.g. hate crimes), police and state violence, and war are all forms of structural violence.

Health insurance companies–which profit off of the suffering of the ill who are denied the money they need to pay their expensive medical bills (and those without such health insurance have died by the tens of thousands each year)–are committing structural violence. When people’s lives are in any way being threatened, including this way, it’s natural to want to fight back. When people like me are advocating the emergence of more Luigis, we’re simply hoping for more of that fighting back against systemic oppression. It isn’t bloodlust–it’s self-defence.

The fascist Trump government’s nabbing of ‘illegal’ immigrants, ‘terrorists,’ ‘gang members,’ and ‘antisemites,’ to incarcerate them in CECOT, which is–let’s face it–a concentration camp: this is another case of structural violence. How are we going to free people like Kilmar Albrego Garcia without the use of physical force? Vote blue, no matter who? Use black magic?

Now, let’s move on to some more extreme forms of structural violence–those involving war and ethnic cleansing. It shouldn’t be necessary to point out by now that the global response to the Gaza genocide has been–to say the least–woefully inadequate, and to say the most, outright complicity.

Such complicity, it needs to be said, but again, shouldn’t, is not the sole responsibility of the Trump administration. The ongoing current phase of the Gaza nightmare was first enabled by the Biden administration, and American politicians of all political stripes have, to varying degrees, supported Israel’s bloody actions. The only Democratic exception, to my knowledge, is Rashida Tlaib, a Palestinian American, significantly.

Rationalizing of the continuing extermination of the Palestinians is based on the ‘need’ to wipe out Hamas, which of course has been branded a terrorist organization. The whole reason Hamas exists, though, is as resistance to Israel’s brutal occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. If you don’t like Hamas, end the occupation. It’s as simple as that…though the Zionists will never comply, of course.

The UN acknowledged, decades ago, that armed resistance against an occupying power is legitimate. This includes Hamas ‘terrorism.’ Recall in this connection that Nelson Mandela, in his armed resistance to the South African apartheid system (which engaged in plenty of armed violence of their own), used to be labelled a terrorist by right-wingers like Reagan and Thatcher. Since Israel, properly understood, is a racist, apartheid, settler-colonial ethnostate, the labelling of Hamas’s armed resistance as ‘terrorism’ should be regarded as equally cringe.

As is often said, Zionism’s violence against the Palestinians didn’t start just after October 7th, 2023. It started officially in 1948 with the establishment of the Jewish state, resulting in the killing and displacement of about 750,000 Palestinians. Since then, Israel’s very existence has made the Palestinians’ lives a living hell…insofar as they’ve even continued living.

Gazans are caged in what’s been called an open-air concentration camp. Their access to electricity and water has been severely restricted, and IDF incursions into their impoverished neighborhoods terrorize them. UN resolutions frequently condemn Israel’s actions, but the resolutions are blocked by the US. Again, what are the Palestinians supposed to do about any of this? Wag their fingers at the IDF and say, “naughty, naughty”?

As far as Western politicians’ reactions to this oppression is concerned, even the ‘left-leaning’ liberals are sure to repeat that hackneyed line, “Israel has a right to exist.” Such voices include those of Sanders and AOC, in spite of the lip service they pay to Palestinians’ rights. And no, as a settler-colonial state bent on the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, Israel does not have the right to exist. Palestinians are the ones with the right to exist! To say that the Zionist state has a right to exist is equivalent to saying that Nazi Germany has that right.

The notion of a “two-state solution” sounds on the surface like a reasonable compromise between giving Israelis and Palestinians what they want. Look deeper into the issue, though, and you’ll realize that the “two-state” solution is really a mask for the continued enabling of Zionism.

Israel, just like the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., is a settler-colonial state forcibly imposed on the indigenous peoples who were there first and who were–and are–the people who have the right to the land. Settler-colonialism is a cancer that grows and kills more and more of the indigenous population. We can see that in, for example, the genocide and decimation of the Native American population, and we can see it in Israeli settlers’ stealing of more and more of Palestinian land, and in the IDF ethnic cleansing going on since October 7th.

You don’t cure a cancer by just allowing it to exist in one small part of someone’s body, for it is the nature of a cancer to grow. You have to remove the cancer completely: that means, to use my metaphor, that Israel must not exist. Similarly, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., in their current forms, must not exist, either. The land must be given back to the indigenous people, while negotiations should be made between, on the one side, the aboriginals, and on the other side, the whites and all others who have come to live in each of these countries, negotiations to coexist peacefully and enjoy full equal civil rights, preferably, as I envision it, in federations of socialist communities.

Similarly, in the case of Israel, I see no problem with Jewish communities living in Palestine. A large Jewish community should be allowed to live in a fully-restored state of Palestine, enjoying full equal civil rights with the Muslims and Christians living there…equal, not superior, civil rights. These would be Palestinian Jews, not Israeli ones–that’s the difference. The problem with Zionism is its hegemony and imperialism, not its Jewishness…which leads me to bring up another important issue.

A lot of people, in their zeal over condemning the horrors going on in Gaza, are confused about the true source of the evil of Zionism. Many like to repeat old antisemitic slanders about the Jews ‘controlling world politics’ and ‘ruling the world from Israel.’ THIS IS NONSENSE. It’s also Nazi b.s., and it gives political ammunition to Zionists like those in the Trump administration, who in their efforts to maintain the status quo are silencing pro-Palestinian opposition to Israel. It’s part of the problem, not part of the solution, and it’s got to stop.

Israel does not control the US and Western empire: it’s the other way around. European and American Christian Zionists wanted the creation of the Jewish state to ensure they’d have a foothold in the Middle East, an extremely important geo-political/strategic region. Remember all that oil in the area! While, to be sure, some Jews are Zionists, so are many non-Jews, and many Jews are outspokenly anti-Zionist–here are some famous examples.

Biden, an example of a particularly contemptible Christian Zionist, has said the quiet part out loud about the true relationship between the US and Israel. Israel is there to protect American interests in the region; without Israel, the US would have to invent one, or else send the navy into the area. No, there is no magical Jewish mojo controlling the Earth: the ‘chosen ones’ are not the people of the Devil. Let’s drop the superstition, grow up, and follow the money if we’re to discover the root of all evil.

Now, as for the violence of the Hamas attack on October 7th, a few things need to be understood. First of all, the severity of the attack was wildly exaggerated for propagandistic purposes in the Israeli media. Sensationalistic stories about rapes, violence against children and babies, etc., have turned out to be outright lies. The same is true of Hamas’s treatment of Israeli hostages, which was far more humane than has ever been the case of the Israeli treatment of Palestinian hostages…and recall that in that open-air concentration camp that is Gaza, every single resident can be legitimately called a hostage.

Furthermore, the Israelis themselves have admitted that many of the Israelis killed on October 7th were killed by Israeli forces themselves–they call it the “Hannibal Directive.” But ultimately, the current genocide isn’t about defeating Hamas: Hamas is just an excuse for the genocide.

Protests and demands for a ‘ceasefire’ are nowhere near good enough: we saw how meaningless that ceasefire was when Trump came to power. And it isn’t a war between the IDF and Hamas: a war implies two sides hitting each other; the average Palestinian isn’t armed, whereas the IDF is armed to the teeth with the most advanced weaponry, and they’re slaughtering the Gazans indiscriminately. The IDF isn’t fighting terrorism–they are the terrorists.

Zionism as a whole must be defeated with the use of military force. I don’t like war, but there is no choice here. The Houthis in Yemen are doing the heroic work of trying to thwart Israel, and of course the Trump administration is bombing Yemen in an attempt to thwart them.

Allied to American fascism is so-called social democracy, which as Stalin once said, is “objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Zionism, as we’ve seen, is a form of fascism, and liberals like Sanders and AOC, being the careerists that they are, cynically pander to Zionism, in spite of their paying lip service to supporting the Palestinian cause, criticizing Netanyahu, or saying they’d stop the sending of weapons to Israel. Left-leaning liberals like Sanders and AOC, who won’t even acknowledge the genocide, are the social democrats of today’s increasingly right-wing world. They’d rather affirm Israel’s “right to exist” and to “fight terrorism” than save Palestinian lives.

When we are all up against not only such extreme forms of oppression as the Americans’ healthcare-for-profit system, political parties that don’t represent the needs of working-class people, fascistic deportations, Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and taxes for the poor in the form of tariffs, etc, but also liberals who give false hope of “fighting the oligarchy” and then smash those hopes by sheep-dogging the people into voting for the next corporate whore in the Democratic Party, it should not be too difficult to understand why some, out of desperation, might resort to violence.

So much of a game is made out of liberal politics in identifying this or that particular politician, or this or that political party, as the source of everyone’s ills, instead of identifying the actual cause, which is the entire system. Sanders would rather blame the plight of the Palestinians on Netanyahu than on Zionism as a whole. Similarly, the Democrats would rather blame current American woes on Trump and Musk than identify capitalism and imperialism as the problem.

They do this blaming of specific people, who are mere symptoms of the sickness, rather than correctly diagnosing the whole sickness, because these liberals benefit from the class privileges that the system gives them. For this reason, liberals will never help the working class.

This is why fighting the system, and not ‘voting harder,’ is the only viable solution. Yes, literally fighting it. I don’t mean running around in the streets and acting like a maniac with a gun. Luigi is just a symbol for what I’m talking about. People in the West, not just in the US, need to build a huge working class movement that is in no way compromised by the mainstream political parties. They need to get fully organized, and when a revolutionary situation arises, they need to seize power of the state by force.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I don’t like violence, in my heart (I guess it’s the residual liberal in me), but it isn’t a matter of liking violence–we simply have no other choice. The ruling class will never allow us to legislate them out of their wealth, and no peaceful protests are going to stop the Zionist killing machine. The Red Army forcibly stopped the Nazis: a similar show of force is the only thing that will free Palestine.

The liberation of Palestine is intimately linked with the liberation of all of humanity, especially those in the Third World and the global proletariat, because these issues are all linked up with imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism. They’re all different facets of the same struggle, because the enemy is preoccupied with the accumulation of capital in all the corners of the Earth. There’s oil in them-there Palestinian hills.

Able-bodied young people are going to have to do this fight: go to the gym, lift weights, get weapons training, learn guerrilla tactics, etc. (Recall how much of this battle-preparedness the fascists already have!) The rest of us can be involved in organizing, planning, theory, agitation, spreading the word, etc.

The odd American or two may get snarky with me and say, because I’m advocating this kind of struggle from the comfort of my living room on the other side of the world, that I should go over to his country and fight with him. Well, apart from the fact that I’m neither able-bodied nor young (I have muscular atrophy in my legs), I’m also neither American nor a voter (I haven’t even voted in a Canadian election since around the early 1990s!), so I’m in no way responsible for the mess voters (not just in the US, but also in any bourgeois democracy) have made by contributing to and validating such a bogus, corrupt system. I therefore have every right to complain about the creation of a mess I had nothing to do with: I consider George Carlin to be my authority on this matter.

Different people have different talents and aptitudes, and all of us are helping in our own way, as long as we’re not voting for any of the corrupt, Zionist, mainstream parties that make promises they’ll never keep.

Remember that revolution is not a dinner party, and political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Ultimately, though, violence…as self-defence against the ruling class…is not just violence for its own sake. After smashing the bourgeois/imperialist system, the goal is to build socialism. This means improving the quality of life for everyone: providing and guaranteeing universal healthcare and education, ensuring our basic needs are all met, and liberating us from oppression.