Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

Synchronicity is a concept that CG Jung wrote about in 1960. Literally, “unified time,” synchronicity refers to meaningful coincidences that have no causal connection. Because of this acausality, there’s no scientific way of testing the idea by way of falsifiability; one either believes in synchronicity, through personal, subjective experience, or one doesn’t believe in it.

Jung’s belief in this idea was part of his interest in spirituality, myth, and religion in themselves, not just for their psychological meaning, as atheistic Freud would have used them. This difference of opinion is essentially why Freud and Jung had a falling-out.

There are dozens of YouTube videos out there on synchronicity, describing it all too often in a sentimentalized way, linking it with ideas like the “law of attraction.” To be honest, I’d rather stay away from this kind of rose-tinted glasses interpretation.

To be even more frank, I haven’t yet made up my mind about whether or not I believe in synchronicity. As of this writing, I’ve recognized one distinct synchronicity that’s occurred over the past fifty-one years: three incidents occurring on September 11th–one in 1973, one in 1990, and one in, of course, 2001.

Notice how none of these three dates, assuming you know the history of all three incidents, are in any way ‘positive’ or sentimentalized. These three are the Chilean coup d’état of 1973, George HW Bush’s 1990 speech about us moving into a new world order (I’ll go into what is so unsettling about the speech below), and of course the terror attacks of 2001.

What these three incidents have in common beyond all sharing the same date–and this is the deeply meaningful part–is how all three tie in with US imperialism.

II: The Three September 11th Years

The Chilean coup d’état, backed by the CIA, ousted the democratically-elected president, Salvador Allende, a socialist who wanted to nationalize Chilean industries and thus thin the wallets of the American capitalists who wanted to be able to continue exploiting the country. Allende was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing dictator and puppet of the Western imperialists. Allende’s socialist economic policies would be replaced by the “free market” ones of the Chicago Boys. Any leftist resistance resulted in imprisonment, violent punishments, killings, and being ‘disappeared,’ which included being thrown out of helicopters.

While Bush’s 1990 speech tried to present the coming new world order as a positive change in the political climate of the time, properly understood, the president was heralding a post-Soviet world, in which the “free market” had triumphed over ‘Big Brother’ government and socialism. The USSR hadn’t yet been dissolved as of the speech, but its demise was coming soon, and no one knew better that this dissolution was coming than the very people who’d been scheming about it. The fall of communism allowed the capitalists to do anything they wanted…to everyone.

As for the terror attacks in 2001, it really doesn’t matter if we go with the official narrative that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda masterminded the attacks, and that George W Bush’s administration was too careless and incompetent to have prevented the attacks; or if you believe it was an inside job with controlled demolitions, and that it was all blamed on Al Qaeda and, by extension, the whole Muslim world. What matters is how the attacks were used by the American ruling class to manufacture consent for war after war in the Middle East, not only to steal the oil and enrich themselves with it, but also to exercise their dominance over the whole region, being the capitalist imperialists that they are.

Indeed, as far as all three of these incidents are concerned, it isn’t so much what happened on September 11th as it is the aftermath. What happened on that day, these three times, was more about the warning of what was to come than the inciting event itself. For another part of this synchronicity is, how 911 can signify an emergency telephone number you ring when an urgent situation comes up.

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

All three of these incidents could be, and should have been, seen as dire warnings that matters were about to get much worse. The replacement of a socialist government with a right-wing dictatorship using “free market” economic policies was a kind of ‘laboratory experiment,’ if you will, to see how well it would go…from the point of view of the global capitalist class, of course. They never cared that the Chicago Boys’ economic policies were a disaster for poor Chileans; what mattered was the huge amassing of wealth for the rich, known as the “miracle of Chile.” As of the 1980s, this “free market” experiment would be tried in the US under Reagan and in the UK under Thatcher.

So the immiseration of the poor Chileans would be extended to Americans and the British. The lie would be propagated that the “free market” would involve minimal state intervention in the economy, when a) there’s always at least some state intervention in it, and b) state protection of private property, especially when the capitalist class accumulates a huge amount of private property, necessitates a particularly intrusive form of government…capitalist government–hence, Pinochet’s brand of fascism, hand in hand with the “free market.”

And still, right-wing libertarians and ‘anarcho’-capitalists continue to be duped by the idea that “true” capitalism is antithetical to an intrusive state. One shouldn’t be surprised in the least that Reagan‘s ‘small government’ (translation: war on the poor) would be accompanied by a great increase in military spending as part of a scheme to bring the USSR to an end. Since imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, requiring the expansion of markets and capital into other countries, an expanded military will be needed to protect the interests of capitalist globalization.

Now, where plunging people into poverty hits you immediately, and scathingly, when you live in Third World Latin America, as was the case with Chileans in the 1970s, hitting us in the First World with poverty is more insidious and gradual in its effects. Problems like homelessness certainly increased under Reagan in the 1980s, but it’s grown worse since then, and now in the 2020s, there’s an epidemic of homelessness in many cities in the US and elsewhere.

This is all why I see a synchronistic meaning in these three September 11th dates and the emergency number 911. The Chilean coup d’état was an urgent warning not to let the “free market” counter-revolution spread to other countries. It was a warning left unheeded.

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

As I said above, Bush’s new world order speech was presented in rosy, optimistic language about a new era of triumphant liberal democracy, since it was understood that the Cold War was over. There would be a greater commitment to US strength as the leader of that promotion of liberal democracy. Translation: US imperialism would reign supreme, and every other government in the world was expected to do whatever the US government told them to do.

There would be a Soviet-American partnership in promoting world democracy, as Bush expected. Again, translation: Russia was expected to do American bidding as everyone else was. Gorbachev‘s compliance with all of this was further proof of his weak, treasonous leadership.

Of course, nothing like Bush’s rosy vision came to be since September 11th, 1990. The advancement of American imperialist ambitions certainly did, though. With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the demise of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe in 1989, it was already known that communism was out, and that Russia’s days, in their Soviet form, were numbered.

But while the mainstream Western media of the time were hailing the end of the Cold War as a triumph for democracy and the “end of history,” it would be foolish to assume that most Russians, and indeed many in the former Soviet Bloc, were holding their arms up, ready to embrace ‘capitalist freedom.’ Most people in the USSR wanted to keep the Soviet system; Boris Yeltsin and his ilk forcibly took it away.

In fact, since then, poll after poll has been done in Russia, indicating that majorities of Russians have consistently said life in Soviet-era Russia was happier than it has been since the era’s end. Since they were provided with free healthcare, education, housing, full employment, and other government benefits, it isn’t hard to see why the Soviet system was preferred.

While the Soviet system surely had its faults, it was also an effective counterweight to Western imperialism. The USSR aided anti-imperialist liberation movements in the Third World, and its example pushed the postwar capitalist West to adopt welfare systems and public healthcare. With the USSR’s demise, though, the West has had less and less incentive to keep these social services going. Accordingly, we’ve been losing them, bit by bit, over the years.

The signing of NAFTA not only took jobs away from American workers, but also gave those jobs, at lower pay, to Mexicans. The corporate tax rate, cut way down by the Reagan administration, stayed low (and was cut even lower by the Trump administration…it’s unlikely that Biden or anyone will raise it significantly any time soon).

Clinton killed welfare in the mid-1990s. His signing of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 led to the mergers and acquisitions in the media that, in turn, has led to 90% of American media being owned by only six corporations, meaning that the vast majority of our access to information is controlled by the rich. (This American near-oligopoly on information, incidentally, is also internationalized.) The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act led, as many believe, to the 2008 financial crisis. And the government bailed the big banks out.

All of these forms of government intervention were clearly in the interest of capital…and yet there are still political idiots out there who think that the government and capitalism are musically exclusive opposites. Long live the “free market”!

The above are but a few examples of what Bush’s new world order resulted in for the US. Now we must take a brief look at what the ideas of his September 11th speech led to for Russia.

Part of the reason we should regard with skepticism Bush’s claim to greater Soviet-American cooperation (at the time, in the context of a united response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and therefore Gorbachev’s compliance with Western imperialist interests) is that, when the Berlin Wall fell, and East and West Germany were to be reunited and thus a part of NATO, it was promised to Gorbachev, most mendaciously, that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.”

Note how much farther eastward NATO has advanced to the East since then. A number of former SSRs and Warsaw pact members–the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, and Albania–joined NATO. Russia has NATO armies right on her borders now! Attempts have been made to have Ukraine join, too.

Anybody who knows anything about NATO realizes that the organization is an extension of US imperialism. These members of NATO do the bidding of the American empire, even when it’s against their own national interests to do so.

The debacle that has been the Russia-Ukraine war is squarely the fault of the US/NATO empire…but you wouldn’t know that to read the lies and propaganda of the Western media, who routinely call it “Russia’s war” and “Putin’s war.” Indeed, so much effort has been made to call Russia’s intervention “unprovoked” that in fact such a lie has been told precisely to cover up the fact that it was most definitely provoked.

Collaboration of the capitalist West with ex-Nazis, from the end of WWII to the present, has included the recruitment of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers the whole time. Knowledge of this exposes the lie in the current capitalist mainstream media that there is no major Nazi menace in Ukraine.

Ever since a CIA-assisted coup d’état in 2014 in Ukraine, removing democratically-elected Viktor Yanukovych and replacing him with US puppets (recall Chile in 1973 and see these coups as part of a pattern), Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers have been part of their government and military, including far-right organizations like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector, and other admirers of Stepan Bandera.

These Russophobic extremists were, for the eight years between the coup and the beginning of the Russian intervention, discriminating against the use of the Russian language and terrorizing ethnic Russians in the Donbass. Putin, branded an “imperialist” and a “fascist” in a shameless act of projection by the Western establishment media, tried everything he could to find a peaceful resolution over those eight years, including the Minsk accords.

All the US and NATO have wanted to do is to keep sending weapons to the Ukrainian Nazis, including weapons that can be fired into Russia, which could provoke a wider war–WWIII, which in turn could go nuclear and bring about the end of the world. Since all of these events stem ultimately from the hypocritical words and secret schemes of Bush et al when he spoke on September 11th, 1990, we can see the 911 emergency that also went largely unheeded.

V: The Terrorist Attacks

That the terrorist attacks of 2001 were ringing the 911 emergency number is so obvious that I hardly need to explain how, but going through its consequences can remind us of the gravity of this emergency. Right from George W Bush’s statement that the attacks were “acts of war,” the red flags were waving.

Not only did the attacks give his administration a pretext for perpetual war (a “war on terror” isn’t directed at any country in particular, so there’s no clear way of ending the war), but they were also used to justify a number of restrictions on American civil liberties (the Patriot Act, which was extended during the Obama administration; racial profiling; NSA surveillance).

This authoritarian stripping-away of civil liberties is all too often assumed by propagandized right-wing idiots to be a form of socialism, since these politically illiterate morons assume that socialism is just “anything a government does.” These people are so ignorant of the political history of their own country that they’ve paid no attention to the removal of workers’ rights over the years (some of which I describe above), the cutting of taxes for the rich, and union-busting, none of which would happen under a socialist government.

These right-libertarians refuse to acknowledge the existence of authoritarian right-wing governments (recall again Pinochet). The Democratic Party–and the Labour Party in the UK–moved to the right because, as I said above, the demise of world communism meant that the West was no longer pressured into accommodating the working class.

US/NATO imperialism thus has been able to do anything it wants to any country, and to anyone within its own countries, with complete impunity. Endless war is in the interest of capital because war is a business–all those weapons manufacturers: Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, etc., have been laughing all the way to the bank profiting off of human death and suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and now Ukraine, the Palestinian Territories, and potentially Russia, China, and Iran. The American military is all over Africa, the rationale being that they’re fighting terrorists.

The tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) means that these weapons manufacturers, in order to remain competitive and survive as businesses, must keep their profits up. The only way they can do that is by either having actual wars all the time or at least sustaining a constant threat of war. No war, no sale of weapons–it’s as simple as that. The “war on terror” has given these companies a most convenient excuse to keep banging the war drums.

The scapegoating of the many heads of state around the world who refuse to kow-tow to US imperialism–starting with Milošević and Saddam, then continuing with Gaddafi, Assad, Maduro, Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, and whoever comes up in the future–has led to a desensitizing to the idea of war and its horrors. There was a time when people in the West were instinctively anti-war, regardless of whether they were leftists or mere liberals/hippies; not so much now…though a ray of hope has been seen in some who oppose US support of war in Ukraine and American support of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The point is that we’re seeing not just a resurgence of cold-blooded capitalism, but also a resurgence of its extreme…fascism. We’ve seen it in the anti-immigrant policies of Obama the deporter-in-chief, continued by the “anti-establishment” Trump/à la ICE and the caging of Latin Americans, and again continued with no-less-right-wing Biden. We’ve seen fascism in the excessive surveillance online. We see it in militarized cops. We’ve seen fascism in the support of Ukraine, as I discussed above. Indeed, all of the totalitarian things we were told would happen to us under communism have actually happened to us under neoliberal capitalism.

People complain about the supposed lack of human rights in Cuba. To those people, I’ll say two words: Guantanamo Bay. This is a form of contemporary fascism and authoritarian government.

People on the right complained about intrusive government during the Covid pandemic. I’m a skeptic about its dangers, too, but I never saw a “communist plot” to establish a “one-world government.” I saw a group of pharmaceutical companies make huge profits while millions of poor people got poorer–many became homeless. I saw the fascist, authoritarian government that grew out of this problem as a threat of capitalism, not communism.

VI: The Collective Shadow

I hope, Dear Reader, that you can now see the deep meaning behind this triple 9/11 synchronicity. It’s not just three identical dates when something…political…happened. They all share common themes: the intrusion of imperialism, a shift to the political right, violent consequences, the taking away of basic civil rights, and the promotion of fascist, authoritarian government.

Now, part of synchronicity is how the inner psychic life is connected with these meaningful coincidences in the external world. For me, it’s how I saw the deeper meaning in these three September 11th dates and their aftermaths. As for those behind the three events, I’d say that the connection between the inner and outer worlds is based on the Collective Shadow.

Just as there’s a collective unconscious, a large reservoir of all of the unconscious feelings of all of humanity, going back to the earliest of us in prehistory, so is there also an accumulation of all of our worst, most hateful, most bigoted, and most destructive thoughts. This accumulation is the Collective Shadow, an amalgam of the personal Shadow of each and every one of us.

Erich Fromm, in his book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, would have called this dark part of all of us “the necrophilous character.” He wasn’t referring to the paraphilia; he described “necrophilia” as “the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. (Fromm, his emphasis, page 369)

Consider in this connection all that resulted from all three September 11th events: the death resulting from Pinochet’s repressions, the terrorist attacks and the imperialist wars that ensued, but also the violence done to Russia as a result of the dissolution of the USSR: Yeltsin bringing out the tanks on the Russian protestors in 1993; his re-election, as a result of American interference in the vote in 1996; the impoverishment of the Russian masses (as a result of privatization) as the elites snapped up most of the amassed Soviet wealth to make themselves the Russian oligarchs; and as I mentioned above, the Western enabling of Ukrainian Nazis to attack ethnic Russians in the Donbass.

Now, please be careful with my use of the the expression “new world order”: I’m not using it in the sense of many right-wing conspiracy theorists who fantasize about a “one-world government” run by Freemasons, “the Jews,” and other members of an imagined elite of people in some kind of secret society of Devil-worshippers (“the Illuminati”). Those who run the world are capitalists and imperialists; they aren’t of any particular ethnic or religious group. They don’t need to have formal meetings, they don’t twirl their mustaches or laugh “Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!”, as in some badly-written B-movie. They simply share similar interests, and have social get-togethers where they discuss how to further their interests as the ruling class–how to get more for themselves and less for the rest of us.

I don’t believe in the Devil because I don’t need to. Human greed, aggression, and selfishness–spawned by, and a distortion of, the evolutionary drive to survive–sufficiently explain the problem. The Devil as a metaphorical concept, though, the Collective Shadow, might be believed in.

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

I don’t necessarily believe in any of these ‘supernatural’ ideas; I just want to explore some possibilities, and show how, regardless of whatever the real explanation is for these coincidences, there have been some most disturbing patterns.

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

Incidentally, just as there is the 911 emergency phone number and the three September 11ths, so is there a 119 emergency phone number in parts of Asia (including where I live) and in Jamaica. Furthermore, just for fun, we can, in this connection, look at three dates for November 9th: 1917, when the Balfour Declaration was published in The Times newspaper; 1938, when Kristallnacht happened; and 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell.

Anyone who cares about the Palestinians will see the publication of the Balfour Declaration as, in a way, a kind of declaration of emergency of the oppression to come. Anyone who cares about Jews and worries about the spread of fascism will see the obvious state of emergency in Kristallnacht. And anyone who knows that the real purpose of the Berlin Wall (the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, as it was called in East Germany) was to keep bad people out, not to keep good people trapped in (the real resistance against defectors was to prevent brain drain; most of the East German workers and others in the former Soviet states were happy to stay and enjoy the government benefits that were soon to be gone by the 1990s), will see its fall as the beginning of NATO enlargement to the East, which has ultimately culminated in the Ukraine Nazi problem.

Now, you can criticize me, Dear Reader, for being selective about bad events on September 11th and on November 9th, while ignoring many good things that surely also happened on those dates, in different years. The point about synchronicity, though, is not to say that those two dates are “evil” ones; they simply represent, on these six occasions, coincidences that I find highly meaningful. I might consider these synchronicities a manifestation of two of what I call The Three Unities–that is, The Unity of Action and The Unity of Time.

Forget about the coincidental dates, though. The point is that fascism (Nazi or Zionist), and authoritarian, imperialist capitalism, along with its government and endless wars, are on the rise. None of the events of the earlier of those six dates directly caused those that succeeded them; but all of the events I discussed of those dates are disturbingly meaningful.

Raised Fist

O, keep your fingers
on the pulse of what
the people need in this
alienating, unfair world!
A good rule of thumb is
remembering we can’t
do all of this alone.
We all must raise
our arms together
in loving solidarity.
Alone, we’re weak;
together, we’re not.
When our muscles
are stacked, one on
top of the other, we
can be unstoppable,
a giant which could
pound the crap out
of the ruling class. There are so many more of us than there are of them.
They want us just to be fingers and thumbs, all insignificant sinews. We
must link up–as ligaments–muscles and bones. A fist that’s connected
can punch out the rich, so let’s raise it together. Our rulers would have
us all fighting, so we won’t be fighting them, defeating them for good.

Analysis of ‘The Crying Game’

The Crying Game is a 1992 film written and directed by Neil Jordan. It stars Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson, and Forest Whitaker, with Adrian Dunbar, Ralph Brown, and Jim Broadbent.

While the theme of the marginalization of race, sex, and sexuality is placed at the forefront of this film, another issue, the right for the self-determination of nations, is also there, but it’s…well, marginalized, as I’ll discuss in more detail in the paragraphs below.

The Crying Game was a critical and commercial success, having won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It also got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Davidson), and Best Film Editing. The British Film Institute named The Crying Game the 26th-greatest British film of all time in 1999.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete film (minus the credits).

The proper political and historical context of The Crying Game is to be seen in the Northern Ireland conflict, also known as “The Troubles,” which went on for about thirty years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Mainstream Western culture generally looks on the IRA as a bunch of fanatical, cold-blooded terrorists who indiscriminately killed out of a frenzied, passionate nationalism. What is ignored in this kind of judgement against them is the centuries of brutal British imperialist rule that provoked Irish resistance all the way up to the Troubles that began in the late 1960s.

The Crying Game, as well as The Cranberries’ song “Zombie,” are bourgeois liberal portrayals of the IRA as mindless, violent killers rather than embodying legitimate armed resistance against a colonial oppressor, which is recognized in international law and the UN. Ireland was England’s first colony. The Emerald Isle has been invaded again and again from as early as the 12th century, with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Indiscriminate massacres of the Irish, including women and children, went on countlessly. Just as the Palestinians have a legitimate right to armed struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism, so have the Irish had that right against British imperialism.

To go into more detail about this issue would be beyond the scope of this analysis; the links provided above and below should help with the details left out here. Still, I needed to bring this issue up and give it proper attention because The Crying Game fails to do so; just as blacks and transgender people are marginalized in the real world, so is Irish liberation tossed to the side and ignored, in the real world and in this film.

Granted, it is perfectly legitimate to sympathize with blacks and transgender people when they suffer prejudice and bigotry. The problem with The Crying Game is how the film uses these otherwise justified sympathies as forms of identity politics to keep us on the side of imperialist, colonial British rule. The fact remains that, in order to ensure and maintain the liberation of such marginalized groups as blacks and transgender people, the first thing that must be done is to overthrow the capitalist, imperialist system that uses marginalization as a weapon to keep the working class divided; and the IRA, with their leftist ideology, are one of many groups dedicated to that very overthrow.

One of the things the IRA does in The Crying Game, though, is something that very much divides the common people, in this case, the sexes–they have pretty Jude (Richardson) lure a British soldier named Jody (Whitaker) with a promise of sex, in order to kidnap him and threaten to execute him if an imprisoned IRA member is not released by the UK in three days. Jody curses at Jude for being such a Delilah to him. Well, what can I say? The capitalist/imperialist system must end first, then we can work on ending the social divisions.

As I said above, the real aims and purposes of the IRA are not properly explored in this film. As far as The Crying Game is concerned, these people are just a bunch of “extremist,” terrorist bad guys. Jody will be shot in three days, just because the UK authorities won’t free a fellow IRA man. Towards the end of the film, they want to assassinate a British judge: they don’t care who he really is–he’s just “a legitimate target.” As you can see, the IRA are portrayed as killers for the sake of killing, not as freedom fighters.

Note that the film came out in 1992, just after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, and thus neoliberalism could really get going without a leash on its neck. All sympathy for the poor and marginalized would be given within a liberal, non-socialist framework.

As Jody is held by the IRA for the last three days of his life, he cleverly establishes a bond with Fergus (Rea), a Provisional IRA member with long hair (I’ll get into the significance of that later). Jody talks about his girlfriend and his love of playing cricket. This bonding will make it harder for Fergus to shoot Jody when the inevitable third day comes, for the UK government will deem Jody expendable, anyway. From the point of view of the film, and the anti-IRA/pro-British imperialist message it’s trying to convey to audiences, this bonding will humanize Jody for us, making us want to sympathize with him, and therefore with the British side.

One of the ways he gains our sympathies is by complaining about the frank, blunt racism of the Irish that he, as a black man, has to put up with while stationed among them as a British soldier. This otherwise legitimate problem is used to distract us from another legitimate one: UK rule over Northern Ireland. Stereotyping the Irish as crass racists also camouflages their victimhood.

One could relate this racism, the using of a woman to lure a man into a trap, and even Irish collaboration with the UK, to Jody’s story about the Scorpion and the Frog, and how doing what’s against one’s interests is nonetheless in one’s nature.

Jody, as a member of the proletariat no less than Jude, Fergus, or Peter (Dunbar), should be concerned with the interests of the global working class (including other blacks, of course) over those of empire; instead, he chooses the job of British soldier for easy remuneration, and gets stationed in a place where not only will he be openly taunted as a “nigger,” but also where he’s at risk of being kidnapped and killed by the very kind of people who would otherwise be contributing to the fight for the kind of world in which that slur won’t be used anymore. Jody chooses easy money over liberation and safety, though, because it’s in his nature to choose what’s easy over what’s hard.

Jude, in going along with the plan to use her body to lure Jody in, rather than use some other, non-objectifying method, is going against her own interests as a woman, thus having to endure hearing Jody’s slurs of “bitch” and “whore.” Recall how, above, I compared her to Delilah (I’ll go into more Samson symbolism later); her name suggests another Biblical betrayer. Still, being a woman who can’t help having internalized the sexist attitudes of her society (including having to serve Jody, the man who now hates her, food and drink), she can’t help it: it’s in her nature.

The Northern Ireland Unionists, generally Protestant and therefore worried that a unified Ireland–being mostly Catholic–would marginalize them, side with the UK and its terroristic atrocities on the Irish in the hopes of preserving their version of Christianity (or so they rationalize). Instead, by siding with the IRA and its leftist agenda, they could help deal a blow to imperialism–which thrives on such forms of divisiveness as racism, sexism, and religious intolerance–which could lead eventually to a kind of world that would do away with such divisions and liberate us all. Still, it’s in one’s nature to choose the quick and easy solution over the long and hard road of ending capitalism.

Fergus, too, chooses the quick and easy solution of sympathizing with Jody, and later, Dil (Davidson), over sympathizing with his fellow Irish. This latter sympathizing would, as I explained above, ultimately lead to the liberation of everyone, including transgender people, if it were to succeed on a global level. Such a path, though, is long and hard, and Fergus can’t help it–it’s in his nature–to reject such a path, leave the IRA, and even go to jail for Dil’s murder of Jude.

To get back to Jody’s clever manipulating of Fergus to win his sympathy, Jody goes beyond just telling him the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, but he also tells Fergus about his girlfriend, Dil, back in London. He has Fergus take out his wallet so Fergus can see a photo of her, to see how pretty she is. By doing this, Jody humanizes both himself and Dil for Fergus. To humanize himself even more, Jody actually has Fergus take his penis out of his pants so he–his hands tied behind his back–can take a piss!

All of these tactics, of course, make it well-nigh impossible for Fergus to shoot Jody in the woods when the dreaded day comes, for the UK authorities–the ‘good guys,’ recall!–have no intention of saving Jody, only of finding the IRA hideout and killing all of the resistance.

Ironically, it’s the British forces who end up killing Jody by hitting him with an armoured vehicle on the road that he accidentally runs out on. They don’t mean to kill him there, but that doesn’t matter: they’ve never taken seriously the need to save one of their own. As I said above, they consider Jody to be expendable: such an attitude is proven by how the UK flies planes over the IRA hideout and reduces the entire shelter to flames, without a thought that Jody could be in there somewhere.

This moment of British viciousness gives us a taste of the might of Western imperialism, hinting as to why the IRA is resisting them in the first place…if we’d pay close attention. Still, the liberal slant of The Crying Game would have us see this viciousness as an example of how ‘there is bad on both sides.’ Little consideration is given to the fact that one side is much more powerful than the other, and that that powerful side has historically caused much more killing than the other. This same false moral equivalency is used in the worsening situation in Gaza, which is characterized in the mainstream media as a ‘war’ between the IDF and Hamas, rather than as an ongoing genocide of unarmed Palestinian civilians.

Fergus, keeping his promise to Jody to go to London and find Dil, has left the IRA–assuming that Jude and Peter are dead–and renounced their revolutionary ways. He changes his name to Jimmy, and he has his hair cut short, symbolic of Samson losing his strength when Delilah has a servant cut his own hair short. Fergus’s haircut thus can be seen to symbolize his giving up of his strength, a symbolic castration, his renouncing of solidarity to Ireland. His changing of his name only reinforces his turning his back on what he once believed in, as well as lying to Dil that he’s Scottish when she gives him a trim in her hair salon. Really: if he was so half-hearted about the IRA, then why did he join in the first place?

Along with losing his strength, “Jimmy” seems to have lost much of his intelligence, too, for he follows Dil to a gay bar, being attracted to her as a cis-woman, and never cluing into what anatomy she might have under her clothes. Though he falls in love with her, he gets a big surprise when her clothes come off as the two of them are about to be intimate, and his reaction is…as we on the left would say…reactionary.

Some might consider these elements to be coincidental, but leaving the IRA (an example of something that Mao would have called backsliding into liberalism), then being a creep and following a girl at night from her place of work to the local bar, and hitting her when he realizes she’s a transwoman…some of us see a meaningful connection here. This sort of thing is why some of us don’t think that liberals have the best solutions to dealing with marginalized people. When he tells Jody not to take being called a “nigger” seriously, that was bad enough. Look at how far he’s fallen since then.

“Jimmy” gets a job in London as a day labourer, and while he’s had dreams of Jody playing cricket, and he tries to identify with Jody by imagining himself playing the game while on the job as he sees other men playing it, he has to put up with a nagging boss, Mr. Deveroux (played by Tony Slattery), who hardly sympathizes with his apparent athletic aspirations. You chose to sell out to the capitalist world, “Jimmy”; you made your bed–you lie in it.

It’s remarkable after his having come to this gay bar, The Metro, and presumably having seen men with men, and women with women, and he needs the bartender, Col (Broadbent) to tell him that Dil is a transwoman (though Col never gets around to telling him). Dil is onstage, singing “The Crying Game,” a song fittingly covered by Boy George on the movie soundtrack.

“Jimmy” has to help Dil get rid of an abusive boyfriend named Dave (Brown, who you may recall played Danny in Withnail and I, and who also appeared in Alien 3 and Star Wars: Episode I). One night in Dil’s apartment with “Jimmy,” they hear Dave outside on the street calling up to her as if he were Stanley Kowalski calling “Hey, Stella!” Dave isn’t so lucky though: instead of her coming back to him, Dil throws his clothes and his goldfish out the window.

“Jimmy” is touched by how she keeps Jody’s old things: his clothes and old photos of him. As we can see, Jody is still being humanized even after his death. Even though “Jimmy” is initially repulsed to learn that Dil is a transwoman, he still has feelings for her, and so in his conflict over her, she is still being humanized for us. No humanizing of the IRA is anywhere to be seen, though.

She appears at his place of work, walking on the field where the cricket games are played, and therefore reinforcing in his mind the association of her and Jody when he sees her coming. The other workers are whistling at her: I doubt they’d be doing that if they knew what’s under her clothes. He breaks a window frame in his shock at her arrival, angering Mr. Deveroux. It’s interesting how LGBT issues can intersect with other leftist issues like labour (“Jimmy” will be docked pay for the damage), yet not with anti-imperialism.

There’s such mutual alienation between “Jimmy” and Deveroux that the latter calls the former “Pat.” (I suppose that the Irishman can be comforted that at least his boss isn’t calling him “Mick.”) Fergus is thus doubly alienated from himself with these two false names. Deveroux’s sexist attitude to Dil the “tart” is enough to make “Jimmy” want to stand up for her–fair enough–but centuries of British oppression of Ireland aren’t enough for Fergus to stand up for his people. Bonding with Jody is all it takes to make him end his commitment to Irish liberation.

So, “Jimmy” manages to reconcile himself with a transwoman, but he can never reconcile himself with the IRA…and this is when Jude suddenly comes back into his life–Delilah with a new hairstyle of her own. Her new, “tougher look” makes us dislike the IRA all the more–how fitting, for the purposes of this movie.

Her hair isn’t much shorter, though, so she still has her strength–aptly shown when she takes out her phallic pistol. Her hair has gone from blonde to a dark red; her clothes are also darker, all of which reinforces our sense that she’s one of the ‘bad guys.’ Her implicit threat on Dil’s life, if Fergus doesn’t comply with the IRA’s plan to assassinate the judge, also reinforces our sense of antagonism to her.

From here on, we’re meant to see the IRA as not just a bunch of nationalists who are a little too militant for their own good, not just one of ‘two bad sides,’ but as just pure, unmitigated evil. The evil side of the Western empire isn’t even to be considered as such: they’re just ‘mainstream society’ now; in the neoliberal new world order that just defeated the Soviet Union, this globalizing capitalist ‘rules-based order’ is just the way things are. If you try to rebel against it, you won’t just be killed, you’ll be forgotten by most people; history will vilify and blacken your name, and you’ll be marginalized in ways that not even blacks and LGBT people are these days.

The man Fergus is supposed to hit is an aging, arthritic judge. He’s to be shot on the street as he’s struggling to get out of his car and go with his security men into a building. His weakness is again to elicit our sympathy for him, as Jody was sympathized with. We’re not meant to feel any sympathy for, say, the unarmed Irish protestors who were gunned down on Bloody Sunday, for that sort of thing is never mentioned in the film.

Because he wants Dil to be unrecognizable to Jude (who’s seen him with her), Peter, and any other IRA members, Fergus takes her to her hair salon and cuts her hair short. He’d have her without makeup and dressed in Jody’s old cricket clothes. This removal of her feminine trappings thus strips her of her sexual power, not only depriving Dil of the femininity she wants to be able to express to the world, but also of what makes her feel desirable to him, thus making her feel especially insecure and vulnerable to his leaving her.

There is thus more Samson symbolism here, in Dil’s loss of power through her haircut from her–as she suspects–male Delilah, for she fears that he’ll betray her and leave her. In another reversal of sex roles, her dressing like Jody is what, from a transwoman’s point of view, would truly feel like cross-dressing. Still, her dressing like Jody must feel like, from Fergus’s point of view, his successful protecting of Jody where he previously failed to do so.

This Samson and Delilah symbolism brings up some important themes in The Crying Game, including loyalty vs betrayal, and having vs lacking the strength to fight one’s enemies. Samson eventually grows his hair back, the source of his strength, and defeats his enemies. He’s betrayed by Delilah, as Jody is betrayed by Jude, and Dil–jealous that Jude is about to steal “Jimmy” from her–fears his betrayal. But the greatest betrayal of all, though not properly reflected on by the average viewer of this film, is Fergus’s betrayal of Ireland, and his weak caving in to the UK through Jody and Dil, as symbolized by his haircut.

Fergus finally tells Dil, who’s drunk and in her flat, about the IRA plot to kidnap and kill Jody, and Fergus’s involvement in the plot. So betrayed does she feel by “Jimmy” that, while he’s asleep on her bed, she ties his hands and feet to the bedposts; she also takes out a pistol. Since he can’t shoot the judge now, Peter does it instead and gets killed by the judge’s security. Jude goes over with her pistol to Dil’s flat to confront Fergus.

Dil is in a most ironic situation here: a transwoman dressed like a man and thus feeling symbolically (though, of course, not literally) castrated, that is, having lost her sexual power. Still, with that phallic pistol in her hands and pointing it at Jude, she’s as much a phallic woman (!) as armed Jude is in a symbolic sense.

Knowing that Delilah-Jude used “those tits and that arse” to lure Jody in, Dil shoots and kills her. Fergus, however, takes the blame for the murder and goes to jail so Dil can go free.

It’s interesting how, in this confrontation between Dil and Jude, we see a case of strong women–be they cis or trans, it doesn’t matter–as part of a camouflaging of and a distraction from anti-imperialist struggle, just as the issues of prejudice against blacks and LGBT people have been used as such camouflage in this film. As I said above, eradicating capitalist imperialism–and its alienating divisiveness–is the best way to ensure an enduring protection for these people against these prejudices, but liberals wish to maintain the privileges of that imperialism while pretending to care about eradicating those prejudices–hence, this film.

Indeed, how does the film end?…with an Irishman in jail for a murder of an Irishwoman committed by a UK citizen. His sacrifice is seen by Dil as a Christ-like love (John 15:13), and Christ was crucified for having attempted to rise up against Roman imperialism, by the way. As far as other relevant Biblical references are concerned, when Dil visits Fergus in jail several months later, we see her hair growing back, like Samson’s–she’s getting her power back.

Now, remember, a British armoured vehicle is what actually hit and killed Jody, not any of the IRA, who were fighting to liberate Ireland from British imperialism. All the IRA agents in the film are dead. Fergus has given up his liberty to save that of a Brit.

The real crying game of this film thus is how sympathy is generated for marginalized people–blacks and LGBT people–which is in itself perfectly warranted, but done so here at the expense of an historically victimized people whose side of the story is never told, not even in passing. The Irish are the truly marginalized people in The Crying Game: denigrated, vilified…never heard.

Earthquake

It’d only
take one
fleeting
moment
to ruin a
person’s
life, with
one bit of
bad luck,
and a poor
foundation.

What
was tall and
seemingly sturdy is
now an unsalvageable wreck.
One is homeless from a rent increase,
loss of a spouse, natural disaster, or a war.
A system based on profit collapses, makes us poor.

Analysis of ‘In the Wake of Poseidon’

I: Introduction

In the Wake of Poseidon is King Crimson‘s second studio album, released in 1970. It came into being during a period of great instability in the band, since founding members Ian McDonald (alto sax, flute, clarinet, Mellotron, vibraphone, and backing vocals) and drummer Michael Giles quit after the band’s American tour. To make matters worse, lead singer/bassist Greg Lake would also leave, during the recording sessions of Poseidon, to cofound ELP.

Though the album was well-received by critics upon its release, citing the execution and production quality as better than its predecessor, Poseidon has since been regarded as something of a mere copy of In the Court of the Crimson King. Indeed, apart from “Peace–A Beginning,” all the tracks from Side One of Poseidon are parallels of those on Side One of the first album. Furthermore, on Side Two of Poseidon, towards the end of “The Devil’s Triangle,” there’s a clip from the title track of the previous album, the “Ah…ah, ah-ah, ah, ah-ah” vocals.

Still, in spite of what would seem legitimate criticisms of this reworking of the first album in the way guitarist/leader Robert Fripp would have had it, I’ve always preferred Poseidon to Crimson King: I find this second album to be bolder and more colourful than the first (though I consider the lyrics of the first album to be preferable overall to the obscurantism of those of the second). In an attempt to rationalize this ‘redoing’ of the first album, I’d say that Poseidon can be seen as the ‘epitaph,’ if you will, of Crimson King, a kind of ‘lament’ over the demise of the great original lineup.

Here is a link to all the album’s lyrics, and here is a link to all the tracks from the album, including the shorter single version of “Cat Food,” “Groon” (the B-side of the “Cat Food” single), and Greg Lake’s guide-vocal version of “Cadence and Cascade”.

Apart from the links to the first album that I’ve noted above, the second album has other links to the original lineup. Giles was retained as a ‘guest drummer’ for Poseidon, and two of its tracks are based on music the original band played live: “Pictures of a City” is based on “A Man, a City,” and “The Devil’s Triangle” is based on “Mars,” an instrumental improvisation based in turn on “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from Gustav Holst‘s The Planets.

In fact, as noted above, Lake even recorded a ‘guide vocal’ for “Cadence and Cascade” in an uncharacteristically unexpressive voice; not to bad-mouth replacement singer Gordon Haskell for his excellent performance on the recording used on Poseidon, but if Lake was available to sing the track, why didn’t he do so with his usual expressivity, then Haskell could have debuted on bass and vocals for Lizard?

Many of the themes of the first album are repeated here on the second: the horrors of war, modern alienation, capitalism, political corruption, and fear of the end of the world. The theme of modern alienation is in abundant supply in “Pictures of a City,” this album’s counterpart to “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

But as a sharp contrast to all of this negativity, remaining original members Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield gave us a trilogy of tracks on the ideal of peace. Of course, this ideal can never be realized if the issues of the preceding paragraph are not dealt with, but it’s good to be reminded of peace as a goal worth striving for, on three occasions spread out over the course of the album.

II: Peace–A Beginning

“Peace–A Beginning” opens with heavy reverb that will die out slowly over the course of the short track. Lake is singing a cappella in C minor. The four-line verse he sings makes references, however indirectly, to the four elements: air (“the wind”), fire (“lit by the flame”), earth (“the mountain”), and water (“the ocean” and “the river”); these are all identified with a personified peace.

Such basic, fundamental elements point in the direction of unity and permanence, which is fitting, given that peace will “never end.” It’s also fitting that there are two references to water, rather than just one; one of these is the ocean, appropriate for an album called In the Wake of Poseidon, the title track of which will deal more with the four elements.

When Lake sings the last word, we can hear Fripp softly play four notes on his guitar: A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp. Then we go into the next song.

III: Pictures of a City

Since this song is Poseidon‘s equivalent of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” it’s fitting that we hear saxophones in it, played by McDonald’s replacement, saxist/flautist Mel Collins. His jazzy playing of the saxes reinforces the contemporary urban feel of the song. The band is playing in G minor, in a kind of twelve-bar blues before the first verse.

Rather than present any kind of narrative, Sinfield just gives us a series of urban images, true to the title of the song, as well as the sounds of the city, and the feelings that result from such sights and sounds.

“Concrete” gives us a “cold face,” leaving us “stark sharp” and “glass eyed,” lacking expression. Such are the alienating effects of modern urban life: removed from nature, with the city’s polluted air, fire breathing out smoke from cars’ exhaust pipes, earth covered up and suffocated, if you will, under concrete, and water made filthy through sewage, we’re also disconnected from community. The contaminating of the four elements means there can be no peace.

There’s a considerable amount of internal rhyme and assonance in these verses: “face cased,” “stark sharp,” “bright light scream beam,” “neon wheel,” “spice ice dance chance,” “mouth dry tongue tied.”

The third line of the first verse vividly portrays the problems of driving in the big city: road rage, screeching brakes, the honking of horns, and car accidents. Never mind wars between nations–one often finds oneself in a kind of war just by driving in a busy city.

The white of “red white green white” suggests light, like that of the “neon wheel.” Note the red and green of traffic lights, fittingly mentioned right after the “brake and squeal” of impatient drivers. Note also the absence of the yellow traffic light: one hurries up and waits, but never drives slowly.

After the first verse, we return to the jazzy twelve-bar blues riff of the harmonized saxes and guitar. City life sure can give you the blues.

Much of the imagery of the second verse, especially its first line, suggests how urban alienation leads to a desperate attempt to connect with others by looking for love in all the wrong places: “Dream flesh love chase perfumed skin.” There are other “tinseled sin[s]” going on, though. There’s the “greased hand” of political corruption and bribery. One’s teeth one ought to hide so the people we’re cheating don’t know of one’s wicked motives. “Pasteboard time slot sweat and spin” suggests the daily grind of the nine-to-five job, or wage slavery under capitalism.

This verse ends with Fripp playing a chromatic ascension of high notes going up to A-sharp, which leads into “42nd at Treadmills,” the fast middle-section equivalent of “Mirrors,” from “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Since this song is about the immorality of the city, I can interpret “Treadmill” in terms of its old use as a punishment for prisoners in the UK and US of the 19th century, used to exert labour from them, an effective metaphor for wage slavery. “42nd” suggests a doubling of the evil of “21st” from the original song.

Like “Mirrors,” “42nd at Treadmill” is essentially in a 12-bar blues structure (a cycle of four bars of the tonic chord, two of the subdominant chord, two of the tonic again, two of the dominant chord, and two again of the tonic). In fact, much of this section is simply a sped-up version of the 12-bar blues riff heard before each of the first two verses.

After this comes a soft, slow variation on the 12-bar blues structure, suggesting the night time and everyone having gone to sleep…though since this song was initially inspired by New York City, ‘the city that never sleeps,’ during King Crimson’s American tour of late 1969 and early 1970, perhaps we should imagine people tossing and turning in their beds, especially at this section’s dissonant ending, which suggests the morning and therefore the need to wake up and face yet another grueling work day.

With the final verse, instead of getting images of city life, we get what is largely the effect of city life on its residents–the alienation, brokenness, and blindness of those without political or class consciousness. Blinded by drunkenness and aimless partying, these people can’t communicate or see their reality for what it is. They’re doomed in an industrialized, urban hell.

The song ends with that chromatic ascension of high notes on Fripp’s guitar, but this time ending on B and introducing a chaotic, dissonant ending like the one for “21st Century Schizoid Man,” though I find this one to be far darker, and therefore better, than the first one. Also, you can hear in this one Fripp’s signature screaming guitar phrases, in which he quickly strums dissonant, high-pitched chords like the splintery ones you hear on “Sailor’s Tale.”

IV: Cadence and Cascade

This song is Poseidon’s equivalent to “I Talk to the Wind.” It features Fripp’s lyrical acoustic guitar playing, Haskell’s lead vocal as mentioned above, and some lovely flute solos by Collins. The song is in E major, Fripp opening with combinations of single notes, strums, and arpeggios in the tonic chord, an A-major chord, an E-major 7th chord, and A major again.

Haskell’s singing introduces two groupies, Cadence and Cascade, and the man they’re interested in, Jade, who depending on the interpretation of Sinfield’s lyric is variously portrayed as, for example, a singer, or a Silk Road merchant trading goods from the Far East. The names “Cadence and Cascade” suggest the two women’s beauty (more on the meanings of their names later); “Jade” suggests his wealth.

The women worship him for his wealth, power, and fame, but grow disappointed with him as they get to know him better: “As his veil fell aside…They found him just a man.” His phony appeal is comparable to that of a prostitute: “Sad paper courtesan.”

In the world of traditional sex roles, which still largely existed in the West as of 1970, women found their only option for gaining wealth and social status was through a man, so when they met a rich and powerful man, they idealized him…only to find later that he is just as faulty as any other man of modest means. Masculinity is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, even approached, let alone attained.

The bridge opens with Fripp playing one of his “devices,” a celeste, with an ascension of notes: B, C-sharp, E, F-sharp, and G-sharp; this is heard over an A major seventh chord, then with the switch to an A minor seventh chord, we hear celeste notes of G-sharp, A, B, C, and D, E, and F-sharp. We also hear Keith Tippett‘s jazzy piano in the background.

The verse of the bridge has Haskell singing about the lovemaking between the groupies and Jade, their worshipping of his wealth (“sequin,” and “velvet-gloved hand”) and fame (“Cascade kissed his name”). In a larger sense, the groupies’ worship of Jade can represent the idolatry of famous people in general, and the simping for billionaires. This applies to men and women, as worshippers and worshipped.

After the first flute solo, we hear a refrain of the “sad paper courtesan” verse, except that Cadence and Cascade now “knew [Jade] just a man” (my emphasis). The groupies have left him behind in their disappointment in him.

One of the biggest problems in our world is that, because of the worship of fame, wealth, status, and power, people keep aspiring to it, instead of sharing everything so that the basic needs of everyone are met. We aim for these heights, then in disappointment we fall…which leads me to my next point.

Apart from the groupies’ names suggesting their beauty, “Cadence and Cascade”–something Haskell sings several times leading into Collins’s second flute solo–are also words coming from the Latin world cadere, meaning “to fall.” There’s the musical cadence of resolving a harmonic progression back to the tonic, and a cascade is a waterfall (the element of water again, as jade is associated with the element of earth). Both meanings suggest musical or natural beauty, or the beauty of a woman’s cascade of long, wavy hair flowing down to her shoulders. There’s also the fall of the girls’ disappointment on knowing Jade is “just a man.”

V: In the Wake of Poseidon (including “Libra’s Theme”)

This track reworks the first album in two ways: the title, of course, parallels that of the last song on Side Two of the first album; more properly, though, this song is a reworking of “Epitaph,” the last song on Side One of the first album.

Sinfield apparently rewrote the lyric to this song about twenty-five times to make it tie in with the cover art, which therefore should be discussed now. I’ll describe each of the dozen faces not as they appear on the outer album cover–which shows a painting called The 12 Archetypes, or The 12 Faces of Humankind, by Tammo de Jongh–but in order of appearance as Sinfield brings them up in his lyric.

The Observer, a bald old man with spectacles up above his brow and his hand on his chin, looks pensive and scientifically-minded. His elements are Air and Earth. The opening lines, “Plato’s spawn cold ivied eyes/Snare truth in bone and globe,” refer to him. He represents Western science in the service of cold-blooded imperialism, taking over the globe and, exploiting it, reducing all indigenous resistance to skulls and bones.

The Joker, a harlequin painted in reds and yellows and smiling in a triangular hat, is the subject of the next two lines of the first verse. His elements being Fire and Air, he’d “coin pointless games/Sneer jokes in parrot’s robe.” His sardonic humor points out our everyday foibles and political corruption, but it’s “pointless” in how it does nothing to solve our problems.

The Actress is next. She’s Egyptian, with long pearl earrings and necklaces, and with tears running down her cheeks. Her elements are Water and Fire. She is represented in the lines, “Dame Scarlet Queen/Sheds sudden theatre rain.” She weeps for the sins of the world, as does…

…The Enchantress, her long dark hair going across her face. She has Water and Earth as her elements. She “knows every human pain.”

As I said above, the title track is especially concerned with the four elements, two of which are associated with each of the twelve archetypes, as we’ve seen and will continue to see. All four are also heard twice in the next verse, a bridge between the first and third verses, this latter continuing to depict the twelve archetypal faces.

Though the elements are associated with peace, as we saw in “Peace–A Beginning,” the “World [is] on the scales,” with war and destruction on one scale, balanced on the other with peace and its four elements. This “Balance of change” means the world is teetering “on the scales” between peace and war. Which side will win? Which will outweigh the other? Will it be the side that wants peace and justice for everyone, or will it be the side of the imperialistic warmongers, whose recklessness is pushing us all ever closer to nuclear armageddon?

This song, and therefore the entire album, has as much relevance for us today as it did back in 1970, with its Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation between the US/NATO and the USSR. We’re experiencing a new, and utterly needless, new Cold War between the Western, NATO-allied powers on one side, and Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran on the other. Between the two sides are thousands of nuclear weapons, and no attempt at détente is even being considered.

To return to the archetypes, the next one is The Patriarch, an old philosopher with long white hair and a beard. He’s frowning, with a furrowed brow. Surrounding him are such shapes as flowers and snowflakes. His elements are Air and Water. Referring to him are the lines, “Bishop’s kings spin judgement’s blade/Scratch ‘Faith’ on nameless graves.” The Church controls the heads of state–The Patriarch being one of these stern religious leaders–and it pushes the kings to fight ‘holy’ wars. (One might think of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely persuading Henry V to invade France.)

The Old Woman would “hoard ash and sand.” She has a wrinkled, sad face, and her hair is wrapped in white. Her elements are Earth and Air. Such women are “Harvest hags,” peasant farmers, whom we associate with the working class, yet these peasants are betraying the fellow proletarians in that they “rack rope and chain for slaves,” the next archetype to be discussed.

The Slave, a black African with earrings and a nose-ring, has Earth and Fire as her elements. The slaves “fear fermented words,” that is, they’re scared of revolution, and like the kulaks who hoarded grain during the famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, they “rear to spoil the feast.” This lack of solidarity among the poor is what allows the rich to stay in power.

The Fool, the laughing man to the centre-left of the front cover of the album, with the pink face, the blond beard, and the flowers in his hair, is “the mad man [who] smiles/To him it matters least.” In his foolish, delusional state, he doesn’t care about the corruption in the world, because like The Slave and the Old Woman, he has no class consciousness. His elements are Fire and Water.

After this verse is an instrumental passage that includes the (Libra’s?) theme (“Air, fire, earth, and water”), only it’s played by Fripp on the Mellotron instead of sung by Lake. I suspect that part of the reason this song is called “In the Wake of Poseidon” is that the god of sea and earthquakes best represents all four elements: the earth and water aspects hardly need to be elaborated on; air can be included in its being blown as wind over the sea, making waves, and Poseidon is known for his fiery temper–consider how he treated Odysseus after he blinded the god’s cyclopean son, Polyphemus. I’m assuming this section is “Libra’s Theme,” given our “world on the scales.”

To go back to the archetypal faces, the next one is The Warrior, wearing a steel helmet and a full black beard, and baring his teeth, ready to fight. His elements are Fire and Earth, and he’s represented in these lines: “Heroes’ hands drain stones for blood/To whet the scaling knife.” The weapons of war wound not only bodies, but the Earth as well.

Next comes The Logician, a wizard with dark hair and a long dark beard. He’s holding a wand in one hand while the other is held up high. There are stars all around him, presumably the magic from one of his spells. He’s represented with the lines, “Magi blind with visions light/Net death in dread of life.” He represents the theologian or philosopher who is ‘blinded by the light’ of his own dogma, preferring death and the peace of a presumed heaven over the pain of living here.

The naïve sheep of these religious shepherds are represented in The Child, a girl with long blonde hair and a face of sweet innocence. The necklace she’s wearing has a white key on it. Her elements are Water and Air, and these lines represent her in the song: “Their children kneel in Jesus’ till/They learn the price of nails.” To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must be as a child (Luke 18:17); hence, the key on The Child’s necklace (Matthew 16:19). Still, learning “the price of nails” means learning either to submit to the powers-that-be, whether they’re religious or political, or to suffer as Jesus did for defying them.

And the last archetype is The Mother Earth, or Mother Nature. We see her lying asleep in the grass in left profile, with dark skin and flowers and butterflies all around her. Her elements are Earth and Water, and the last two lines of the song refer to her: “Whilst all around our Mother Earth/Waits balanced on the scales.” Our Earth sits passively as mankind decides the fate of all living creatures who have her as their home: nuclear war, or peace? A healthy planet, or ecocide? Our collective fate is being weighed in the balance, “on the scales,” by psychopathic leaders who care about wealth and maintaining their power, and not about us.

To understand the deeper meaning of archetypes, one must look into analytical psychology, Jung‘s offshoot from Freudian psychoanalysis. Jungian psychology has a grounding in such psychoanalytical concepts as the unconscious and repression, but unlike Freud the atheist, Jung developed an interest in myth, mysticism, and religion far beyond just their psychological symbolism. As a result, he broke with Freud, who would later speak derisively of Jung as one who would “aspire to be a prophet” (Freud, page 280).

The archetypes are characters that reside in the collective unconscious, that aspect of the unconscious we all share and that has been inherited throughout human history. These include the Sage (which can find its equivalent in the song and album cover as The Patriarch), Innocent (The Child), Hero (Warrior), Magician (Logician), Jester (Joker), and Creator or Caregiver (The Mother Earth). The point is that we have all of these characters, hidden deep down in our unconscious; they influence how we think and interact in the world. To this extent, they control us, and therefore control mankind’s collective fate.

In this song, we can see how unhappy these twelve are, or how manipulative (or manipulated) they are. They’re in the depths of the ocean of the collective unconscious, so “the wake of Poseidon” is, literally speaking, the making conscious all of these characters that reside deep within the sea-god’s realm. If we can make their sorrow conscious, we can integrate them, become whole and healthy, then work to save our planet from ecocide and nuclear annihilation. Hence, the deep relevance of this song back in 1970 and, even more, today.

VI: Peace–A Theme

This is a short instrumental for solo acoustic guitar, about a minute long, in A major.

Fripp plays the melody Lake sang a cappella on “Peace–A Beginning,” as well as the bridge melody (“Searching for…, etc.) that we will hear on “Peace–An End.” Fripp opens with a strum of an open A major chord with an added sixth.

From this chord, he embellishes the melody Lake sang before with an appoggiatura: he does a hammer-on and a pull-off as part of the continuing melody with E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, he strums a D-flat minor 7th chord, and single notes D-flat and E, then a hammer-on to F-sharp, and a strum of a D-major 7th chord, the E, D-flat, and an A major chord, with a high note of D-flat.

Next, he strums the D-major 7th chord, and plays the above appoggiatura with the E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, there’s the strum of the D-flat minor 7th chord again, then a strum of an E dominant 9th chord, then a strum of a D major 6/9 chord, and an ending of the melody that includes another appoggiatura, a hammer-on and pull-off of F-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E, then the D-major 7th chord again.

All of the above is repeated, then we come to the bridge (“Searching for…,” etc., in “Peace–An End”). Fripp strums an A-major chord, then an A chord with a major second instead of a major third, then the A major six chord again. Then he plays arpeggiated chords of D-flat suspension 4th and a D-flat major. Next, a melody of F-sharp, A, B, D-sharp, E, D-sharp, B, G-sharp, and F-sharp is played over chords of D-major 7th, D-flat minor, and D-major 7th again.

After an E suspension 4th chord and an E major chord in the dominant, Fripp repeats the bridge section as described in the previous paragraph, but he ends the piece with a strum of an A 6/9 chord, only without a third, and with the sixth in the bass; then he softly hits an E-flat, a flattened fifth for A major.

VII: Cat Food

This song is another example of King Crimson doing a perverse variation on the 12-bar blues structure, with Tippett mixing in dissonant tone clusters with his more usual jazzy piano playing, and with the usual 4/4 time getting bars of 6/8 thrown in between from time to time. The song is in E minor.

The song is satirizing capitalism and consumerism, and all of the maddening effects these have on people, hence the piano discords. A woman shopping in a supermarket wants to talk to the manager, presumably to make a complaint. “Grooning to the muzak” sounds like an ironic comment on Fripp’s instrumental with drummer Michael Giles and his bassist brother, Peter (who plays all the bass parts on this album instead of Lake), “Groon,” Side B to the “Cat Food” single. Groon is a pun on groan, a complaining sound.

The blatantly atonal “Groon,” truly an acquired taste for most listeners, is a piece of avant-garde jazz that sounds like a Cecil Taylor improvisation, but with Fripp’s guitar replacing Taylor’s piano. The supermarket shopper, however, is annoyed with the muzak, or ‘elevator music,’ which is annoying at the other extreme: it’s music so bland, so ‘nice,’ and so conventional that it desperately needs a little dissonance to make it half-way interesting to listen to. The contrast between “Groon” and muzak is also the contrast between music as experimental art and music as sellable commodity.

She lays out her goods, as if to complain about them to the manager. They’re all “conveniently frozen,” so she can “come back for more” as soon as she’s finished with them. This is convenient for capitalists, who can make more money when she comes back. Ironically, this ‘convenience’ is what she has to complain about.

Next, the woman shopper is cooking at home, whipping up “a chemical brew/Croaking to a neighbour as she polishes a sabre.” The “chemical brew” suggests some kind of processed food from the supermarket, superficially tasty, but ultimately bad for you. Just as she ‘grooned’ to the muzak, now she ‘croaks’ in complaint to a neighbour, suggesting the social alienation that comes from the same source as the fetishized commodities that she’s bought–capitalism. The ‘sabre’ she polishes is presumably her cooking knife, but calling it a sabre evokes the idea that it’s used for killing rather than feeding.

She “knows how to flavour a stew,” but her meal is “poisoned especially for you,” because as I said above, this processed food, in its “tin,” is bad for you. “Hurri Curri” sounds like a brand name of cat food, or its particular flavour. It’s also a pun on hara kari, a form of ritual suicide, given how willingly eating such innutritious, processed food, this ‘hurried curry,’ this instant food, is bad for you.

Because the capitalist system is focused more on profit than on providing a nutritious product, we get the blues from it, hence the song’s 12-bar structure. The alienation from capitalism causes mental health problems, too, hence the piano dissonances, Lake’s mad cackling at the end of this second verse, and “your mother’s quite insane,” in the repeated bridge verse.

“Cat food…again?” sounds like a complaint about eating the same old crap over and over again. Cat food, with its unpleasant smell and even more unpleasant contents, is a metaphor for all the unhealthy junk food we all eat at least once in a while, enriching its producers.

“A fable on the label” of so many of these food products, stuffed in cans, suggests the lie that they’re full of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritious ingredients, when actually the processing and artificial colours, additives, and preservatives ruin the said nutrients, in all likelihood. It’s “drowning in miracle sauce,” meaning that the sauce, however superficially tasty it may be, is killing the nutrients by drowning them. With all of this understanding, the last two lines of the song should be self-explanatory.

The song ends with improvising over the 12-bar blues structure, with its alternating of a few bars of 4/4 with one in 6/8. Michael Giles does a few great drum licks here, as Tippett does with his colourful, jazzy piano.

VIII: The Devil’s Triangle

As I said above, this piece evolved out of “Mars,” the instrumental improvisation that the original King Crimson lineup played in their live shows, based in turn on the first movement of Holst’s The Planets. For this reason, I see the resulting studio version as still thematically linked to the horrors of war, and it’s therefore fitting to have it immediately precede “Peace–An End,” for dialectical purposes as I’ll explain later.

The piece includes three sections, titled “Merday Morn,” “Hand of Sceiron,” and “Garden of Worm.” The first part gives partial writing credit to McDonald, but not the last part, which includes the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King,” which he wrote with Sinfield.

“Merday Morn” opens with a long, slow fade-in: the listener may get impatient waiting to hear any music. It’s as if the music were the sun slowly rising over the watery horizon of the ocean, the beginning of the ‘day of the sea,’ hence the name of this section. We sense that Poseidon is waking up, hence the album’s title, taken literally.

Recall that ‘the Devil’s Triangle’ is another name for the Bermuda Triangle, the legend surrounding the place–the three corners of which are Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico–being that ships and airplanes entering it mysteriously disappear. One senses the fiery wrath of the sea-god here, and why the music is so spooky.

In the entire piece, we have all four elements represented: in “Merday Morn,” the sea obviously represents water, and the rising sun represents fire (as well as Poseidon’s fiery wrath); in “Hand of Sceiron,” air is represented at the end of the section by the sound of strong winds, as if ships are entering a storm; and “Garden of Worm” suggests the element of earth, symbolic of a grave for the dead in sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, the ground of the seabed.

When we finally start hearing the music, we hear Michael Giles playing a martial beat in 5/4, accompanied by his brother, Peter, on the bass. Fripp is providing melody and harmony on the Mellotron, at first with string section tape, then, when the music starts to get tense, he uses brass section tape. To add to the tension, we’ll hear him play a lot of tritone intervals, which are fitting as the diabolus in musica.

“Hand of Sceiron” begins with a foghorn sound, suggesting that ships are approaching a dangerous area at sea. Along with the tritones heard on the Mellotron, we hear lots more dissonance on, for example, Tippett’s piano. This section ends, as noted above, with those winds. Sceiron refers to violent winds in a myth from an area described in Book IX, Chapter One (section 4) of Strabo‘s Geographica. A ticking metronome sounds like a clock that is ticking towards the end of one’s life.

Of course, the tension is raised to a climax in the “Garden of Worm” section, with its faster tempo and heightened dissonance. Independent layers of sound are put together: the 5/4 martial beat heard on the drums, with the bass in 4/4 playing descending fifths, and dissonance in the Mellotron and piano tone clusters. It all descends into chaos, including, by way of xenochrony, a brief passage for string section, and the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King.” It all ends with flurries of flute notes and a soft, arpeggiated resolution in E major on Fripp’s acoustic guitar.

So, what does all of this music mean? What does a ship entering the Bermuda Triangle and going missing there, all the passengers presumed dead, signify? The piece’s link with “Mars,” with the martial beat (though different from Holst’s original rhythm, because Holst’s estate did not give Fripp permission to use it), suggests the symbolism of war, too. But what do a ship lost in a sea storm, and soldiers killed or missing in action in a war, symbolize in “The Devil’s Triangle,” and In the Wake of Poseidon as a whole?

Recall the archetypes from the title track and the album cover, and how these reside in the collective unconscious. In the wake of Poseidon means ‘as a(n unpleasant) consequence of the sea-god.’ The realm of Poseidon, the ocean, is symbolic of the unconscious, both personal and collective. So as a consequence of confronting Poseidon and his tempestuous ways, we awaken the unconscious and discover those unpleasant parts of ourselves that we want to reject, repress, or project onto other people. To confront them is to confront what Jung called the Shadow. This is a scary, but necessary and enlightening experience.

“The Devil’s Triangle” begins in silence, and with a slow fade-in, because such a beginning represents not only the unawareness of unconscious conflicts, but also the unwillingness to learn of them, the resistance against them. As the music gets more and more dissonant, one is becoming more and more aware of the unpleasant, rejected parts of the Shadow.

The social problems dealt with in the other songs–urban alienation and decadence in “Pictures of a City,” hero-worship of wealth and celebrity in “Cadence and Cascade,” and capitalist consumerism in “Cat Food”–have their psychological roots in these unconscious, repressed conflicts. The way to end the conflicts and attain peace of mind is not to avoid them, by sailing around the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche, but to go through it and risk the dangers therein.

And dangerous it is. Jung warned of these risks when attempting to do what he called individuation through Shadow work, dream interpretation, and Active Imagination. One is advised, when doing this inner work, to have someone monitoring you, ideally a fully-trained therapist specializing in Jungian psychology. Otherwise, one risks navigating the treacherous waters of repressed traumas, leading to psychological fragmentation, a psychotic break with reality (what Lacan called The Real), which is what the “Garden of Worm” section represents.

The significant thing, though, that happens if you can make it through the maelstrom symbolized by the ending of “The Devil’s Triangle” (as Jung apparently did by bravely facing the demons of his own unconscious), and can integrate the darker aspects of your mind with the lighter ones, you can come out the other side and find peace and bliss, as symbolized by the pretty flurry of flute notes and Fripp’s acoustic guitar ending.

(Such psychological integration includes a man confronting his anima, as represented by the six female faces on the album cover and described in the title track, and a woman confronting her animus, the six male archetypes on the cover and in the title track. In this connection, the sea can be masculine, Poseidon, or feminine, Thalassa. La mer est la mère.)

I’ve written many times about my personal interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros, as representing the dialectical relationship between opposites as the meeting ends (the serpent’s head and tail) of a circular continuum (the serpent’s coiled body) including all intermediate points between the extremes. We can hear this oneness in contradiction in “The Devil’s Triangle” in how the music starts in peaceful silence, then the music comes in and gets increasingly dissonant, a move from the serpent’s biting head, down its coiled body towards its bitten tail. At the tail of extreme chaos and pain, we cross over to the head and back to peace and bliss, leading thus to…

IX: Peace–An End

One interesting thing about the “Peace” trilogy is how this last one is musically in ternary form (ABA), while “Peace–A Theme” is in binary form (AABB), and “Peace–A Beginning” is just the A theme heard twice. It’s as though peace begins as just a germinating idea, then it develops, and now it is complete, after having gone through the necessary hell of “The Devil’s Triangle.”

Furthermore, the first part is essentially a cappella, the second just an acoustic guitar solo, and this last part has both Lake and Fripp. It is musically thus the Hegelian dialectic triad of thesis (“Beginning”), negation (“Theme”), and sublation (“End”), this last part not only being complete, but also a resolution of the contradiction of the previous two parts. In fact, the first two parts ended without perfect resolutions: the A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp on Fripp’s guitar ending “Beginning”; the A 6-9 chord with the sixth in the bass and the E-flat ending “Theme.”

Only now do we have a truly peaceful resolution in E major, with Lake’s last sung note, on “war,” being a D-flat, a major sixth in relation to the tonic, and so it’s reasonably consonant. It suggests, in combination with “war,” a somewhat tenuous peace–since when is perfect peace ever realized, anyway?–but it’s peace all the same, and therefore a fitting end to the album.

Two of the four elements are mentioned in the first line of the first verse–water and air (“sea” and “wind”). Water will again be mentioned in the first line of the last verse, too–“stream.” The reference to “dawn on a day without end” suggests earth and fire, in that we imagine the sun peeking over the horizon, that is, over the land, hills, and mountains in the morning. The fire of the sun will shine on an eternal day, too.

Because the four elements are so fundamentally what make up everything as we imagine it here, they bring us closer to the blissful oneness of Brahman, and therefore to peace, nirvana. Those twelve archetypal faces are each associated with two of the elements; and since attaining psychological peace, as I described it above–with my ouroboros symbolism–involves confronting the twelve archetypes in the Shadow of the ocean of the unconscious, then peace is in this way also associated with the elements.

A bird sings as you smile because it is pleased with your happiness–it is your friend. Peace causes a foe to love you as a friend; we must take those troublesome archetypes of the unconscious and make them our friends–this is how we change war into peace. We bring love to a child, like the sweet, innocent girl on the cover with the white key on her necklace. She has the key to heaven, remember, because one has to be as a child to enter heaven, the realm of peace.

You search for your friends, but can’t find them, because you foolishly don’t realize how close they are to you, like the nirvana and Buddhahood that the lost vagabond son of the parable doesn’t realize he already has, personified by his father. You search for yourself everywhere outside, but you don’t realize that you have to do the inner work, as described in my interpretation of “The Devil’s Triangle,” to find yourself within, in the twelve archetypes, the four elements, and the Atman that is already one with the oceanic feeling of Brahman.

The heart is what empathy flows from, so that’s why peace is a stream from there. Breadth, that is, the width of tolerance and open-mindedness, is the dawn, or beginning, of peace.

The fire of the sun will burn forever for peace, that is, without end; yet peace is also the end, ironically, like death, of the war. The war people would have had in mind back in 1970 was, of course, the Vietnam War, wishing it would end.

There are other wars, though, besides literal ones, that need to end. There’s the emotional war of psychological conflict, as dramatized in “The Devil’s Triangle” and the title track. The Jungian inner work described above to integrate the light and dark parts of the psyche, the conscious and unconscious, to bring about inner peace, can be compared to the Buddhist’s quest for nirvana.

Nirvana literally refers to the blowing out of a flame representing desire, and therefore suffering also. Nirvana is the resulting peace from having extinguished the fire of the delusion of a permanent ego. Yet Sinfield’s lyric, of peace as the dawn of a day without end, implies a permanently burning fire, while peace is also the end…and nirvana is the end of suffering.

How can we reconcile this contradiction, of a permanent fire and its extinguishment as both meaning peace? We can do so as the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism does, by equating nirvana with samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. We did so before with the dialectical interpretation of attaining peace by first going through the Devil’s Triangle, by passing first through hell to get to heaven. Similarly, the bodhisattva first swears off nirvana until he’s helped all living creatures to get there, hence they all travel there on the Great Vehicle, that boat that must weather Poseidon’s storm at sea.

Note how Lake’s singing on “Peace–An End” brings back the reverb at the end, just as “Peace–A Beginning” started with reverb. This beginning and ending reverb thus gives us a sense that the album has come full circle, like the cyclical eternity that the ouroboros originally symbolized. In this sense, we can see how peace never ends, even in a world full of suffering. Nirvana is samsara because we can only have peace and happiness by accepting the inevitability of pain.

X: Conclusion

Based on the interpretation I’ve given above, I must say that In the Wake of Poseidon, though not exactly a masterpiece, deserves better than being dismissed as a mere copy, or sequel, of In the Court of the Crimson King. To be sure, much of the second album does rework the first, but there are other things going on that shouldn’t be ignored.

Side Two of Poseidon is essentially new (the xenochrony notwithstanding). The first album presented the problems of the world; the second album expands on the discussion of those problems, and it also proposes a solution. Most importantly of all, In the Wake of Poseidon presents a kind of Jungian odyssey through hell to get to heaven, giving it a kind of universality of human experience that makes it an album that doesn’t just live in the shadow of its predecessor, but exists in its own right.

‘The Flourishing of the Middle Class and the Arts During the Cold War: An Anomaly in the History of Capitalism,’ from Dennis Riches’s Blog

An interesting article on the post-war economic boom and the blossoming of the arts, 1945-1975, as well as the ruling class’s involvement with both.

The Flourishing of the Middle Class and the Arts During the Cold War: An Anomaly in the History of Capitalism

Analysis of ‘Chinatown’

Chinatown is a 1974 neo-noir vilm directed by Roman Polanski and written by Robert Towne. It stars Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, with John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Diane Ladd, James Hong, and Burt Young.

The film is based historically on the California water wars from the early 20th century, by which LA interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley. Chinatown was also Polanski’s last American film.

It received critical acclaim, having been nominated for eleven Oscars, with Towne winning Best Original Screenplay. The AFI placed Chinatown second in its top ten mystery films of 2008, and it is often considered one of the best films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to Towne’s screenplay (its third draft).

One of the central themes of Chinatown is jealousy, and this theme is established right at the beginning of the film, when Curly (Young) is heartbroken at seeing photos of his wife in an affair with another man. The man responsible for getting the photos to prove her infidelity is private investigator JJ “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson). The setting is LA in 1937.

Gittes’s next job will be another investigation into a possible adultery, so more jealousy–though who the jealous one actually is will be revealed much later on. For now, though, it seems that a woman (Ladd) who calls herself Evelyn Mulwray suspects that her supposed husband, Hollis Mulwray (played by Darrell Zwerling), is seeing another woman, and she wants Gittes to get proof of this through photos, as he’s done for Curly.

Hollis is chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Gittes goes to City Hall, where the former mayor, Sam Bagby (played by Roy Roberts), is arguing the case for building a dam and reservoir for Alto Vallejo. Hollis, however, is against building the new dam, since a previously constructed one on his watch gave way and claimed the lives of over five hundred people.

This issue in the story was inspired, of course, by the California water wars as mentioned above. It also links the various strands of the story together, as we shall see. These strands include the above-mentioned theme of jealousy, the schemes of the rich to build a kind of empire based on control of the water, and the way Chinatown is a kind of modern-day adaptation of Sophocles‘ Oediups Rex, as first proposed by Wayne D. McGinnis in his article in a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly.

Indeed, the drought that the locals are suffering in is analogous to the plague that the people of Thebes are suffering in Sophocles’ tragedy. Since Oedipus Rex also inspired Freud‘s Oedipus complex, and a shocking revelation of incest comes up towards the end of Chinatown, it’s useful to know that jealousy is at the centre of a child’s Oedipal love of one parent and hatred of the other. The child narcissistically wants to hog the beloved parent all to him- or herself, and hates the other parent as a rival lover.

The rival parent is hated for having made the child feel pushed to the side, slighted, marginalized. In the child’s narcissistic state, he or she wants to remain the centre of attention, or the attention of the Oedipally-desired parent in particular. Being thus marginalized causes the child to be kicked out of his or her Oedipal Eden, and marginalization is another important theme of Chinatown, since not only is this part of LA not seen until the end of the movie, only occasionally referred to, but the Chinese-American characters, such as the Mulwrays’ butler, Kahn (Hong), are treated as mere details that hover in the background of the story.

To see how Oedipus Rex, and therefore the murderous/incestuous fulfillment of the Oedipus complex, relate to Chinatown, we need to interpret the Oedipus complex in an expanded and metaphorical, Lacanian form, since the equivalent characters of the play have their roles rearranged, if not outright reversed, in the movie. Instead of a young man unwittingly marrying and impregnating his mother, we have an old man raping and impregnating his daughter, giving birth to Katherine (played by Belinda Palmer), the Antigone of the film.

Furthermore, we seem to have two Oedipuses: a good one, Gittes, who like the Theban king is determined to uncover the truth of what’s going wrong in the city, no matter how painful that revelation will be (in accordance with Wilfred R. Bion‘s interpretation of Oedipus Rex, a growing in K); and the bad Oedipus, Noah Cross (Huston), the lecherous, incestuous rapist who, like a king, owns the police and the city, and who’s responsible for the deprivation of the city’s water, as Oedipus’ incest and patricide are responsible for the plague in Thebes.

If you read the third draft of Towne’s screenplay (link above), you’ll note that Cross’s original first name is given as Julian Cross. I’m guessing that when Huston was cast in the role, they decided to change the villain’s name to Noah, for Huston played the role of Noah eight years prior in The Bible: In the Beginning…, a film he also directed (as he did The Maltese Falcon, another noir film, and his directorial debut).

A number of interesting associations can be made with these two opposing Noahs. First of all, the Biblical Noah is the hero of his story, whereas Cross is the villain of his; Noah’s family is surrounded in water in the ark, whereas Cross deprives LA of water.

A particularly interesting association between these two Noahs, though Huston’s film doesn’t depict it, is how they’re related in terms of incest. In Genesis 9:18-24, Ham sees his father, drunken Noah, naked in his tent. This alone was considered quite a serious sin at the time–a breaking of the taboo against seeing a parent naked. Ham’s sin, however, may have been far more serious.

Most Biblical commentators, both ancient and modern, have thought that Ham’s merely seeing his father naked was not a sufficiently serious sin to deserve Noah’s curse. Seeing his father naked could be a Biblical euphemism for–among other possibilities–committing incest (paternal or maternal), as one reads in the Biblical condemnation of the sin: “the nakedness of thy [family member] shalt thou not uncover…” (Leviticus 18).

So Ham may have raped naked Noah (or his wife, his patriarchal property and therefore “his nakedness,” as euphemistically expressed), as Cross rapes his daughter, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Dunaway), and we assume he has similarly lecherous designs on Evelyn’s sister/daughter, pretty Katherine, hence Evelyn’s attempts to prevent him from getting his hands on the girl.

Now, if we apply Lacan‘s more metaphorical interpretation of the Oedipus complex, the little boy suffering his doomed love for his mother can be represented in the film by Cross. His mother can be represented by Evelyn (and later, Katherine), creating a kind of Iocaste complex, but with the sexes reversed. And the interfering, hated father can be represented by Hollis, who has intervened in this perverse family melodrama, married Evelyn, and spent time with Katherine, though in a perfectly innocent way, as opposed to the love affair that, as we later learn, Cross hopes to portray it in the newspapers, to disgrace and discredit Hollis, who has also frustrated Cross by opposing his plan to build the dam.

Hollis wants the water to be publicly available to everyone in the LA area; Cross wants to deprive the area of its water so the land can be bought up cheaply, then later sold at a much higher price. Because of Hollis’s opposition to Cross’s hoarding of the water, Hollis must be killed. The hoarding of the water parallels the wish to have Evelyn first, then Katherine later. Cross, an obvious narcissist who won’t take responsibility for the effects of having abused and estranged Evelyn, is also a wealthy capitalist who doesn’t care how his greedy control of LA’s water supply is hurting the people who live there, especially the local farmers and owners of orchards. In these ways, Cross personifies what I’ve elsewhere called the narcissism of capital.

As for the woman who impersonates Evelyn at the film’s beginning–actually named Ida Sessions–she could be seen as Cross’s idealized version of Evelyn, helping him to thwart Hollis. This idealized Evelyn, however false she may be, exists as she does exclusively for Cross’s benefit; she is thus a metaphorical mirror for his narcissism, an extension of himself rather than existing in her own right, just as the child wants the Oedipally-desired parent to exist for him or her. The real Evelyn originally served this purpose as Cross’s lover, but the trauma and shame she inevitably suffered from her incestuous union with him caused her to experience psychological fragmentation (Cross, accordingly, calls her “disturbed”). This fragmentation, an emotional falling-apart, is comparable to the fragmentation a child experiences up until the mirror stage, when he sees in his reflection a unified image of himself.

This image is the ideal-I, an idealized self-image, yet it’s also false, as Ida is a false Evelyn. Ego formation during the mirror stage, in the Imaginary Order, is grounded in untruth and illusion. It’s narcissistic, bringing about a False Self, reflecting grandiosity back to the subject, as Ida’s Evelyn does for Cross.

The dyadic mother/son relationship is reproduced for Cross in a transference first onto Evelyn, then onto Ida-as-Evelyn. Cross would like to do this a third time with Katherine, but Evelyn plays the role of the Non! du père by hiding her sister/daughter from him, then by threatening him with a pistol, a symbolic castrating phallus, at the end of the film.

The characters in this modern-day adaptation of Oedipus Rex often share, or even swap, roles. As I’ve said, both Gittes and Cross share the role of Oedipus, and Evelyn, pointing her gun at her father, is paradoxically in the prohibitive paternal role of Laius, who gets killed while traveling in a vehicle on the road.

She is also, however, in the role of Oedipus at times (recall that Freud rejected Jung‘s use of the term “Electra complex,” preferring to call the father/daughter romance the feminine version of the Oedipus complex; though what’s happened between Evelyn and Cross more properly corresponds with Freud’s earlier seduction theory). Apart from her incestuous union with Cross-as-male-Iocaste, and the shame she feels from that, she also gets a bullet in the eye, the same eye as the one with the flawed iris that Gittes has noticed, paralleling Oedipus’ having blinded himself upon learning of his shameful union with his mother.

Gittes’s parallels with Oedipus don’t end with his relentless search for the truth. He is deeply flawed in his own ways, though not necessarily in the same ways as Oedipus. Gittes is outright bumbling in the many mistakes he makes. The photos taken of Hollis and Katherine cause him embarrassing publicity leading not only to a near-fistfight with a banker at the barber’s but also to a near-lawsuit with the real Evelyn. His investigation of the releasing of water from the reservoir one night not only gets him nearly washed away and killed in the rushing water, but also gets him scathed with a cut nose from the knife of one of Cross’s henchmen (a short man in a white suit played by none other than Polanski himself).

The close proximity of the cut nose (awkwardly bandaged for much of the rest of the movie) to his eyes suggests another parallel between Gittes and blinded Oedipus. Indeed, the theme of blindness vs sight, as observed in Sophocles’ tragedy, is also seen in Chinatown, in the examples as given above as well as in the following, however symbolically.

First, there are Gittes’s newly-installed Venetian blinds, which he’d appreciate Curly not damaging as he goes through his grief over his wife’s unfaithfulness. Of course, towards the end of the film, we see the black eye that Curly must have given her as revenge for her adultery. When Gittes tells the dirty joke about “screwing like a Chinaman,” he has his back to the real Evelyn, thus blind to how offensive he’s being, even though his employees–to whom he’s telling the joke–are trying to warn him to watch his mouth. So his vulgarity is another glaring fault of his. Her alienation from men’s locker room humour, as well as that of his secretary, whom he asks to leave the room so he can be free to tell the joke, is also an example of marginalization.

Recall also how he tells Evelyn, just after making love with her in her bed, that he once tried to protect a woman he loved from being hurt and ended up making sure she was hurt. This sounds like Oedipus trying everything he could to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy of his murdering his father and marrying his mother, yet he ended up fulfilling it anyway.

To get back to Cross and Evelyn, there’s no mention anywhere in the film about her mother, though in the third draft of the script (page 112, link above), she says, upon having revealed her incest with Cross to Gittes, that “the dam broke…[her] mother died…[Cross] became a little boy…[she] was fifteen…” In other words, Cross was going through his own fragmentation–he was losing his mind over his professional and personal adversities–and he found a defence from that fragmentation through a regression to infantile narcissism and an Oedipal transference, putting Evelyn in the role of a maternal Iocaste.

In this way, Cross responded to the extreme stresses of the time by reverting to the narcissistic solace of the dyadic, mother/son relationship via transference, back to the realm of the Imaginary. Still, that dyadic state keeps on being threatened by the marginalizing encroachment of third parties–Hollis, Gittes, and later, Evelyn herself when Cross jealously comes to want Katherine to complete his dyad.

A narcissist like Cross wants dyadic relationships with one person at a time–keeping things in the Imaginary–because the other person in the relationship is meant to act as a metaphorical mirror of the narcissist, as an extension of himself, like the narcissistic infant’s attitude toward the Oedipally-desired parent. The encroaching third party–the prototype of which is the child’s father, who prohibits his or her incestuous union with the mother–thrusts Cross back into the Symbolic Order, that of language, cultural norms, customs, and the radical alterity of other people who won’t act as mirrors or extensions of himself.

These other people, like Hollis, Gittes, and Evelyn, won’t indulge Cross in his wish to have Katherine as an extension of himself. Hollis won’t indulge Cross to have his dam, so he can buy the dried-up land cheap and sell it at higher prices later, and he won’t let Cross have Katherine, as Evelyn won’t let him have her, so Hollis has to be eliminated, and Evelyn’s plan to hide their daughter must be thwarted. Cross wants Gittes to find Katherine, but when Gittes learns Evelyn’s shocking secret about the girl and their father, he wants to stop Cross from getting Katherine, too.

Being thwarted by these third parties would make Cross feel marginalized, just as the child experiencing the Oedipus complex feels marginalized, pushed to the side and not allowed to have the Oedipally-desired parent, not allowed to be the phallus for that parent, because of the Non! du père coming from the third parties. Cross, however, is a rich capitalist, not a helpless child, and he can arrange to get what he wants with utter ruthlessness, just as King Oedipus, both by virtue of being King of Thebes and by being unaware that Queen Iocaste is his mother, can fulfill his own desires, as unconscious as they are.

Cross owns the police, as Evelyn observes at the end of the film, and his wealth can influence the government to build the dam and have huge quantities of water released from the reservoir every night, despite there being a “drought” in the LA area. So instead of being marginalized, Cross can marginalize others; he is free, through his wealth, to indulge his narcissism, just as King Oedipus indulges in his hubris, imagining his investigations will save Thebes from the plague the same way he saved the city from the Sphinx.

With the police working for Cross, Gittes can be arrested and detained instead of listened to, so Cross would be forced to face justice for his crimes; also, the police will shoot at Evelyn as she drives away with Katherine, killing the former (however unintentionally). Cross, though shot in the arm by Evelyn and showing grief over her death, nonetheless walks off with a traumatized Katherine so he can do to her what he did with her mother/sister.

It can be argued that part of the purpose of Greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex is that they are critiques of political corruption: the Theban king’s incest is symbolic of how his corrupt leadership has…plagued…his city. Similarly, the dyadic relationship Cross narcissistically and jealously wants to maintain with Katherine, marginalizing everyone else, spills over onto LA society as a whole (a private narcissistic relationship parallels such a relationship with the public)–controlling the water and depriving everyone else of it, marginalizing everyone else (a marginalizing paralleled by the Chinese-Americans’ relationship with white American society). Hence, Cross’s falling-out with Hollis is two-fold: over Katherine and over the dam.

My point is that, in Cross, we see how the unresolved Oedipal situation of narcissistically wanting to hog a person all to oneself leads, if one has the money and political influence, to wanting to hog crucial resources like water all to oneself, too. There are the material roots of power, and there are the psychological roots of grasping for power.

Recall what Cross says to Gittes after the latter has finally figured out that the former is responsible for Hollis’s murder and for having raped Evelyn: “Hollis was always fond of tide-pools…that’s where life begins…marshes, sloughs, tide-pools…he was fascinated by them.” (third draft of the script, link above, page 121) These three are all water sources and life sources, like one’s mother…le mer est la mère. In this we see the connection between Oedipal narcissism and that of capital.

Cross thus plans to incorporate the Northeast Valley into LA, then irrigate and develop it. He also schemes at finding Katherine, through Gittes’s help, and ‘irrigating and developing’ her, so to speak. His falling-out with Hollis outside the Pig and Whistle, as photographed by Walsh (played by Joe Mantell), one of Gittes’s employees, isn’t proof of Hollis having an affair with Katherine, but it reflects Cross’s jealous wish to hog that water and the girl to himself, and to stop Hollis from getting in the way of his plans.

Hollis is thus that third party, the Non! du père with his prohibitive laws and government regulations, stopping a capitalist from doing whatever he wants to the detriment of everyone else. But instead of the capitalist using the “free market” to rid himself of the intrusive government, Cross uses other parts of the government–corrupt cops, Yelburton (Hillerman), Mulvihill (played by Roy Jenson), etc.–to get what he wants, all proof of the hypocrisy of the capitalist who claims to advocate ‘small government,’ when he really considers government to be just fine…when it’s convenient for him.

Interestingly, right in the scene when Gittes meets Cross, and just before Cross wishes to hire him to find Katherine, Evelyn is brought up in the conversation, and Cross asks if Gittes is taking her for a ride…financially and sexually. Since Hollis is her husband, and Cross has had predatory interests in both females, he’ll feel jealousy toward Hollis and, potentially, Gittes. Again, in this we see the water and the women connect.

The eyeglasses found in the pond of saltwater (“bad for glass [sic]”) behind the Mulwray home are Cross’s, and they’re proof that he murdered Hollis, whose body had saltwater in it. The glasses fit in with the theme of sight-vs-blindness that’s also in Oedipus Rex. Killing Hollis, the Laius of the movie, and losing the glasses there is paralleled to Oedipus blinding himself after realizing his shame. One of the lenses is broken, too.

Note in this connection also the marginalization of the Chinese-American gardener, who like the other Asians is just a detail to the plot, whose imperfect English says “glass” when he means “grass,” and yet his comment is crucial to helping Gittes solve the mystery and determine Cross’s guilt. He’s thought the glasses were Hollis’s, and that Evelyn murdered her husband; but they’re bifocals, which Hollis never wore…Cross, however, did. Still, the git who is Gittes can’t convince Escobar (Lopez) and the other cops that Cross is their man.

So Gittes has to go home with the horrifying realization that he’s failed, as he has at so many other things, at protecting not only Evelyn, but also Katherine, whose father/grandfather is getting his filthy hands on her…as if the poor girl isn’t traumatized enough at seeing her mother/sister with a bullet in her eye. Rich Cross will get away with everything; Gittes cannot stop him.

The film ends with an emphasis on the theme of marginalization. Finally, we see in this last scene the Chinatown that is the film’s namesake and that has only been mentioned in passing here and there, like seeing the occasional Chinese-American servant. Walsh ends it all fittingly by telling Gittes, “Forget it, Jake–it’s Chinatown.” Yes, even in Chinatown, we should push it and its residents to the side. As the Chinese-American community comes over to see Evelyn’s dead body out of curiosity, Escobar shouts at them to get back and “clear the area.”

Marginalization, and the jealousy that comes from being pushed back, tossed aside, and forgotten for the sake of someone deemed more important–like a spouse in favour of a paramour, the needs of the poor in favour of pursuing profit, or a boy’s mother pushing him aside in favour of his father–this is the thematic essence of Chinatown.

Analysis of ‘Repo Man’

Repo Man is a 1984 film written and directed by Alex Cox, starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, with Tracey Walter, Olivia Brash, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Fox Harris, and Dick Rude. Michael Nesmith of the Monkees was executive producer, and Iggy Pop wrote the Repo Man theme; he also sings the song during the end credits.

A satire on American life under the Reagan administration, on consumerism, and on the Atomic Age, Repo Man had a troubled initial release because Universal Pictures doubted the film’s commercial viability. It nonetheless received widespread acclaim, was considered one of the best films of 1984, and is now a cult film.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the script (including outtakes), and here’s a link to a rather poor quality video of the complete film (i.e., the image being in the bottom-right corner, it’s being sped up, with all the sound in a higher pitch).

After seeing, during the opening credits, a shifting road map of Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and finally to California, we’re in the Mojave Desert, with J. Frank Parnell (Harris) driving a ’64 Chevy Malibu. A cop on a bike pulls him over and wants to know what’s in the trunk of the Malibu. Parnell tries to warn him not to look in there, but the cop insists. He opens the trunk, a bright light shines out of it, and he screams as he’s being disintegrated from the mysterious thing in there, leaving only his flaming boots. Parnell drives away.

Later in the film, we learn from Leila (Barash) that aliens are what is in the trunk; they’re emitting the radiation that killed the cop. A question that should be obvious to ask is this: what business were the contents of the car to the cop? What right had he (I couldn’t care less about his badge) to stick his nose in Parnell’s personal business?

Now, aliens are heavenly beings, if you will. This fact, combined with the sinfulness of LA (where the bulk of Repo Man takes place), as well as the vaporizing of anyone who opens the trunk and exposes the ‘heavenly beings,’ makes me think of the Biblical story of Lot in Sodom. Such an association probably sounds far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, but please hear me out.

To get our bearings, I’ll start by saying that the aliens are like the angels God sent to destroy Sodom, which LA represents here. Granted, the aliens don’t destroy LA in the movie, they just kill a few people nosy enough to look in the trunk; but they do shake things up for a lot of people in and around the city. The radiation emitted by the aliens can be associated with the radiation from nuclear explosions, which can wipe out cities, as happened in Japan. These associations are close enough for me, since as was mentioned above, one of the satirical targets of Repo Man is the Atomic Age.

One of the major sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. The Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house when they knew he was accommodating the visiting angels. The Sodomites demanded he send out the angels so they could “know” them. (Gang rape, regardless of sexual orientation, can only be evil.) Knowing his duty to be hospitable to the angels, Lot couldn’t send them out. When the Sodomites tried to force their way into the house, the angels blinded them, which can be associated with the aliens vaporizing the intruding cop.

My point in bringing up the story of Lot in Sodom is that one of the central themes of Repo Man is impingement, encroachment, or imposing oneself on another’s personal space, just as the men of Sodom tried to impinge on Lot’s home and the guests to whom he was giving hospitality. If you impinge on others, they’ll impinge back on you, as the angels did when the Sodomites tried to break into Lot’s house and rape the visiting men.

The scene in the supermarket–where Otto (Estevez) and Kevin (played by Zander Schloss, bassist for the Circle Jerks, who appear later in the film as a nightclub band) are working as stock clerks facing cans–is full of impingement. Kevin, a geek who is annoyingly sycophantic to the whole capitalist system, is singing, of all things, a 7-Up jingle right next to Otto, irritating him. The last thing punk rocker Otto needs to hear is an advertisement for a soft drink while he’s doing monotonous wage slave work.

Otto impinges back on Kevin by sticking a price tag on his glasses. Then, to annoy Otto further, his boss, Mr. Humphries (played by Charles Hopkins), comes over to nag him about not only being habitually late for work, but also for not spacing the cans properly. He gives Otto an implicit warning of getting fired by mentioning how, in the bad economy of the time, one must be careful about the quality of one’s work. Luis, an armed security guard, gets in Otto’s face for not listening to his boss, then Otto curses at him, shoves chuckling Kevin into the pile of cans they’ve been facing, flips off Humphries and Luis, and walks out.

Incidentally, all the cans, cereal boxes, and other things sold in the supermarket are generically labelled and designed, as if either made by one company with no regard for visual style, or to indicate that it doesn’t matter who the makers of the commodities are. The satirical point being made here is about consumerism as an escape from eroding democratic freedoms in the Reagan era, which inaugurated the “free market” policies that have resulted in the neoliberalism that plagues us all today.

I’m reminded of what George Carlin would, in later decades, complain about: the illusory freedom of choice (i.e., lots of different brands and flavours to choose from) for consumers instead of meaningful, democratic freedom of political choice (viable political parties other than the GOP and DNC, ones that offer a genuine left-wing alternative). Seeing generic, no-name brands in the supermarket exposes the lie of consumerism as ‘freedom of choice.’

Kevin’s gloating over Otto losing his job, as well as his sucking-up to his boss, does him no good, because Humphries in his rage fires the “worm” too. Kissing the asses of capitalists is no guarantee of advancement.

More impinging is going on in the next scene, though it’s consensual–slamdancing to punk rock–at a party that night in the back of a warehouse. There, Otto meets Duke (Rude), a fellow punk who just got out of jail. The Circle Jerks song “Coup D’état” is heard. There’s a suggestion in this atmosphere of an anarchist wish for violent revolution, though it’s only a fantasy.

In the next scene, Otto is in bed with Debbi (played by Jennifer Balgobin) in Kevin’s house, where the party has moved. She asks him to go get her a beer from the kitchen, an interesting reversal of sex roles, especially seen in light of how she’s about the cheat on him with Archie (played by Miguel Sandoval) and Duke.

The partiers are living in a freely anarchist manner, while nothing is being done about the capitalist-based problems of the outside world, in the rest of LA and in the world in general. We don’t solve our problems by escaping the world and getting wasted, but far too many of us do this anyway. “Institutionalized,” a song by Suicidal Tendencies about teenage disaffection and alienation (a fitting subject for these punks), is heard from downstairs.

Speaking of disaffection and alienation, Otto is next seen alone outside in the early morning, in a vacant lot drinking a beer. He recites some of the lyrics from “TV Party,” by Black Flag. They’re lyrics about not wanting to think about anything important, about only wanting to watch the idiot box and drinking beer. Otto vaguely senses the futility of mindlessly partying instead of, say, organizing and advocating for social change.

Later, when it’s light out, Otto is still walking around outside, now in some neighbourhood. Bud (Stanton) is driving by in his car and offers Otto ten bucks, which sounds to Otto like he’s soliciting for gay sex, which of course would be more impingement. (Note how Otto’s homophobic response could be linked to the homophobic tone in the Bible story.) Bud actually wants Otto to help him repossess a car in the neighbourhood.

Repossessing someone’s car has to be one of the extreme forms of impingement, as well as the opposite of hospitality, which involves giving, not taking. Sticking one’s nose into someone else’s business, going into his or her personal space, and taking a vital personal possession of his or hers are among the worst forms of impingement.

Repossession of cars also makes for a vividly illustrative metaphor for the Reagan revolution, which was, in effect, a repossessing of so many of the working-class gains of the postwar period up to the 1970s. The Reagan years saw dramatic cuts in domestic spending, a steep increase in the number of homeless people, union-busting, and a number of other policies that resulted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor, policies continued and exacerbated by all succeeding US presidents.

Otto repos the car for Bud as requested, unaware that what he’s doing is a repo, and he takes it to the “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation,” a misnomer for a repo organization so ridiculously bizarre as to be outright Orwellian doublethink. Indeed, proponents of the Reagan agenda similarly regard its rolling back of government benefits for the poor as a ‘liberating’ of the people from the ‘shackles’ of ‘big government,’ all while jacking up military spending to the point of leaving the American government with a deficit.

When Otto realizes the people in this business are repo men, a truly despicable, thankless job, he expresses his contempt for them by taking the can of beer they’ve given him and spilling it all over the floor–impingement on their property. Instead of being mad at him, Bud and Oly (played by Tom Finnegan) say he’s “all right,” meaning Otto has the kind of confrontational, impinging personality that makes for an ideal repo man. Still, he doesn’t want to do the job.

A government agent named Rogersz (played by Susan Barnes)–she has a metal hand–is leading a group of people who are investigating how the cop got killed in the desert. They will now try to find the Malibu, which is to become the MacGuffin of Repo Man, the car that will be the ultimate repossession.

Otto and Kevin are going through a newspaper, job-hunting and sitting by an unemployment office. Still deluding himself that if he works hard and plays the capitalist game, Kevin can become “manager in two years, King! God!” after dedicating himself as a fry cook. Otto isn’t so optimistic, though. He’s had a dream in which he and Kevin were 65-year-old bellhops in a “sleazy shithole motel” in Miami. It looked painfully real to Otto.

Since job prospects don’t look too good for him, Otto goes home (he lives in the garage, incidentally: see the outtakes [link above] at about 9:00) and asks his parents for a thousand dollars promised to him if he finishes school, so he can go to Europe. His mom and dad are stoners sitting on the couch sharing a joint and watching TV. The show they’re watching is of a televangelist, Reverend Larry, to whom they’ve given the thousand dollars to sell Bibles to El Salvador.

To make money, Otto will have to become a repo man. You’ve gotta love the “free market.”

The televangelist, of course, is a real character in himself, and a reflection of the Reagan years in many ways. Apart from the fact that Reagan himself was a conservative Christian, his preaching of ‘small government’ was a ploy to lower spending on the poor in order to increase spending to further the interests of the rich (e.g., increasing military spending for the sake of US imperialism), that is, big capitalist government! Similarly, the reverend tells his viewers, largely lower to middle-class people in need of ‘spiritual answers,’ to give him their money.

Also like Reagan, the reverend wants us all to “destroy the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism at home.” Note how the religious right, calling these ideologies “twin evils,” is either too ignorant or outright lying when they don’t see the huge difference between communism and liberalism.

It’s safe to assume that Otto’s stoner parents used to be hippies back when he was a baby. Hippies are liberals, by the way, not communists. A common complaint we on the left have is when liberals backslide toward the right, as Otto’s parents have done by going beyond smoking marijuana to enjoying the opium of the people, a subject I explored in my analysis of Drugstore Cowboy.

Note how Otto’s parents aid US imperialism by selling Bibles to El Salvador instead of helping the country be free of the American empire. Religion is a drug used to help people forget their oppression. TV, of course, can also be a drug in itself, a kind of distraction from one’s everyday troubles, just as the partying punks did as observed above. In the outtakes (link above, at about 12:34), we can see cobwebs enveloping Otto’s mom and dad as they’re on the couch watching the idiot box, just as Black Flag sing about in their song.

In his having no choice but to do a despicable job in order to make the money he needs, Otto demonstrates the lack of meaningful freedom in a capitalist society. And just as the punks have their beer and partying, and Otto’s parents have their marijuana and religion as manic defences against the misery of the world, repo men have speed and booze for the same kind of escape.

This escape will be necessary for Otto, since as part of his selling of his soul to do this new job, he’ll take Bud’s advice and “dress like a detective…dress kind of square,” so people will think Otto is a cop. So much for being a punk rocker. Since one imagines punk rockers have at least anarchist tendencies, we can see how this tendency can backslide into liberalism, then to even more reactionary thinking, as Otto’s choice to become a repo man can be seen to symbolize.

As he and Otto are snorting amphetamine in a car in an alley, Bud sees some people outside and tells Otto he hates “ordinary fucking people.” This is because ordinary people always try to avoid tense situations, whereas repo men are always “getting into tense situations.” Such an attitude, glorifying an aggravating of alienation, sounds suspiciously to me like neoliberalism romanticizing confrontation for the sake of furthering capitalist interests; it’s somehow ‘cool,’ ‘rebellious,’ and ‘edgy’ to be a repo man, rather it simply being an asshole.

Bud and Otto go into a store to buy six packs of beer (generically labelled “drink”) while Bud is still talking about “tense situations” with people with knives or guns. They leave the store, and speaking of tense situations involving guns, we learn that Duke, Archie, and Debbi have been hiding behind the counter, where Bud bought the beer, the whole time. The three punks are holding guns on the cashier, about to rifle the cash register.

We’ll notice as we go through the rest of the film that whenever we see Otto and Bud in a store buying drinks, the three punk rock thieves will also be there. Repo men and thieves are thus being associated with each other. This juxtaposition sends the message to us that repossession, properly understood, is stealing. Bud himself admits this earlier when he’s explaining to Otto how much money you can make when you “rip [off]” a car. Making money by stealing: this is also known as capitalism.

In an outtake (link above, at about 6:42), we see Bud trying to repo a car from a man named Arthur Pakman. Bud gives him his name card, which curiously has the name “I.G. Farben” on it. This is the name of a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that became a donor and major contractor to the Nazi government, relying on slave labour from the concentration camps; one of its subsidiaries supplied Zyklon B. That a repo man would have such a name on his name card is an obvious satirical comment on the corrupt Sodom and Gomorrah that is capitalist society, the fascism that hides behind its ‘freedom.’

More impingement occurs when Bud and Otto are driving around a concrete riverbed, and they encounter the Rodriguez brothers (played by Del Zamora and Eddie Velez) in their car, one of them flipping Bud off. They get into a car chase for a while, and Bud and Otto end up stuck in a puddle. Annoyed, Bud says he and Otto ought to go off and get drinks. Otto is amused at how “intense” the car chase was; Bud says that a repo man’s life is always intense.

Duke, Archie (with a paper bag on his head), and Debbi have just finished robbing the store that Otto and Bud are about to enter; the thieves have impinged on the store. They run out, and Archie knocks into a waist-high pole by the door, hurting himself in the balls…more impingement.

Next, Otto and Lite (Richardson) are driving up to Miss Magruder’s car, stopped at a traffic light, and get ready to repo it. Lite gives him a bag with a dead rat in it to throw into her car to upset and distract her, then Otto can get the car. He throws the rat on the seat just beside her; she sprays mace in his face and drives off when the light turns green. He who lives by impingement shall die by impingement, or get blinded by it, as the men of Sodom were.

After that, Otto and Bud drive over to repo a Cadillac owned by a millionaire named Peason, who is in a laundromat talking to two kids about the laundry, and how he wants it arranged. He has an unsurprisingly condescending attitude toward the kids. When Otto rips off the car, Peason runs out of the laundromat, and the kids toss his clothes outside while laughing at him. It’s hard to sympathize with a rich guy who can’t be bothered to make the payments on his Cadillac.

As he’s driving around in the Cadillac, Otto sees Leila running on the sidewalk. She’s attractive, so naturally he slows down to talk to her. He wants to offer her a ride, but she’s distracted him from his driving, so he drives his car into a pile of garbage on the side of the road (impingement), angering an old lady who nags him to clean it up; he ignores her, of course, Leila gets in the car, and he drives off.

It’s here where we learn that Parnell has been driving around with aliens in his trunk. She shows Otto a photo “of four dead aliens.” He laughs in disbelief at her story. Since she’s being chased by government men associated with Rogersz in their own car, Leila has ducked down and hidden herself from them; she’s afraid they’ll kill her over the aliens. She explains to Otto that Parnell has smuggled the aliens from an air force base in his Malibu. She needs to find him before Rogersz et al do.

In this sense, Leila and Parnell are like Lot and his family, and the government people are like the men of Sodom, so to speak. Otto drops Leila off at her place of work, “The United Fruitcake Outlet,” which sounds like a flippant pun on the United Fruit Company. Apart from the aliens being associated with the angels in the Lot in Sodom story, their deadly radiation implies an association with Soviet nuclear weapons, a capability that the American government would like to be about to take from them, as would any capitalists, such as the United Fruit Company, who spearheaded a coup against the leftist Guatemalan government in 1954 (remember the selling of Bibles to El Salvador in this connection).

It’s easy to see Rogersz’s government agents as the bad guys here, but one shouldn’t assume that Leila’s ‘fruitcake’ group of people are any more sympathetic just because she becomes Otto’s girlfriend…or something (Leila and Parnell aren’t the good guys, just as Lot’s family aren’t all that good, either, as we learn in Genesis 19–Lot offering his daughters for the sexual sport of the Sodomites, his daughters getting him drunk and committing incest with him, etc.). Recall how later Leila helps Agent Rogersz torture him by electric shock to get information as to where the Malibu is. At the end of the film, he leaves Leila to go in the car with Miller (Walter); she asks Otto about her “relationship” with him, and when he blows her off, she angrily says she’s glad she helped Rogersz torture him.

There isn’t really anyone in Repo Man who can be called a ‘good guy’ in a more or less pure sense. As I said, the LA of this film is a modern-day Sodom, a corrupt, impinging, inhospitable place. Even the aliens in the Malibu’s trunk, whom I’ve associated with the Biblical angels on the one hand, and with the USSR on the other (radiation>>Atomic Age>>Soviet nuclear weapons), aren’t to be considered the ‘good guys,’ given that this film is a product of Hollywood liberalism, which has no more sympathy for leftist anti-capitalism than conservatives do.

Accordingly, everyone in the film, those from the far-right to the left-of-centre of the political spectrum, wants to get his hands on the Malibu. Thus Agent Rogersz and Leila wanting to find it is simply symbolic of competing capitalists/imperialists wanting to thwart the Soviet accumulation of nuclear power, as represented by the radiation in the trunk of the Malibu. To repo the Malibu, one will get the unusually high reward of $20,000.

After repossessing a red car, Lite and Otto are driving around in it, and at one point, Lite mentions a book he once found when he swiped a Maserati in Beverly Hills. The book is called Dioretix: the Science of Matter over Mind. “That book will change your life,” Lite tells Otto. It is obviously a parody of L. Ron Hubbard‘s 1950 book, Dianetcs, and therefore a satirical stab at self-help books and pseudoscience in general. (Matter over mind? Not vice versa?)

In the next scene, we see Otto with Miller in a vacant lot. Otto is holding his copy of Dioretix and is about to toss it into a burning garbage can. Miller goes into a big spiel about how many things that seem to be coincidences are really interconnected in some secret, profound, mystical way; it sounds like Jung‘s notion of synchronicity, but Miller’s use of a plate of shrimp as an example of how it works sounds idiotic.

It seems as though Miller has been reading Dioretix, too. His absurd attempts at philosophical profundity give Otto the impression that he must have done way too much LSD over the years. Still, Miller seems like more of a Dostoyevskyan idiot, for though Miller expresses his opinions with ludicrous examples, he seems to have his instincts in the right places, for at the end of the movie, he gets into the Malibu, his gut correctly telling him that it’s an alien vehicle, a spaceship that goes up into the night sky, then into space, and…who knows?…may well even travel time, as he imagines flying saucers and time machines to be one and the same thing. He is a working-class man with a spark of intelligence never properly developed because of a lack of money for higher education.

When it’s learned from the repo men that the reward for finding the Malibu is $20,000 (and it’s speculated that the large amount of money offered for the car is due to it containing drugs, rather than celestial beings, symbolically linking the drug speculation to the “opium of the people”), Otto calls Leila about the car to arouse her interest. He, however, is aroused by her body, and when he arrives at The United Fruitcake Outlet, he tries to get sex from her…or at least a blowjob. Angered by his impinging on her at work, she slaps him…twice. He who leers with impingement shall get slapped with impingement.

But now that so many people are licking their lips over that $20,000, Bud is imagining a life of financial security without needing to work anymore. He insists to Lite that he can achieve this security with $20,000 because he has good credit.

In the next scene, he’s driving with Otto and telling him about how important credit is: it’s “a sacred trust,” what the American “free society is founded on.” (That’s funny: I thought American ‘freedom’ was founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, but I digress…) This “sacred trust,” combined with getting the coveted money, is what Bud imagines is the capitalist ‘liberation’ he has within his reach.

He compares this dutiful payment of bills and debts favourably to how the Soviets don’t “give a damn about their bills.” When Otto implies that not needing to pay bills in the USSR is a better deal, Bud (recall his IG Farben name card from the outtake) takes umbrage at such an implication and wonders if Otto is a “commie.” So many Americans are brainwashed about what ‘freedom’ is under capitalism to such an extent that it’s inconceivable to them how not needing to pay bills is one of the most liberating things possible.

Now, Bud doesn’t want to sound too right-wing, so while he won’t tolerate any “commies” in his car, he doesn’t want any Christians in it, either. Such an odd appendage to his hatred of the left can only be explained, in my opinion, as an ego defence anticipating an accusation of far-right thinking, or an attempt to seem centrist and liberal. One ought, however, to take into account the “fish hook theory,” which illustrates how liberalism and centrism are actually closer to fascism (remember again Bud’s IG Farben name card) than communism ever was, in spite of what that nonsensical horseshoe theory says.

Parnell drives over to a gas station, where Kevin has a new job. The nerdy boy still kisses capitalist ass, doing the phony friendly-to costumers attitude and hoping it will lead to advancement. He approaches Parnell and offers a vacuum of the Malibu, but the sweaty old man wants to find junk food from vending machines, imagining such food to be healthy. Kevin offers to check Parnell’s trunk, and luckily for him, he ends up not doing so.

He does the same ass-kissing routine for the Rodriguez brothers, who recognize the nearby Malibu and swipe it while Parnell is gone and Kevin is looking for a non-existent box of matches for the brothers in the gas station office.

In someone’s home, Otto tries, instead of outright repossessing the car of a sweet middle-aged black lady named Mrs. Parks (interesting choice for a name on Cox’s part!), to get her to pay the rest of what she owes for it. Her musician son and his bandmates, all huge guys, come home and, learning Otto is a repo man, beat him up outside. Oh, the karma of impingement…

Otto returns to the lot at Helping Hand, and Miller bandages up his wounds. Plettschner, a cop played by Richard Foronjy, interestingly has the same first name as Otto but is practically the opposite in personality or likability. He gets in Otto’s face by saying he isn’t cut out to be a repo man, getting a “fuck you” reply, which just gets the already obnoxious cop angry, so he brags about all of his ‘achievements’ as a veteran and as a prison guard, whereas Otto is just a “punk” and a “little scumbag.” ACAB.

The Rodriguez brothers carelessly lose the Malibu, which is literally and figuratively hot (from the radiation), to Duke, Archie, and Debbi, who see their chance and steal it while it’s unattended. Otto and Lite try to repo a car, but the owner shoots at them. Lite takes out a pistol of blanks and shoots back, telling terrified Otto to get in the car and repo it. As we can see, this juxtaposition of swiping cars shows how repo men are hardly any different from any ordinary car thief. Otto is increasingly realizing that repo men, with their guns and intense lives, are crazy.

Leila is talking to Parnell on public phones, but a car with Rogersz’s agents smashes into her phone booth just after she’s gotten out; they chase and catch her, put her in their car, and take her away. Rogersz is in a van, looking at Leila on a monitor and questioning her about the Malibu. When Leila mentions the aliens in the trunk, Rogersz asks her if she’s ever thought of working for the CIA, Leila having already said she is in no way averse to torturing people. As we can see, the sides these two women work for aren’t all that opposed to each other.

Next, there’s a party in the Helping Hand yard. The staff ask Otto who beat him up, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Marlene (McGee) asks Plettschner why he won’t go after Otto’s attackers, but the cop says he’s on his coffee break. ACAB. Bud says that repo men should get their revenge on Otto’s attackers without the need of cops. “Just like John Wayne,” Marlene says, sneering at the men, who insist that the Duke is the greatest of American men.

Miller rains on the parade of the repo men’s worshipping of this epitome of American machismo by calling John Wayne “a fag” who wears dresses. (One might recall, in this connection, the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo [Dustin Hoffman] tells Joe Buck [Jon Voight] that dressing like a cowboy in New York makes him look like a gay prostitute; Buck, shocked, says, “John Wayne? You wanna tell me he’s a fag?”)

The importance of this scene isn’t about the homophobia (though homophobia links this scene with the homophobia in the Lot in Sodom story, as discussed above). It’s a satiric jab at conventional masculine roles, something further developed when Oly says lots of straight men like to watch their friends fuck, as do Oly and tough-guy Plettschner…apparently.

The repo men insist that Otto tell them who beat him up, and he lies and says that it was his old boss, Humphries, who gets beaten up that night at his home. It’s hard to sympathize with a petit bourgeois capitalist, all the same.

Leila has Otto meet up with Rogersz in a bar to discuss the Malibu and the aliens in the trunk. The two women stress the urgency of finding the car. Recall how the aliens, via the radiation, represent the Soviet power that the women, in turn representing capitalist and state interests, want to get their hands on.

While this is all going on, significantly, the Circle Jerks are performing in the pub as a nightclub band. They’re playing a lame and square acoustic version (this must be deliberate) of their punk song, “When the Shit Hits the Fan.” It’s easy to see why Otto would say, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.” Recall that the bassist of the Circle Jerks is playing Kevin the nerd.

The song, as you can glean from the lyric, is about economic hard times that hit the poor the hardest. It is an ironic take on the Reaganite way of seeing the problem: “blame the government for hard times”; “let’s leech off the state/gee, the money’s really great,” thanks to “welfare checks,” and “free loaves of bread.” However, thanks to Reagan, “social security has run out on you and me,” meaning that it’s the capitalist government, not a ‘socialist’ one (something the US has never had, by the way), that we should blame.

So when we see the Circle Jerks having changed from a punk band into a lame night club one, the transformation parallels what’s happened to Otto (from punk rocker to repo man), to his parents (from hippies to supporters of a televangelist), and to Leila (from avoiding the government to working for them). All of these transformations allegorize the Reaganite metamorphosis of a welfare capitalist society, one where there’s at least the hope of evolving into a more left-leaning one, into a nakedly neoliberal capitalist society, the worst of which we have now in the 2020s.

Small wonder when Duke, Archie, and Debbi enter the bar and see Otto, they speak derisively to the repo man, annoyed that he’s too busy with work to hang out with his punk friends. Though Otto’s choice of work is a bad one, no other money-making opportunities have been opened to him. As the Circle Jerks sing, “We just get by however we can/We all gotta duck when the shit hits the fan.”

Of course, the trio of punk thieves aren’t all that much better. Committing petty crimes hardly improves society. Debbi thinks Agent Rogerzs’s metal arm is fascinating: it merely symbolizes how the system has dehumanized her and made her part of ‘the machine,’ as it were. The three punks, in their own way, have degenerated from their would-be revolutionary ideals, as have Otto, his parents, Leila, and this fictionalized version of the Circle Jerks.

The three thieves leave the bar and find Parnell trying to retrieve his Malibu. They feel he’s impinging on him, not realizing he was originally impinged on, first by the thieving Rodriguez brothers, and then by these three. Their sticking their noses into his business is no different, in principle, to the cop’s having done so at the beginning of the film, so fittingly, Archie suffers the same fate as the cop. Duke and Debbi run off in terror, and Parnell gets his car back.

The Rodriguez brothers are driving along and see Parnell in the Malibu. They claim to be “special deputies” and tell him to pull over. This pretence of authority to justify taking away a man’s car is how we can see no substantive difference between cops, repo men, and car thieves. Might makes right in the end.

This mutual identity is especially apparent when the repo men, in Bud’s car, find the Rodriguez brothers and Parnell in the Malibu, then start vying over who will get the coveted car, which soon drives off. Bud et al get into a violent altercation with the Rodriguez brothers. Swinging a baseball bat at the two, Bud would like to repo their car, but they insist they’ve paid it off.

Because Bud hit one of the brothers with the bat, they’re suing Helping Hand “for malicious damages,” and Bud has lost his job in a nasty falling-out with Oly. He is next seen in a car with Otto. They’re driving in a neighbourhood with a bunch of homeless people. Bud has just lost his job, but he still has no sympathy for them; he’s internalized the Reaganite attitude that the destitute have somehow ‘chosen’ their lot, and they’re leeching off the welfare system. Bud doesn’t understand that, as an unemployed man, he’s closer to being one of the homeless than he is to being the ‘made man’ he thinks the repoing of the Malibu will make him.

Otto is so disgusted with Bud’s attitude that he gets out of the car and walks down the neighbourhood with the homeless, people who truly deserve our sympathy. People in radiation suits carry off a dead body and put it in a car trunk…rather like those melting aliens.

Otto then sees the Malibu. His sympathy for the poor dissolves, he has dollar signs in his eyes, and he runs after the car. Parnell lets Otto in the car, and they drive together. Parnell is actually dying right there as he’s driving, from his exposure to the radiation in the trunk with the aliens. His ability even to focus and follow a conversation is clearly impaired when, during his conversation with Otto, he mishears the boy saying he represents the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, hearing instead radiation, something impinging on Parnell’s brain.

Parnell claims, in his obvious, growing mental instability, that any talk of radiation being bad for you is “pernicious nonsense.” Then he speaks glowingly of lobotomies, a friend of his and he himself each having apparently had one. Soon, he slumps over the steering wheel and dies. Otto gets him out of the Malibu and drives it to the Helping Hand repo yard.

It seems that Otto’s going to get the $20,000 for the Malibu, so at a party at Miller’s that night, the wives of several repo men, including Oly’s, are all over Otto…”like flies on shit.” Someone, however, has broken into the yard and taken the Malibu. Otto goes walking outside; Bud drives by, and Otto gets in the car. They’ll go to that liquor store to get some drinks again.

Duke and Debbi are in a car just outside the store. He’s talking, in all absurdity, about how they ought to settle down, get a house, and have a baby, since “everybody does it,” and it “seems like the thing to do.” Here we see yet another example of initially rebellious attitudes degenerating into mere social conformity–from rebel to liberal. She can hear how ridiculous he sounds, and so they just go into the store to rob it.

Otto and Bud are in the store, and a gunfight ensues. Debbi shoots, and her bullet grazes the side of Bud’s head. Duke is mortally wounded. As he’s dying, he does a melodramatic speech about how ‘tragic’ his demise is, and that it’s society’s fault that he became a criminal, but he’s a white suburban (implying at least middle class) punk. He who lives by impingement, dies by it.

Since the Malibu is missing, the agents are trying to find it. Marlene and Otto want to stop the agents from getting it, but Plettschner, dick that he is, tries to stop her and Otto from stopping the agents. Otto throws scalding hot coffee on the cop’s face (serves him right–ACAB), and Otto and Marlene run out the door; but he’s caught by the agents.

Leila and Rogersz torture Otto to get information about the Malibu. Leila is still a little conflicted about hurting her apparent boyfriend, but Rogersz rationalizes torturing him with a typical psychopathic projection: “no one is innocent,” apparently. Marlene and the Rodriguez brothers break into the room where Otto’s being held and get him out of there. Rogersz is fine with this, since it will lead her to wherever the Malibu is.

The search for the car continues, and even the reverend is interested in it, which shouldn’t be at all surprising. Considering what the Malibu, which is glowing now, represents as I’ve described above, it’s easy to see how commie-hating religion fits in with the capitalist state as personified by Leila and Rogersz, respectively.

Eventually, the car is found in the Helping Hand lot, angelically glowing with Bud at the wheel. It’s raining ice cubes, a kind of dialectical opposite of raining fire and brimstone over Sodom. This is fitting, if we equate the Malibu with Lot’s house, and equate everyone gathering to get at the car with the men of Sodom surrounding Lot’s house.

Otto goes up to Bud and tries to make a deal over what percentage of the reward money each of them will get for the car. Someone from a helicopter above warns Bud to get out of the Malibu. He gets out, but he’s brandishing a pistol. He’s shot from someone in the helicopter, but before he dies, Bud quotes Emiliano Zapata, in all irony, given Bud’s established opposition to revolutionary ideas: “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

The agents get close to the car, but sense “a strange, eerie kind of force field” surrounding it. Another agent approaching the Malibu catches fire. The reverend comes near the car holding a large Bible; he’s flanked by others in religious garb, as he himself is dressed, and Rogersz is with him, even calling him “your holiness,” implying a link between the state and religion that the ruling class would keep intact. A bolt of lightning from the car zaps the Bible in his hands, causing him to expose the phoniness of his “holiness” by saying “holy sheep-shit!” The Church is every bit as corrupt and sinful as everyone else in LA, the modern Sodom.

The force-field, the fire, and the bolt of lightning coming from the car thus all parallel the angels (i.e., the aliens in the trunk) striking the men of Sodom intruding into Lot’s house (i.e., the Malibu) with blindness.

So who is worthy of getting into the Malibu and driving it (even though he can’t drive)? Miller is, and he waves at Otto to join him inside for a ride. Miller, recall, is the Dostoyevskyan idiot whose innocence and lack of interest in the $20,000 makes him worthy. Now, Otto, spurning Leila and her association with capitalism (the United Fruitcake Outlet) and the state (Rogersz and the agents), as well as his tiring of the repo man job, is now also worthy of being in the car and enjoying its true benefits.

The aliens take the car up into the sky. Just as Lot and his daughters escaped the sin of Sodom, Otto and Miller fly up in the car into space and freedom from the sin of LA and the rest of the world.

Analysis of ‘Brain Salad Surgery’

I: Introduction and Cover

Brain Salad Surgery is ELP‘s fourth studio album, released in late 1973, after the prog rock supergroup‘s eponymous debut, Tarkus, the live album Pictures at an Exhibition, and Trilogy. It was produced by singer/bassist/guitarist Greg Lake, as were all of the trio’s previous albums.

Though it initially got a mixed critical response, Brain Salad Surgery‘s reputation has improved over time. It had always been a commercial success, reaching #2 in the UK and #11 in the US; it eventually went gold in both countries.

Here is a link to the full album, and here‘s a link to all of the lyrics.

HR Giger‘s superb album cover gives a vivid visual representation of the album’s central theme of duality–male vs female, man vs machine, and good vs evil. The male/female duality is represented by the woman’s face in the circle in the middle of the cover; under her chin is the end of a phallus pointing up along her neck, the rest of the phallus being represented, outside the metal circle, by a short cylinder and a circle with ELP representing the balls. The record company insisted on removing the phallus for obvious reasons, so on early releases of the album, one instead saw it airbrushed away and replaced with a…shaft…of glowing light.

The album’s title–derived from the lyrics to Dr. John‘s “Right Place, Wrong Time” (released earlier the same year), and replacing ELP’s working title, Whip Some Skull on Ya–is a reference to fellatio, hence the phallus just under the woman’s face…and the skull at the top.

The cover originally opened up, like two front doors to a building, to reveal the whole head of the woman with her eyes closed, as opposed to seeing the skull’s eyeholes over her when the cover is closed, indicating the dualities of life and death, good and evil, and man and machine.

II: Jerusalem

Side One begins with two tracks that are adaptations of other composers’ works, something the band had done several times before, as with pieces like “The Barbarian” (based on Bartók‘s Allegro barbaro for solo piano), “Hoedown,” by Aaron Copland, and the aforementioned piano suite by Mussorgsky. As for track one of Brain Salad Surgery, ELP did an arrangement of a hymn by Hubert Parry, who set William Blake‘s poem, “And did those feet in ancient time” (from the epic, Milton), to music.

“Jerusalem” was released as a single, but it failed to chart in the UK; actually, the BBC banned this ‘rock’ version for potential “blasphemy” (despite how reverent the band’s arrangement was). Apart from being understood as a religious song, “Jerusalem” is also considered patriotic to England, even proposed as the national anthem.

Now, the long-held modern assumption that Blake’s text is based on an apocryphal story–about Jesus walking on English soil during His lost years–is unlikely to be true, because no such story existed, apparently, before the twentieth century; instead, Blake’s text is based on a story that it was Joseph of Arimathea who allegedly went to England to preach the Gospel there. I find such an interpretation hard to follow, though, since the text explicitly refers to “the holy Lamb of God” and “the Countenance Divine” being in England.

In any case, the notion that the feet of Christ (or those of Joseph of Arimathea, for that matter…whichever) sanctified English soil by treading on it is jingoistic nonsense that actually turns the meaning of Blake’s poem into its opposite. The key to understanding the text is not “England’s green and pleasant land,” but rather “these dark Satanic mills,” referring to the early Industrial Revolution and its destruction of nature and human relationships, or to the Church of England and how it imposed conformity to the social and class systems.

People who see patriotism and conventional Christianity in Blake’s poem are blind to his irony in using Protestant mystical allegory to express his passionate advocacy for radical social and political change. He wasn’t saying that Jesus walked in England, thus making it ‘the greatest country in the world,’ and worthy of global domination. He was asking if Jesus went there, where the “dark Satanic mills” would later be found.

That he meant such a visit seems unlikely, but if the visitor was Joseph of Arimathea, at least he would have done a proselytizing of the primitive Christianity of the first century AD, not that of later centuries, with the corrupt Catholic or Protestant Churches of Blake’s time, those that subjugated other lands and justified their imperialism with their ‘superior, civilized’ religion.

Blake says he “will not cease from Mental Fight” (my emphasis), meaning his moral struggle with the powers-that-be, the industrial capitalists who used religion as Marx would later call “the opium of the people” to maintain social control in the interests of the ruling class. Blake’s bow, arrows, spear, and sword are metaphors for all he would use to bring about revolution and social justice (his metaphor for these being “Jerusalem”) in England; they were never meant to aid in the building of empire, much to the chagrin of the British patriots who want to read his poem in that way. Even Parry grew disgusted with the jingoistic misuse of his hymn.

This ironic surface patriotism and conformist piety as cloaking Blake’s real revolutionary social critique plays well into the theme of duality–good vs evil–on Brain Salad Surgery. Similarly, it’s fitting that keyboardist/composer/arranger Keith Emerson should have done an adaptation of Parry’s musical setting, one with the usual Emersonian pomp embellishments, but still reverent to the piety of Parry’s music. For again, such a musical style, soon to be contrasted sharply with that of the next track on the album, is a part of the good-vs-evil dualism of Brain Salad Surgery.

III: Toccata

The “dark Satanic mills” of the first track seem to be vividly depicted, in musical form, in this next ELP adaptation of a composer’s work, this one being the fourth movement of the first piano concerto of Argentinian modernist composer Alberto Ginastera. The movement is titled toccata concertata, hence the name of ELP’s adaptation.

Unlike the trite harmony of Parry’s work, this one is violently dissonant, something accentuated by Emerson’s use of raspy synthesizer sounds. Indeed, the dissonance of this adaptation makes King Crimson sound like the Bay City Rollers in comparison.

Another valid comparison of ELP with King Crimson, as far as this second track is concerned, is how we hear a push towards the most state-of-the-art technology. Recall how the 1980s King Crimson used guitar synthesizers, the Chapman stick, and Simmons electronic drums. “Toccata” boasts (as does “Jerusalem”) the use of the very first polyphonic synthesizer, the Moog Apollo, and eight specially developed drum synthesizers, used in the track’s middle percussion section, arranged by drummer/percussionist Carl Palmer.

Again, this use of the latest technology of the time, as mixed in with more conventional instruments and singing, reflects the album’s theme of dualism–in this case, the dualism of man vs machine.

I’d like to do a comparison/contrast of Ginastera’s fourth movement with ELP’s adaptation. I won’t cover every detail, as that would be too difficult and tediously long; so I’ll point out and compare/contrast a number of highlights. (Here is a link to the entire piano concerto, with a video of the score; move it ahead to about 18:50 to get to the fourth movement.)

ELP’s adaptation adds a considerable amount of material to Ginastera’s piece (as well as removing much of it), including of course the percussion section in the middle, as I mentioned above. Another addition is at the beginning, with Emerson playing a synthesizer, and Palmer hitting tympani.

Emerson plays a motif of B-flat, E, E-flat, and A, then Palmer hits A, A, A, and C. Then Emerson plays the same notes again, a bit faster, adding a C and an A, and Palmer does a short roll on A. Emerson goes up an octave to play the same first opening four notes, and Palmer does another, longer roll on A. Emerson, still in the higher octave, plays the notes faster, with the added C and A, and Palmer doesn’t another, still longer, crescendo roll on A.

Next, ELP’s adaptation converges with Ginastera, but with the latter’s arrangement of the B-flat, E, E-flat, and A motif played predominantly on horns, with all the notes sustaining in a swelling dissonance, while Emerson plays the notes on his synthesizer, intensifying the tension by adding a raspy, grating tone to it. The motif is played as I described above, then transposed an octave and a semitone higher to give B, F, E, and B-flat.

ELP come in with Emerson on organ, Lake on bass, and Palmer on drums. In Ginastera’s original, we hear pounding dissonances on the piano in 3/4=6/8 time, with the fourth bar in 5/8 time as an exception.

With the piano beginning in octaves of E in the bass, the orchestra is playing a cluster of eighth notes in A, B-flat, and E-flat. The E-flat goes up to a G-flat (with the E in the bass going down to a C-sharp with the G-flats), then back to E-flat, up and down and up and down. These movements up and down occur at irregular times, creating the illusion of odd time signatures, but Ginastera’s score has the whole passage in the same 3/4=6/8 time. The playing sounds fairly subdued in Ginastera’s original, but Emerson’s organ gives the passage a fiery extroversion.

The next passage has piano playing in the bass, whereas ELP’s version has Emerson playing it on synthesizer. A beginning in F and E leads to the opening motif of B-flat, E, E-flat, and A, then ending in another swelling dissonance reminding us of the opening one, but transposed a whole tone higher, giving us C, F, G-flat, and B (reverse the second and third notes to see the exact parallels). In Ginastera’s original, these notes are heard in the orchestra, predominantly the brass; in ELP’s version, Emerson does it on the synth, ending with that rasping sound again.

Next, a tune with a galloping rhythm, starting off with eighth notes going back and forth in F-sharp and A, then going to F-sharp, B, B-flat, C, A, F-sharp, and E, is heard on the strings; Emerson plays it on the organ. These seven eighth notes are heard three times, accented in a way that gives the listener the impression of 7/8 time, but again, Ginastera’s score notates it all as 3/4=6/8 time.

The up-and-down of F-sharp and A continues for a while, then we hear a five-note ostinato of B, A, F-sharp, E, and F-sharp, which grows dissonant with the addition of the horns, and ends with the piano playing a descension in octaves. ELP’s version ends the five-note ostinato, played on the organ, with more dissonant, angular synthesizer.

More of a galloping rhythm is heard in piano chords (on organ in the ELP version); this leads to more galloping, but with switches from 3/4=6/8 time to a bar of 5/8–this happens twice, then it returns to the regular 3/4=6/8 time. Again, what is piano in Ginastera is organ in ELP. Also, Ginastera’s version develops this switching of the time from six to five, while ELP’s version brings the tension to a climax with organ chords featuring a tritone of E and B-flat. Palmer also plays this tritone on the tympani.

Later on in Ginastera’s score, we hear a variation on the passage mentioned earlier, the cluster of repeated eighth notes, the top of which is the E-flat that goes up to the G-flat, then down, and up and down at irregular times. This time, however, the notes are a second-inversion A-minor triad with A-flat and C-flat in the bass. The top C-natural will go up to an E-flat, and down and up and down, in the same irregular pattern as with the E-flat and G-flat before. We hear the orchestra, predominantly strings, doing this; ELP’s version has the organ doing it.

After this, the piano does more galloping rhythms, with a few dissonant seconds thrown in here and there. Later, the piano does more developments of that passage with the time changes back and forth between six and five as discussed above, with an additional bar of 7/8 sandwiched in the middle. This passage isn’t in ELP’s version, which skips ahead in Ginastera’s score to bar 200.

Here, the galloping rhythm is done on pizzicato strings, starting with E-flat and G-flat going up and down in the bass clef. Then we hear E-flat, G-flat, A-flat, and A-natural three times before transposing the first two notes to A-natural and C. Emerson plays this line on the organ, but develops it further before going to the next passage.

A French horn plays A, D, G, and G-sharp, then A, E-flat, D, D-flat, G, and G-sharp, etc. Emerson plays this line on a synthesizer an octave higher. After this phrase, Ginastera has us hear five pairings of eighth notes of a minor second (C-sharp and D), with groupings of two to three eighth rests in between the first, second, third, and fourth pairings of those notes. They’re played softly in his score, but Emerson plays this rhythm as stabbing, loud organ dissonances.

A trumpet plays F, B, B-flat, and E three times; this leads to a climactic, dissonant passage. ELP’s version builds up this tension much more, right from the beginning of this passage, on the synthesizer. Ginastera does glissandi down and up on the piano; Emerson does a downward glissando on the organ.

At bar 240, the piano plays octaves in C, F-sharp, F-natural, and B, a restatement of the opening motif, but transposed up a whole tone; Emerson plays this on the synthesizer, using it to embellish the dissonance further and bringing this tensely climactic moment to raspy near-chaos, leading to Palmer’s percussion section. Ginastera’s original, however, further develops these themes on the piano, coming soon to the end of the movement.

Palmer pounds away on the tympani for a while, striking a gong here and there. This comes to an end, then we hear the soft hitting of A and C on the tympani, and on both tympani and tubular bells. Emerson plays three soft, dense chords on the piano as this passage comes to the end.

Next comes a passage with Lake playing electric guitar, with Palmer in the background hitting the tympani. Lake is playing, among other things, variations on that opening motif of sharpened tonic, fifth, flattened fifth, and tonic an octave higher.

The climax of the percussion section is Palmer showing off with a solo on his drum kit that features the drum synthesizer, and all the flashy, extraverted electronic sounds it can make.

After this, ELP ends their adaptation with a reprise of the section starting with A, D, G, G-sharp, etc. (i.e., the French horn line in Ginastera’s original). Again, Emerson intensifies the dissonant tension with that raspy synthesizer in ways totally different from the dissonant tension ending Ginastera’s original.

Both pieces end more or less the same way, with twelve sets of eighth notes of a dissonant chord played molto sforzatissimo, by the orchestra in the original, and on the organ in ELP’s version. The band played their recording of the adaptation for Ginastera in order to get his permission to publish it. The composer gladly gave it, describing ELP’s adaptation as “Diabolic!” and “Terrible!” These words were meant as compliments, though, for he felt that ELP had captured the mood of his music as no one else ever had.

That this music is “diabolic” makes it a perfectly dualistic contrast to the ‘piety’ of “Jerusalem.” Hence, we can see these two adaptations as thematically fitting within the context of Brain Salad Surgery as a whole. An outward appearance of trite piety masks the evil inside.

(Incidentally, a piece I composed years ago, my Divertimento for Strings, has a third movement, presto furioso, that is inspired by ELP’s adaptation of Ginastera’s toccata concertata, though I must insist that I used all my own notes and themes, not theirs. If you’re interested, please check it out.)

IV: Still…You Turn Me On

Lake was always sure to include an acoustic guitar ballad on every ELP album, and Brain Salad Surgery is no exception. Earlier, and in my opinion, far better examples of such ballads are “Lucky Man” and “From the Beginning.”

A curious thing about Brain Salad Surgery is how the musical style jumps all over the place. Normally, one tries to find a reasonably consistent style from track to track, but on this album, ELP seemed to be deliberately going as far in the opposite direction as possible. The album has a hymn, a violently modernist piece, a syrupy love ballad, a honky tonk piano farce, and a sci-fi epic–part standard prog, part jazz/piano sonata.

As far as I’m concerned, the only way to see unity in such musical and lyrical disunity is to hear it in terms of dialectical dualism, of finding a paradoxical unity in opposites. So, in these opening three tracks, we have the sentimentality (thesis) of Lake’s ballad, the brutal ugliness (negation) of the Ginastera adaptation, and the ironic piety masking evil (sublation) of the Parry/Blake adaptation. That Lake’s ballad is a love song also gives us the duality of male and female, some romanticized brain salad surgery? After all, he is turned on.

The instrumentation of the ballad reflects the man-vs-machine duality, in that on the one hand, we hear the human voice, Lake’s acoustic guitar, and Emerson’s harpsichord, but on the other hand, there’s Emerson’s synthesizer and Lake’s electric guitar leads played through a wah-wah pedal.

V: Benny the Bouncer

This song has lyrics written by Lake and Pete Sinfield, a colleague of Lake’s back when both of them were members of the original King Crimson back in 1969 and 1970. Lake would return the favour by helping Sinfield release his solo album, Still, on ELP’s new Manticore record label, as well as contributing vocals and electric guitar on it. Sinfield would also contribute lyrics to Side Two of Brain Salad Surgery, as we’ll soon see.

“Benny the Bouncer” manifests the album’s theme of duality in two ways: first, the use of synthesizer at the beginning, and the use of vocals and honky-tonk-style piano suggests the man-vs-machine motif; second, the light-hearted nature of the music, as juxtaposed with a story about a fight and a violent murder, gives us the duality of good vs evil, or light vs dark.

Benny is already understood to be a bloody, violent sort: “He’d slash your granny’s face up given half the chance,” as Lake sings in his affected Cockney. “Savage Sid,” however, is much meaner. First, he spills his beer on Benny’s boots to test him, then when the two fight, Sid sticks Benny with a switchblade, and Benny ends up with “an ‘atchet, buried in [his] head.” He’s dead now, and “he works for Jesus as the bouncer of St. Peter’s gate.”

All of this fighting, of course, is a reflection of the alienation found in an oppressive, dystopian society, the subject of the epic coming next, “Karn Evil 9,” the real thematic focus of Brain Salad Surgery.

VI: Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression

“Karn Evil” is a pun on carnival; this title for the sci-fi epic was suggested by Sinfield–due to the festive, carnival-like nature of the music heard in the “See the show!” sections of this movement, or “impression”–as a replacement for the originally intended title, “Ganton 9,” a fictional planet on which all evil and decadence has been put.

“Karn Evil” also reflects duality in the sense that the ‘carnival’ show of decadent displays is a pleasing, entertaining diversion (the ‘good’) from the evil and oppression really going on in this dystopian world. Indeed, this epic has real relevance in our world today, in the 2020s, in which such breads and circuses as the Super Bowl, Taylor Swift, OnlyFans, and photos of string-bikini-clad beauties plastered all over our Facebook feeds distract us from such problems as extreme income inequality, escalating wars, a media controlled by the super-rich, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

As for “9,” apart from “Ganton 9,” the meaning of this number could be seen in a subdivision into three of each of the three “impressions.” We all know, of course, about the division of the 1st Impression into two parts, because its length had to be spread over two sides of the original LP. One could, however, divide this impression further–namely, at the break between Lake’s singing of “Fight tomorrow!” and “Step inside, hello!”, or, between the frankly dystopian opening lyrics and the ‘carnival’ section about the “most amazing show.” Hence, three parts for the 1st Impression.

As for the 2nd Impression, it can easily be subdivided into three by virtue of its fast-slow-fast sections, like a short, three-movement piano sonata. The 3rd Impression can be divided in terms of the storyline as given by the lyrics: before the war, from the beginning to “Let the maps of war be drawn”; the middle, five-minute instrumental section and keyboard solo, as dramatizing the war; and the outcome of the war, from “Rejoice! Glory is ours!” to the end.

Anyway, part one of the 1st Impression begins with Emerson doing some contrapuntal playing on the organ. As Lake is singing the first verse, Emerson is playing dark, eerie bass notes on the piano while Palmer is hitting a cowbell.

This first verse establishes the dystopian world of the story, a dystopia disturbingly similar to our own world of the 2020s, “about an ago of power where no one had an hour to spare.” Those who have the power, the capitalist class, ensure that none of us, the working class, have much of any free time, because we’re all overworked and underpaid.

“The seeds have withered” because of environmental damage caused by prioritizing profit over the health of the planet. “Silent children shivered in the cold” because ‘free market’ capitalism has failed to provide for the needs of the poor, rendering so many of them homeless and unheard (“children” here isn’t necessarily to be taken literally; they can be also children in the metaphorical sense of being vulnerable and helpless).

The common people suffer like this because of “the jackals for gold,” or the greedy capitalists. “I’ll be there” to help when the revolution finally comes.

The working class have all been betrayed and silenced by the advocates of neoliberal, ‘free market’ capitalism (whose prophets, including the likes of Milton Friedman, were already making their promises of plenty in a world of ‘small government’ as of 1973, the year Brain Salad Surgery came out, thereby making “Karn Evil 9” prophetic, as I see it). The riot police of the ‘small government’ have “hurt…and beat” the people who try to protest the injustices they’ve been subjected to.

Everyone, working several jobs just to have enough to pay his or her bills, food, and rent, is “praying for survival,” but “there is no compassion” for those who cannot leave this miserable world–these are the homeless, whom it’s against the law to feed, and who suffer anti-homeless architecture and benches.

He, in whose voice Lake is singing, begs for a leader who will rise up and save the world from oppression, who will “help the helpless and the refugee”–that is, the impoverished and those displaced by war in ravaged places like Libya and Syria, or by genocide in Gaza. Again, he says he’ll “be there…to heal their sorrow.”

Next, we have the instrumental break that, in my opinion as described above, divides part one from the real part two of the 1st Impression (the “part two” of this impression beginning on Side Two of the LP being, in my opinion, ‘part three’ in actuality). We hear a tight riff in alternating 6/8 and 4/4, led by a synth melody; this tune will be heard again on Side Two in part two (or ‘part three,’ as I’d have it), but it will all be in 4/4.

This instrumental continues, with more time changes and synthesizer soloing, until it segues into the ‘carnival’ themes and ‘part two,’ as I conceive of it. Now that the dystopian world has been established, we will learn of how the powers-that-be are distracting the people from their oppression with “a most amazing show.” We can relate to this aspect of the story today, with all of the entertaining nonsense we see on TV and social media, distracting us from the horrors of the real world out there.

Those in power have always used two ways of keeping the masses under their control: the carrot and the stick, two seemingly opposed tactics, but actually just opposite sides of the same coin, since they both serve the same political purpose. The world government of Huxley‘s Brave New World uses the carrot of pleasure (sex, drugs, etc.) for social control, whereas the totalitarian government of Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-four uses the stick of coercion and bullying for the same purpose.

“Karn Evil 9” opens with an exposition of the dystopian stick, and with the “most amazing show,” we have the carrot. In our world, TV and social media are our carrot, meant to distract us from the stick of riot police and standing armies that imperialistically oppress the world. In cyclically abusive relationships, the carrot and stick represent traumatic bonding.

Those who “come inside” to “see the show” are the industrial working class, for they are told to “leave [their] hammers at the box” before going in. Among the images to see are violent, shocking ones, meant in this way to be entertaining and “spectacular”: namely, “rows of bishops’ heads in jars,” and a terrorist’s car bomb. The same goes for the “tears for you to see.”

There are entertaining horrors, but also entertaining pleasures, like the stripper. Of course, for many, the opium of the people is the most entertaining spectacle of all, hence they “pull Jesus from a hat.”

After all of this, there’s an instrumental section leading to the end of Side One of the LP. Being one of the pre-eminent progressive rock bands of the 1970s, ELP were always known for showing off their virtuosity as musicians, even to the point of annoying music critics, who accused them of egotism run rampant. For ELP to show off in this way, however, for the sake of putting on “a most amazing show,” is perfectly appropriate. In fact, Lake does some extended lead guitar soloing here, something he did only sparingly on previous ELP albums.

Side One ends with a fading-out of Emerson playing a repeated synth note in A-flat, accompanied by Palmer shaking a tambourine. This same music fades in to begin Side Two. There are CD versions of this music played without the fading out and in, giving an uninterrupted 1st Impression, but the long instrumental passage leading up to the famous “Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends,” still gives us the feeling that this is a distinct part two…or ‘part three,’ as I’d have it.

Note the ecological destruction alluded to in the line, “There behind the glass stands a real blade of glass.” While Lake is singing this line, Emerson comes in with the organ, playing that cheerful, ‘carnival’ music. In this we hear the stark contrast of the happy music masking the evil reality depicted in the lyrics of having wiped out almost all the plant life on the planet…and this horror is presented as a form of entertainment, or a museum piece.

In today’s world, the debate surrounding climate change could be seen as a form of entertainment, in that it may amuse many of us to watch and hear the heated, angry arguing over the controversy as to whether global warming is real or a myth. We go from “England’s green and pleasant land” to “a real blade of grass” over the space of one side of an LP.

So we can see how the theme of the good-vs-evil duality manifests itself as a mask in “Jerusalem” and “Karn Evil 9.” The piety and patriotism of the first track masks the “dark Satanic mills,” as discussed above, and the enjoyment of “the show,” the Karn of the carnival, its carnality, masks the Evil.

That the show is “guaranteed to blow your head apart,” in the context I just described, can thus have a dual meaning: good in that the show will impress and amaze us, and bad in that its mesmerizing effect will take away our ability to think independently. That we’ll “get [our] money’s worth” sounds like a capitalist hard-sell, and that “it’s rock and roll” suggests the decadence of capitalism (i.e., rock stars making huge profits while posturing as edgy, anti-establishment social rebels).

The decadence of rock is then aptly demonstrated by more instrumental showing-off, in this way by an organ solo by Emerson. This has to be one of the greatest organ solos in the history of art rock, ranking right up there with Rick Wakeman‘s organ solo on Yes‘s “Roundabout.” These solos almost compel fans to play ‘air organ,’ they’re so good.

Emerson’s organ playing here, as is the case with his piano playing in the 2nd Impression, is so good that it makes all the more tragic his suicide in 2016, from a gunshot wound to the head. Nerve damage in his right hand, starting in 1993, was hampering his playing; it had abated by 2002, but in 2016 he was struggling with focal dystonia, something he did not dare discuss publicly for obvious, professional reasons. Drinking and depression exacerbated the problem, and anxiety over performing badly, disappointing fans, pushed him over the edge, especially when internet trolls made mean comments about his playing. Lake died later the same year.

Speaking of Lake, after Emerson’s organ solo, he replays most of the written part of his guitar solo from Side One, followed by some extrovert drumming by Palmer and more verses. More references to decadence are made, these times of a sexual sort, when Lake sings of a “gypsy queen in a glaze of vaseline,” reminding us of the stripper from Side One; then there’s “a sight to make you drool–seven virgins and a mule.”

“The show” of the 1st Impression ends fittingly with more bombast, pomp, and instrumental showing off, particularly by Emerson playing fast notes on the synth, and by Palmer not only on the drums but also on the tympani.

VII: Karn Evil 9, 2nd Impression

This delightful instrumental has to be the creative zenith of the entire album, with “Toccata” and the 1st Impression just under it. Here, Emerson is held back by neither the need to play someone else’s notes, nor by a need to conform to listeners’ expectations, whether in the mainstream pop world, nor in that of what had by 1973 already become prog rock clichés. Here, we have pure Emerson as composer and artist, unfettered by anything.

Here‘s a link to the piece, with a transcribed score for piano and bass.

The piece begins with a long, twisting and turning piano riff, jazzy in style and yet, in the context of being sonata-like in structure, the ‘exposition,’ as it were. Palmer plays some fast, tricky drum licks before Emerson comes in as described, backed by Palmer and Lake on the bass. The music is modulating all over the place, and while most of it’s in 4/4, towards the end there’s a shift to a bar of 2/4, then two bars in 5/16, and a bar of 7/16 before returning to 4/4.

That long and winding piano riff is repeated, then there are two bars in 3/4, one in 12/16, one in 3/8, and one in 7/8 before going back to 4/4. After a while, we hear octaves on the right hand of the piano, eighth notes and sixteenth notes in C-sharp, then three sixteenth notes in E, then an eighth note in B, while on the left hand (doubled by Lake on the bass), instead of the E and B, it’s D and G respectively.

This set of notes is heard twice, leading into a section with a Latin American rhythm. Over this rhythm, Emerson plays a synthesizer solo that imitates the timbre of a steelpan. Palmer is shaking maracas and tapping claves in the background.

After this, a complicated riff is heard in alternating bars of 4/4 and 7/8 time, in the latter of which we hear high octaves in C-sharp on the right hand of the piano, thirds going up and down in C-sharp/E-sharp and D/F-sharp on the left hand, and C-sharp and D-natural on the bass. Next, a bar in 7/16, one in 9/16, and a 4/4 piano riff of high octaves in G-sharp, then C-sharp on the right hand of the piano, with the left hand playing second-inversion triads of E-natural/A-natural/C-natural to the right-hand G-sharp octaves, and left hand second-inversion triads of G-sharp/D-natural/F-natural to the right-hand C-sharp octaves.

The dissonance of these last few chords is the most tension we hear in this beginning fast section of the 2nd Impression, leading into the eerie tension of the slow middle section. Prior to this tense moment, the music has been largely upbeat and even merry. This contrast between cheerful and dark is once again a reflection of the good-vs-evil duality of “Karn Evil 9,” and of Brain Salad Surgery as a whole. Surface pleasures mask inner evils, as noted on previous tracks. The beginning fast section ends on a chord of C-sharp major.

While the beginning and ending fast sections are light and jazzy, the slow middle section is essentially like twentieth-century classical music in its use of eerie, atmospheric, dense chords, which are a kind of theme-and-variations form based on a harmonic progression in E minor, A minor, and C minor, as expanded tonality. As I said above, this softer music represents the hidden plotting and scheming behind the extrovert fun and games of the faster parts.

In this middle section, we hear Emerson’s expressive use of softer piano dynamics. Before, we heard his dabbling in jazz; now, we hear his mastery of classical technique.

Eerie, ambient, dense chords of G-sharp/D/E/A-sharp and F-natural/D/G-sharp/E are heard on the piano, and Lake follows with a line of A-sharp, G-sharp, F-natural, and E on the bass. These are heard twice, then Emerson plays intervals of G-sharp/E and F-natural/D, which Lake follows with a line of D, E, F-natural, G-natural, and A. This has all been in 6/4.

The time switches to 4/4, and Palmer is playing woodblocks behind the piano and bass, which have been playing harmonic variations of the chords and intervals I described above. At one point during this passage, Lake plays a descending chromatic line from E to A. Now in A minor, Emerson’s playing will include ascending and descending octaves in A, B, C-natural, and C-sharp, then C-natural, B, B-flat, and A; the first three of both sets of notes are triplets, and the second set of triplets are backed with a triplet roll on a kettledrum by Palmer, who’s still playing those woodblocks, like a ticking clock…ninety seconds to midnight (<<<more on this later).

The fast third section comes in next; it starts in 3/8 time, with Emerson playing a lot of fast triplets in the right hand. Then a bar of 4/8, back to 3/8 for four bars, a bar in 9/8, four more bars of 3/8, then 4/4, 4/8, 7/8, and a few more time changes until an improvisatory passage in 4/4.

In the middle of this passage, there’s a brief reprise of those dissonant chords heard just before the end of the fast first section, though notated in the transcription (YouTube link above, at about 6:16) with the enharmonic notes of D-flat octaves in the right hand, and a second-inversion triad of A-flat/D-natural/F in the left hand.

Finally, the 2nd Impression ends with a recapitulation, if you will, of the twice-played ‘exposition’ of the beginning of the fast first section, that twisting and turning theme. It ends with octaves in both hands of F-sharp on the piano, which Lake doubles on the bass.

VIII: Karn Evil 9, 3rd Impression

The music we hear Lake singing to sounds very patriotic, with a harmonic progression that sounds, to be perfectly frank, rather trite with, for example, its ending in a suspension fourth resolving to the leading tone, being the third of the dominant chord in the cadence, then back to the tonic in a major key.

How such music ties in with the story, it seems to me, is that a gung-ho, nationalistic attitude is being appealed to as a solution to the dystopian class conflict as established in the 1st Impression–trite harmony thus corresponds to patriotism as a naïve attitude in politics. Furthermore, historically such a solution has tended to lead to fascism, which in the context of this story can explain its ambiguous ending (more on that later).

Bourgeois liberal democracy gives the pretense of a free society, full of choice and pleasures, hence “the show” of the 1st Impression. But when class conflict gets too strained, as can be felt in the lyrics and music before the displays of the show, and the ruling class feels threatened by a proletarian uprising, they resort to fascism in order to maintain power, typically seducing the masses with talk of nationalism and patriotism, as is felt here in the 3rd Impression.

Once again, we have the duality of good as a mask for evil. The soldiers think they’re fighting for their country, when really they’re just fighting for the capitalist class.

“Man alone, born of stone”, is hard-hearted in his alienation. He thus is “of steel,” he’d “pray and kneel” to political and religious authorities to get an illusory sense of identity, communal inclusion, and meaning in his otherwise empty life. Still, his life is full of pain: “fear…rattles in men’s ears and rears its hideous head.”

Could that “blade of compassion” be the same blade of grass, the one preserved piece of plant life, from the 1st Impression? Whatever it is, it’s been “kissed by countless kings, whose jeweled trumpet words blind [men’s] sight.” Heads of state pretend to care about us, kissing compassion, as it were, and we’re blinded by the “jeweled trumpet words” of their demagoguery and false promises, believing their lies are truth.

We thought our civilization would last forever: “walls that no man thought would fall, the altars of the just, crushed…” Because of these disappointments, war must come, replacing the hope of revolution.

The relevance of the lyrics of the 3rd Impression to our world in the 2020s can be seen in not only the wish to fight the oppressive political system, but also in fascism’s co-opting of the common man to fight wars among nations instead of rising up in revolution against the ruling class, as well as how computers acting in their own right and supplanting humanity sounds like today’s rise of AI, and the fears many of us have about such technology replacing us in the working world and thus leaving us in abject poverty.

Accordingly, we sense hostility between man and machine (which, recall, is one of the main forms of the duality theme in Brain Salad Surgery–remember Giger’s ‘biomechanical’ album cover) in the bridge of the ship when the computer, voiced electronically by Emerson, says, “DANGER!…STRANGER! LOAD YOUR PROGRAM. I AM YOURSELF.” Indeed, our technology, in its quest to be dominant, is a reflection of ourselves.

All of these issues are relevant to our times in that we’ve seen these phenomena: a resurgence of fascist tendencies in many political movements in the world (those of Trump, Ukraine, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni, etc.); such leftist struggles as Occupy Wall Street, opposition to the Gaza genocide, BLM, etc.; and the double-edged sword of AI (in a socialist context, where production is for providing for everybody’s needs, it can liberate us all; but in a capitalist context, it can throw millions of people out of work and thus subject us to homelessness, starvation, and death). Finally, a “nuclear dawn” in our time is the danger of such an armageddon between the US/NATO on one side, and Russia and China on the other.

All of what has come so far in the lyrics is a lead-up to war, culminating with “let the maps of war be drawn.” So the instrumental break, including a keyboard solo, all of it lasting for almost five minutes, represents the war.

There have been three interpretations of the outcome of the war. The first is that man has won, with Lake singing, “Rejoice! Glory is ours! Our young men have not died in vain.” Note the patriotic themes heard not only during the beginning of the middle ‘war’ section, but also during the beginning of this ‘victory.’

Perhaps man has deceived himself, though, in this supposed victory. Is the patriotic music a masking of an insidious evil, that of a surreptitious takeover of the computers? That they have won over man is the second interpretation of the war’s outcome. Such a possibility is suggested when the computer says to the “PRIMITIVE! LIMITED!” humans, “NEGATIVE!…I LET YOU LIVE.” In other words, the superior computers spared the defeated humans’ lives so they could see how inferior they are to their real victors. After all, “the tapes have recorded [the] names” of all the fallen men (suggestive not only of such things as the televising of the carnage of the Vietnam War, but also the deaths of so many in such places as Gaza today, all recorded on cellphones).

The third interpretation of the war’s outcome, as Sinfield–who collaborated with Lake on the lyrics of the 3rd Impression–would have us understand, is that man and the computers won together in a war against a shared enemy, but the computers have since taken control over man. Such an interpretation is the one most consistent with the lyrics, taking account of all of them.

IX: Conclusion

Such an interpretation is also conducive to the relevance of “Karn Evil 9” (and of Brain Salad Surgery as a whole) to our times in the 2020s. Class war was diverted from by fascism, not just in the period between the two world wars, but since both of them, too, in such forms as Operation Paperclip, with ex-Nazis working in the American and West German governments (including in NASA and NATO), in Operation Gladio, and in Western support for Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers all the way from the end of WWII to the present.

The war of the middle section of the 3rd Impression can thus be interpreted as the Cold War, with a preoccupation against “Un-American” activities as represented in the music by the patriotic theme. The perceived human victory would today be seen as the “end of history,” while the subsequent computer takeover can be seen to represent all of the technological advances of the three decades following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, including the online invasions of our privacy, AI threatening to take over many of our jobs, and the prospect of cashless societies making us helpless handlers of our cellphones.

So once again, the duality of good–for example, the convenience of new technologies–masks the evil of the hegemony of those technologies, just as the ‘good’ of patriotism masks the evil of fascism. In the same way, the piety and patriotism of “Jerusalem” mask the “dark Satanic mills,” and the erotic pleasure of ‘brain salad surgery’ and of “the show” masks the pain of “the helpless and the refugee.”

Contradiction and duality are at the heart of everything in life; this is what makes Brain Salad Surgery so thematically universal.

Analysis of ‘Foxtrot’

I: Introduction/Album Cover

Foxtrot is the fourth album by Genesis, having come out in 1972. It is the second of their albums with drummer/singer Phil Collins and lead guitarist Steve Hackett; it’s also their last album to have the cover artwork of Paul Whitehead (who also did the cover for Van der Graaf Generator‘s album, Pawn Hearts), as the band didn’t like the cover.

The most striking image we see on the surreal cover is that of a woman in a red dress with a fox’s head, or a “foxy lady,” hence the title of the album–also Whitehead’s idea. Singer Peter Gabriel, being the oh, so theatrical frontman that he was for Genesis as a progressive rock band at the time, dressed up in a red dress and fox’s head for the album’s tour. The rest of the band at first were uncomfortable with Gabriel’s ‘crossdressing,’ but when his showmanship gave the band lots of press attention, they were more accepting of it.

The ‘foxy lady’ is standing on a piece of ice floating on the water near a shore. If we look at the back cover, we’ll see four fox hunters on horses looking at her. Whitehead meant them to represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, since the end of the world is a major theme of the album–not just the “Apocalypse in 9/8” at the climax of the side-long epic “Supper’s Ready,” but also the aftermath of that as the subject of “Watcher of the Skies” opening Side One. One of the riders has an alien’s head, suggesting the alien watcher of the skies looking down on our world’s demise.

Fox hunters eyeing the foxy lady suggests male lechery. Note again her floating on that plate of ice on the water. She could be seen as personifying our Mother Earth. Let’s juxtapose this interpretation with the four fox hunters of the Apocalypse. The “foxtrot” of these four lustful men, going after the Earth, is destroying her. Global warming, along with rising sea levels, caused by such things as ocean heating and Antarctic ice loss, was a growing concern in the scientific community already by the beginning of the 1970s, around when Foxtrot was conceived.

An allusion to the cover design of the band’s previous album, Nursery Cryme, can be seen in a detail on the back cover of Foxtrot. The macabre croquet game (with decapitated heads instead of balls) depicted on the front cover of Nursery Cryme, reflecting the British upper class and implying their oppression of the working class, is thus linked with how the ruling class today is harming the environment for the sake of profit, which in turn is bringing about the end of the world for all of us. The profit motive, of course, is a major theme of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.”

One of the horsemen, as I mentioned above, is an alien, implying his disconnect from humanity, symbolic of the social estrangement caused by capitalism. Another horseman has a monkey’s head, implying the foolishness of recklessly exploiting and raping the Earth out of a desire to maximize profit. Another horseman has a handkerchief to his face: he’s weeping, implying remorse over the wrongs done to the Earth. The last horseman has an unusually long nose, implying that he’s a lying Pinocchio, disingenuously claiming he’s doing no harm to the Earth, like the climate change deniers. His mendacity can be linked to that of the “Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” (GESM).

Here‘s a link to the album’s lyrics, here‘s a link to a large image of the whole cover, and here‘s a link to all the music on the album.

II:Watcher of the Skies

“Watcher of the Skies” opens with a dark passage that keyboardist Tony Banks plays on a Mellotron he’d just bought from King Crimson, whose leader, Robert Fripp, would have wanted to get rid of on account of its tuning problems. The two opening major chords we hear in the song, a B-major seventh/F-sharp and a C-sharp/F-sharp, sounded especially good to Banks on this Mellotron, though, in spite of its faults; in fact, those chords sounded better on this instrument than on later Mellotrons Banks used. These two chords will be heard during the bridges between verses in the song, too.

Soon after these two opening chords, we hear Banks play cadences including Neapolitan chords: a first-inversion C-sharp major chord going into a cadence with G major and C major, this latter chord being the Neapolitan chord leading to an F-sharp major and a B minor added sixth. Soon after that, he does an ascension of minor chords in G-sharp, A-sharp, and C, then to G-sharp minor again, going down to chords in F-sharp major, E major, up to A major, and back down to G-sharp minor, then down to an F-diminished chord. This more-or-less descending progression will be heard again towards the end of the song.

The opening two chords return, and the rest of the band comes in, with Collins doing a kind of “Morse code” rhythm on the drums, a rhythm also played in a one-note staccato motif in F-sharp by Hackett and bassist Mike Rutherford. This main riff is said to be played in 6/4 time, though I’d notate it as an alternating 4/4 and 2/4, since 6/4 is a compound duple subdivided three plus three.

The progression resolves to F-sharp major, and Gabriel begins singing, with Banks accompanying him on organ, and that staccato motif is heard not as one note, but as C-sharp, F-sharp (9x), then octaves of F-sharp. The line “watcher of the skies” comes from John Keats‘s 1817 poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Now, the new world that Keats, as a watcher of the skies, has seen upon reading George Chapman‘s brilliant translation of Homer‘s poetry (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Batrachomyomachia) is an exciting discovery, a happy one. In contrast, the alien watcher of the skies that Gabriel sings of sees the remains of a most unfortunate world, a world we have destroyed. We have brought about our own apocalypse, a theme to be explored later.

“Now [our] reign has come to end/Has life again destroyed life?” Our foolishness in doing so is described as if it’s a form of childishness, for perhaps we “play elsewhere” now. Could we be capable of more than our mere “childhood games?” In the lizard’s shedding of its tail, the end of this civilization could bring the birth of a new one.

After this bridge, we have a verse in F-sharp major again, but with Gabriel stomping on the pedal of a bass drum to double that of Collins’s drum kit. Gabriel is also shaking a tambourine as he sings of how one shouldn’t judge a humanity already dead. After all, they’re unable to defend themselves against the reproaches they’re sure to get.

After this verse, we hear Rutherford play a bass riff, to the tight accompaniment of Collins’s drums, in one bar of 4/4 time, then Hackett does a lead in a bar of 7/16, then one in 4/4 with triplets; then we’re back to the alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Banks playing those two opening chords again on the organ.

With this next bridge, Gabriel seems to be singing his “parting counsel” to us at the present moment, warning us that our journey isn’t done. Our ship may be sturdy, that is, the Western empire and the liberal order of the 1970s may feel as though it’s safe and secure, but the sea has “no mercy” (at the time, there were fears of nuclear war and the USSR), and would we “survive on the ocean of being”?

As of now, that old Cold War is no longer a problem, but that doesn’t matter, since there’s a new Cold War happening right now, giving this old song new relevance fifty years later. Our “thoughts turn to the stars,” sadly: “this is [our] fate alone.” Towards the end of the song, that “Morse Code” rhythm in alternating 4/4 and 2/4 gets expanded to two bars of 4/4; then the song ends with that descending keyboard progression I discussed that occurred during the Mellotron opening.

III: Time Table

“Time Table” is solely Banks’s song, musically and lyrically, and it’s centred around piano progressions. It opens with him playing two melodic lines in largely parallel motion on the piano.

Gabriel sings of the medieval world in a manner similar to how that world is portrayed in Rush‘s song, “A Farewell to Kings.” It’s depicted as a noble era from which we in the modern world have sadly declined. As with the Rush album, whose themes also include an idealizing of the past, though, we have to wonder if Banks is in earnest, or if he’s being ironic.

I’m betting on the latter. His references to “legends born” strongly implies that he’s perfectly aware that the ‘nobility’ of medieval times was a fiction. The key to seeing the irony is in these lines: “It seems because through time and space/Though names may change each face retains the mask it wore,” followed by a cloyingly mawkish melody in E major on what sounds like one of those old 18th century fortepianos. We hear a train of tinklingly high Bs before going down a fifth to E, then F-sharp, G-sharp, and a B an octave lower. The melody then modulates to F-sharp major before going to the next verse. The mawkishness of this tune, sounding as it does, as if it’s being played on such an old piano, reinforces the theme of a foolishly idealized past.

The point of the song is that, though this “carved oak table” from the past–where kings and queens once sat–is now dusty and of “musty smells” where “only the rats hold sway,” those times of the past had their faults, too. Times may change, but the masks people wear remain the same.

So many idealize the past as some ‘Golden Age’ from which we today have fallen. Surely the feudal era, with its impoverished vast majority, its religious superstition, and royal authoritarianism, is no improvement on our capitalist modern world, as bad as it admittedly is.

IV: Get ‘Em Out by Friday

…and speaking of capitalism, we now come to the next song, “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” In the first song, we encountered the end of the world from an alien’s perspective. Each of the following songs in its own way seems to explain one of many factors leading to humanity’s demise.

A traditionalist, ultraconservative demonizing of progress through praising an idealized past (“Time Table”) at the expense of the present, instead of looking ahead to the future in an attempt to improve the quality of our lives, is one of those destructive factors. Capitalism was an improvement on feudalism; it was even revolutionary several centuries ago. It isn’t revolutionary now, though, and that’s where the problems dealt with in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” come in…as a matter of landlords.

The song begins with a spirited passage in 6/8 and in the key of A major. Banks does a quick, ascending organ run of sixteenth notes from G-sharp to C-sharp. Then the progression goes down to E major, then up to the relative minor in F-sharp, and we hear that ascending organ run of sixteenth notes again.

Then it goes to the mediant in C-sharp minor, then to the subdominant in D major, with Hackett playing an ascension, in thirds, of alternating quarter and eighth notes starting on F-sharp and A, and ending with tied and dotted half notes in E and G-natural, then a parallel ascension from B and D to whole notes in A and C-sharp, with a change to 4/4 time. Variations of these two ascensions will be heard later in the song, one example being in a theme in Mrs. Barrow‘s verse with these lines: “I don’t know why, it seemed so funny/Seeing as how they’d take more money.”

Now the key is A-natural minor, and we hear Banks playing eighth-note triads on the organ; first, a bar in 7/4, then back to 4/4. The rhythm is in triplets.

Gabriel begins singing in the harsh voice of ruthless businessman John Pebble, of Styx Enterprises. He orders Mark Hall, “The Winkler,” to evict all the tenants in properties in Harlow that Styx has recently bought. In the Cockney accent of The Winkler, Gabriel sings to Mrs. Barrow, a tenant, that she must move out.

In The Winkler, we see an example of a crucial element not only in capitalism, but in all systems of power: the servile obedience of underlings to their masters’ laws and edicts. The systems of oppression that we all suffer under wouldn’t exist if the common people, like The Winkler, would simply refuse to do their bosses’ bidding. We’ll come back to this servility in my discussion of the next song, “Can-Utility and the Coastliners.”

Gabriel sings in Mrs. Barrow’s voice of her shock and dismay at the greed of her evictors, while plaintive music is played on 12-string guitar and Mellotron (flute tape). She’s willing to “pay double the rent,” but this isn’t enough for the new owners of the property, who know it’s “good money gone if [they] let them stay.” Under capitalism, it isn’t enough to make money–profits have to be maximized.

To her even greater shock, Mrs. Barrow learns, upon moving to “Harlow New Town,” the new area where Pebble et al want her and the other evictees to live, that they want to raise the rent. This, surely, will allow Styx to get back the four hundred pounds they gave the evictees to goad them into moving, plus get a lot more money, over time.

After a brief solo by Hackett of sobbing guitar leads over Banks’s organ triads, we come to an instrumental interlude meant to represent the passage of time over about forty years. The main motif of this passage is five notes played on the bass and organ: E D E D F-sharp. Soon after, we hear E D E D F-natural. This motive is harmonized on the Mellotron (flute tape again) and Gabriel’s flute.

When Gabriel’s singing returns, we’ve gone from 1972 to 2012, which I find most interesting from our point of view living now. The social commentary and prophetic nature of Gabriel’s lyric (inspired by his own landlord troubles of the time) are even more prescient, in a metaphorical sense as I’ll explain below, than he must have imagined.

One should bear in mind just how much the world has actually changed since the writing of this lyric, just before the 1973-1975 recession marking the end of Keynesian state intervention in failing economies and of the beginning of the end of welfare capitalism, and the dawn of neoliberalism and the “free market,” which in turn has metastasized into the horror it became by the 2010s.

Note how “Genetic Control” announces that there will be a restriction on tenants’ height to four feet. The directors of Genetic Control have been buying up all the properties recently sold, and with shorter tenants, “they can fit twice as many in the same building site,” thus doubling the money made in Pebble’s company, no longer Styx Enterprises, but now “United Blacksprings International” (sounds like BlackRock to me). Under capitalism, successful businesses grow into giant, multinational corporations.

We’ve all been made “shorter in height,” thanks to the depredations of contemporary neoliberalism. Capitalism makes the 99% small so the 1% can tower over us all. The cramming in of “twice as many in the same building site” reminds me of the terrible living conditions of the working class in 19th century England and elsewhere. See also Marx, pages 816-818.

Incidentally, Pebble has been knighted. When a rich, exploitative capitalist becomes Sir John De Pebble, we can see how foolish it is to idealize the era of kings, queens, and knights (à la “Time Table”).

“Satin Peter of Rock Development Ltd.”, an obvious pun on the saint, announces the coming of a capitalist heaven on Earth “with land in your hand.” Remember this religious imagery when we come to “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” in “Supper’s Ready.”

V: Can-Utility and the Coastliners

“Can-Utility and the Coastliners” opens with 12-string acoustic guitars–as integral a part of the early Genesis sound as the Mellotron was of the early King Crimson sound–and Collins hitting a triangle. “Can-Utility” is a pun on Canute, an old king of England, Denmark, and Norway back in the 11th century. Surrounded by flatterers, the king showed them he had no extraordinary powers by sitting on his throne at the shore and commanding the tide to stop coming in, which of course it didn’t.

The song is mostly Hackett’s, with some musical contributions from Banks and Rutherford. Hackett’s lyric demonstrates how foolish blind deference and obsequiousness to authority is. As I said of The Winkler, this thoughtless obeying of orders is what gives evil leaders their power. Luckily for Canute’s flatterers, he was not that kind of king; he just wanted his flatterers to realize how foolish their ass-kissing was.

The song begins, as I said above, with 12-string acoustic guitars, playing arpeggios of B major, C-sharp minor seventh, and F-sharp seventh added flat ninth chords, and a strummed B major chord. Then the song goes to D major, and Gabriel begins singing.

He sings of a history book telling Canute’s story. The book is by the sea, just as Canute was, and its pages get “washed by the waves,” just as the king was. We hear a chord progression of D major, A major, G major, and A major as Gabriel sings of the shadow of a cloud looking down on those pages “as eyes of the past.” Just as a king should not be deified, or made into a cult of personality, neither should history or tradition be so revered uncritically.

We hear those major chords in D, A, G, A again when the king commands the waves to “halt at [his] feet.” With the same music, the king makes the same judgement about the foolishness of obsequiousness as those “eyes of the past” that looked down on the pages that praised a king’s modesty…or was it a false modesty? After all, some have claimed that the king vainly commanded those waves to stop because he really did think he could stop them. Either way, the point is made clear about excessive praise of power and authority.

Rutherford hits a low D on his bass pedal synthesizer and Collins comes in on the drums as Gabriel begins to sing of a coming storm near the king’s throne on the shoreline. We hear those D, A, G, A major chords again with words of flattery to the king. Hackett plays a lead of nine notes through a volume pedal as a segue to 12-string acoustic guitar playing in D minor.

Collins bangs in with the drums again during this instrumental passage, with vigorous 12-string acoustic guitar strumming, Rutherford pounding his foot on that D on the bass pedals, and Banks playing a dark theme on the Mellotron. The music seems to be depicting the waves splashing against Canute’s feet and his throne, humbling him and his flatterers.

One senses that maybe the king, deep down, was hoping the waves would obey him when Gabriel sings “he forced a smile even though his hopes lay dashed where offerings fell.” This leads to another instrumental passage, beginning with a chord progression of D minor, G major, C major, and A major. Gabriel plays an oboe melody over this progression.

While we hear the oboe, Rutherford puts his 12-string acoustic guitar aside, and no longer needing the bass pedals, picks up his bass guitar. The key changes to F-sharp major, and he’s playing fast notes in E and going from there to hammer-ons in F-sharp. Banks is playing arpeggios on the organ, first in one bar of 5/4, then back to 4/4, where the time stays largely the same, except for the occasional time change to a bar in 5/4 again, then to a bar of 3/4. During this time, Hackett does a solo, the first few notes using the volume pedal again.

The key switches to C major, and Gabriel resumes singing over alternating C and F major chords. The king’s modesty sure seems to be false (as far as Hackett’s lyric is concerned, at least), for he hopes that–as the tide soaks him–at least his former flatterers won’t laugh at him.

Well, they do eventually laugh, his face turns red with humiliation, and he dies. Sic semper tyrannus?

The song ends with some tricky riffs, perhaps musically suggestive of the awkwardness of the king’s situation. The 4/4 switches to a bar of 6/4 with an ascension of C-D-E-G-C-D-E, then down an octave to an eighth note in E before going back to a bar of 4/4, and a G in a tied whole note. Then a bar of 5/4 with the G from the previous bar as the first of six eighth notes, the others being a G an octave higher, then E, F, E, and C, and ending with a C an octave lower after a quarter and an eighth rest. Then alternating 6/4 and 4/4, and Gabriel singing about the king’s red face and his death. That’s the end of Side One.

VI: Horizons and Supper’s Ready

Side Two begins with another Hackett composition, a short solo for six-stringed acoustic guitar called “Horizons.” It’s a beautiful piece in G major, featuring a clever use of bell-like harmonics.

After that, we come to the great Genesis epic, “Supper’s Ready.” It’s 23 minutes long, and divided into seven parts, the first of which is called “Lover’s Leap,” based on an experience late at night that Gabriel had with his wife, Jill, in their London flat. Hackett claimed that there was some drug use, and that Jill began speaking in a completely different voice at one point, something reflected in Gabriel’s lyric, “I swear I saw your face change; it didn’t seem quite right.” He made a makeshift cross from household items, and she reacted violently. Obviously, it was a bad trip.

A later incident that inspired some of this part’s lyric was when Gabriel looked out the window and saw seven shrouded men walking across the lawn to his parents’ house. These disturbing experiences would evolve into an epic story about good vs evil, including a journey through various scenes from the Book of Revelation, whose apocalypse ties in thematically with the end-of-the-world scenario of “Watcher of the Skies.” We’ve already dealt with such forms of evil as greed in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

The song begins on an A minor chord with an added 6th, with Gabriel and Collins coming in immediately, singing an octave apart from each other, while Hackett, Rutherford, and Banks are all playing arpeggiated chords on 12-string acoustic guitars. As I said above, this dulcet, harpsichord-like sound of three acoustic guitars together was a staple of the early Genesis sound, something they’d already established on such songs as “Stagnation” from Trespass and “The Musical Box” on Nursery Cryme.

As the band was developing the first part of “Supper’s Ready,” though, they didn’t want to repeat themselves too much, so they made sure to have their epic go in different musical directions, as we’ll hear later in a piano arrangement by Gabriel that would become “Willow Farm,” as well as an instrumental passage by Banks, Rutherford, and Collins that would become “Apocalypse in 9/8.”

Behind the vocals and acoustic guitars, we hear Collins strike a triangle again, and–on the studio version–Rutherford playing a cello. The importance of “Lover’s Leap,” from a lyrical and thematic standpoint, is how the love of the husband and wife at the beginning of the epic establishes the good against which the evil will be later contrasted.

Now, I understand–from the programme notes Gabriel wrote for concertgoers to give further explanation of what’s going on in the story–that the two lovers are supposed to be experiencing all the events of the plot together. Still, I feel that there’s a huge contradiction between the notes and when Gabriel sings, twice, “I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm [loving] arms. It’s good to feel you again”/[alternatively] “Now I’m back again.” These lines are heard toward the end of “Lover’s Leap,” and again at the beginning of “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with the variations as given above.

Why would the husband sing this if he’s been with his “babe” the whole time? I tend to think of Gabriel’s lyrics as more canonical and authoritative than his programme notes, which he could have written while stoned, for all we know. Note also the line “A distance falls around our bodies.” He summed up the story as “a personal journey,” suggesting that we’re meant to think of him “walking through scenes from Revelation in the Bible” alone, not with Jill.

Then again, maybe Jill is with him throughout the song, but only in a metaphorical sense. That is, he misses her, and she misses him, so they imagine themselves together as a kind of dream-like wish-fulfillment. Perhaps this is what’s being implied in the programme notes when they say that in the “Lover’s Leap” section, that they are “transformed in the bodies of another male and female.” Perhaps this, indeed, is what is meant by lover’s leap: it’s a leap of faith that, one day after the apocalypse, they’ll be together again. So they dream, perhaps in a drug-induced stupor, that they’ve been together the whole time, but seeing each other in the bodies of a different man and woman.

If my interpretation–that the lovers are apart from the end of “Lover’s Leap” to “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs”–is true, then I can see “Supper’s Ready” as allusive not only to the Bible, but also, in a subtle sense, to scenes from Odysseus‘ leaving of Ithaca to fight the Trojan War, to his odyssey to get back home–he and his wife, Penelope, missing each other’s touch for twenty years. I’m thinking in particular of the way the story is related in the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante (Odysseus) and Greta Scacchi (Penelope). In this sense, Gabriel’s watcher of the skies really is reading Chapman’s Homer.

The lovers’ bodies transformed into those of a different male and female, and yet together as such throughout the middle of “Supper’s Ready,” can thus be paralleled in The Odyssey to how, on the one hand, Odysseus sleeps with Circe and Calypso, and Penelope is troubled by a horde of obnoxious suitors on the other.

The seven shrouded men moving across the lawn could be paralleled with Menelaus, Agamemnon et al calling Odysseus to join them in retrieving Helen of Troy. It’s interesting how the seventh shrouded man in the front has “a cross held high in hand,” which seems like a projection of the makeshift cross Gabriel had, the one that upset Jill so much. I’m sure Penelope was deeply upset about her husband being taken from her by the suitors of Helen to go to war for so many years.

After all the verses of “Lover’s Leap” have been sung, we hear Banks play a solo on the Hohner Pianet while the 12-string acoustic guitars are playing in D minor. A harmonized tune is played by Hackett on his electric guitar using the volume pedal and Rutherford on the cello. After that, Gabriel comes in with a brief flute melody.

The song soon segues into “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” and we’re back in A minor, which in turn will soon become A major. A humble farmer simply looking after his farm is contrasted with a religious fraud, “who looks after the fire.” The farmer reminds me of Candide, who must cultivate his garden and not be distracted with philosophical and theological nonsense, while the “fireman” reminds me not only of how Pangloss has the opposite philosophical and theological attitude, but also of what a religious hypocrite Tartuffe is.

Religious frauds like the GESM are, of course, part of the evil of the world, promising heaven with their cure-all opium of the people, yet pulling us all into holy (and far-from-holy) wars, just as the GESM will do with his followers, who will do battle against “all those without an up-to-date ‘Eternal Life Licence‘,” as the programme notes tell us. This war, of course, is the subject of the next part, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men.” This war also parallels the Trojan War, as I would have it.

“Ikhnaton” is Akhenaten, a pharaoh from 14th century BCE Egypt, not far in time or space from the Trojan War. We all know what the promise of heaven from the GESM is: it’s a con. The “band of merry men” sound like those of Robin Hood; yet the name must be ironic, for while those of Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, those of the GESM steal to enrich himself.

This section is in D major, with Banks playing arpeggios on the organ, Rutherford quickly strumming a 12-string acoustic guitar, and Hackett tapping arpeggios in harmony with some more played by Banks on the organ. Just as Odysseus and the Greeks win the Trojan War, so does the GESM’s and the husband’s side win in our story. Thus ends this section, and we come to part IV, “How Dare I Be So Beautiful?”

It’s a soft passage in which Gabriel sings about the aftermath of the war and climbing up a pile of corpses. At the top, though, they (the survivors of the battle, or him and his wife, however you wish to interpret “we”) find “a plateau of green grass and green trees full of life.” It’s so surreal that they would find life up at the top of a mountain of death. Is this the GESM’s definition of heaven, after what he’d imagine to be a ‘life and death’ struggle with evil?

The husband’s journey through good vs evil and the apocalypse was also influenced by The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is also about a man, Christian, traveling from his hometown, the “City of Destruction,” or this world, to the “Celestial City,” or heaven, atop Mount Zion.

The husband sees “a young figure…by a pool.” Having “been stamped ‘Human Bacon’ by some butchery tool” sounds like his war injuries, or some other kind of wound. Narcissism’s origins are in some injury, or abuse, and we can see he has this kind of problem.

“He is you”…who? The husband’s wife? I suspect it’s the GESM, for he comes off as having narcissistic traits, given how he’s made for himself a cult of personality. “Babe” seems too sweet to have such vices as these.

The narcissism of powerful leaders is an evil that causes wars like the one just ended. The egotism of “this lad” causes him to turn into a flower, while his servile followers “watch in reverence.” And speaking of flowers, we then come to “Willow Farm.”

A willow, of course, is a tree or shrub–a plant. When willow leaves and bark are used medicinally, one doesn’t generally think about narcotics; when one considers the surreal lyric of “Willow Farm,” though, one may find it easy to think of willow as a kind of euphemism for drugs. So “Willow Farm” could be seen as a code for, say, cannabis farm.

Gabriel’s lyric playfully maximizes rhyme and wordplay, suggesting the imaginative flights of fancy of the stoned. I bring this up because this section of “Supper’s Ready” parallels that of The Odyssey dealing with the lotus eaters. Odysseus and his crew come to an island whose inhabitants eat lotus fruits and flowers, which have a narcotic quality, causing their eaters to sleep in peaceful apathy. This happens to Odysseus’ men, and he has to get them all back on his ship and sail away, for if he doesn’t, they’ll all stay there and never go home.

This lolling about is one of the evils that the husband must struggle against if he is to get back home and be with “Babe” again. So many of us, rather than band together in solidarity and fight the injustices of the world, prefer to sit around and smoke dope, lying about and doing nothing. In terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, this would be sloth.

In the lotus-land of Willow Farm, “everyone’s happy to be here.” If you go there, “open your eyes, it’s full of surprise [drug trip], everyone lies [tells lies, or lies down? I suspect the latter] like the fox on the rocks [inspiring the foxy lady on the cover, though I still insist she’s standing on a flat block of ice] and the musical box [reminding us of the first track on Nursery Cryme].”

Among the examples of surreal imagery in this lyric are “Winston Churchill dressed in drag [since this is not meant to be a reference to transgenderism, I’m delighted to hear that horrible man mocked], he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.” Many bad things or people used to be good ones, or at least they were once perceived to be good. “The frog was a prince, the price was a brick, the brick was an egg, the egg was a bird.”

Such surreal imagery reinforces the idea that what’s being experienced in Willow Farm is a drug trip, or lotus-eating. Accordingly, the people are “as happy as fish, and gorgeous as geese, and wonderfully clean in the morning.” They’ve “got everything, [they’re] growing everything,” like good dope dealers.

In this stoned state, one never gets anywhere. As in the homunculus argument, one tries to explain a concept in terms of the concept itself, hence “mum to mud to mad to dad,” then “dad to dam to dum to mum.” One comes right back to where one started. Those in Willow Farm are thus like the lotus-eaters, high as kites and going nowhere.

However much the husband may yearn for his wife (“Mama, I want you now!”), just as Odysseus did among the lotus-eaters…or when with Circe or Calypso, for that matter…he’s stuck where he is and can’t get home (“like it or not…you’re under the soil…yes, deep in the soil…”).

Being seeds in the soil means that the husband and his fellow survivors of the war are underground, which can be associated with the Underworld, where Odysseus goes to learn from Tiresias how to sail safely back to Ithaca. “Willow Farm” segues into a soft instrumental passage during which Gabriel plays flute over guitar accompaniment in A minor. At the end of this is a marching snare drum with a trumpet-like restating of the GESM theme (“I know a fireman who looks after the fire.”). The martial nature of this restated theme reinforces the link between religious hypocrisy and war.

And now we come to the climactic “Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-Starring the Delicious Talents of Gabbie Ratchet)”. Gabbie Ratchet refers to the Hounds of Hell; they’re also known as Gabriel’s Hounds. It’s called 9/8 time, but a compound triple should be subdivided three plus three plus three, not four plus five, as it is here.

The repeated riff, over which Banks improvises an organ solo, is eighth notes of E E F-sharp E B E E E F-sharp, heard on the guitar and bass, and briefly at one point on Gabriel’s flute. It was originally conceived as an organ improvisation with no defined time signature.

The lyrics are full of imagery from the Book of Revelation: “Magog” (20: 7-8, when Satan, released from his prison, assembles the nations of the Earth [including Magog] for battle); “Dragons coming out of the sea” (13:1), bringing “down the fire from the skies” (13:13); “666” (13:18), and “and the seven trumpets blowing” (8:2 and 6).

Now, the Revelation in the New Testament was referring, however poetically and cryptically, to events in the Graeco-Roman world in the latter half of the first century (i.e., Nero was the Antichrist); but Gabriel’s lyrics are bringing these ideas into the modern world, to a time when there were great fears of nuclear war between the US and the USSR. Since we’re in a new Cold War now, with the US/NATO empire on one side and Russia and China on the other, all nuclear-armed, the warnings of “Supper’s Ready” are all the more relevant today.

Indeed, it really does feel as if we’re coming dangerously close to the end of the world, not only because of this new Cold War, which is being expanded, it seems, to include the Middle East as struggles by Yemen to disrupt the Gaza genocide are being frustrated by the American empire (Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine is a kind of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” in its own right), but also by global warming (recall the foxy lady on the block of ice of Foxtrot‘s cover).

Those of us who want justice feel caught between Scylla and Charybdis: if we intervene in an attempt to bring about revolution, the fascist police can shoot us down; if we sit back and do nothing like the stoned lotus-eaters, letting the imperialists have their way (their all-too-obedient police and military being the Winklers and Canute-flatterers of our day), we’ll all die. Speaking of Scylla and Charybdis, the apocalypse of “Supper’s Ready” could be compared to the unavoidable danger and death faced by Odysseus and his crew, six of whom die.

Towards the end of “Apocalypse in 9/8,” after Banks’s organ solo and Gabriel’s singing of the second verse, Banks comes in with the Mellotron and plays a descending melodic line of high E, E-flat, D, and C. Then the song segues into the seventh and last part, “Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with a reprise of the “and it’s ‘Hey babe, with your guardian eyes so blue'” section of “Lover’s Leap.” Just as Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca and into Penelope’s arms, so does the husband finally return (as I insist, in my interpretation of Gabriel’s lyrics, happens) to his wife.

Note how passionately Gabriel sings of how far away, and for so long, he’s been from her “loving arms.” This doesn’t sound like a man whose woman has been with him the whole time, as the programme notes would have us believe. Collins hits some tubular bells for even greater dramatic effect: first, a first-inversion B major triad, then B, B-flat, A-flat, G-flat, E. One might think of church bells, since a happy ending after the apocalypse can only be the attainment of heaven.

Just as the lovers could be likened to Odysseus and Penelope, in the context of all the Biblical imagery in Gabriel’s lyrics, the couple could also be likened to the Christian bride (the Church) and the groom (Christ), as the lovers of the Song of Songs are often allegorized. Recall also the influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress, as I mentioned above.

And with the “angel standing in the sun…crying with a loud voice, ‘This is the supper of the mighty God'” (Revelation 19:17), we come to the inspiration for the title of this side-long epic. (One might also think of Psalm 23:5.)

But what does all of this Christian symbolism mean? Note how the music of this last section is, ironically, the same as that of “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” but much more passionate, climactic, and sincere. In these two sections of “Supper’s Ready,” we have a contrast between the religious hypocrisy of the GESM and the heartfelt love and genuine spirituality of “As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs.”

There’s a big difference between those capitalists, settler-colonialists, and imperialists who claim to have Christian motives for their evil acts, those who “invest in the church for [their] heaven,” and those whose love is as real as that of the husband and wife of this epic. There’s a big difference between toadying up to authority (people like The Winkler and Canute’s flatterers), and a genuine love of God (“lord of lords, king of kings”).

VII: Conclusion

So, what does the concept of Foxtrot as an album all mean? The destruction of all human life is observed by an alien, and we can see a number of the causes of that destruction. The idealizing of the past, as justifying conservative, reactionary attitudes, which undermine efforts at progressive change; the greedy control of land and wealth, whose ill effects range from landlords evicting tenants to settler-colonialists and imperialists taking land away from the indigenous peoples of the world; servile obsequiousness to authority, to narcissists, and to religious hypocrites, who manipulate us all into supporting wars that ultimately lead to the annihilation of the human race. And instead of doing anything about it, so many of us would rather lie about and smoke dope.

And what would be a cure to these ills? Yet another thing that the lovers of “Supper’s Ready” could represent is our communal relationship with each other. The husband and wife, thus, are the self and other. Their separation, as I interpret it to be during the middle of the story, and expressed as such at both the beginning and the end of the epic story (“I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm/loving arms.”), can represent social alienation in general, another well-known symptom of capitalism, or any form of class conflict.

So the cure of the ills that will destroy our world includes a restoration of that communal love, whose solidarity will end alienation, and with that, end war, greed, servility, slothful intoxication, and the wrong-headed idealization of the past. For it is to the future that we must look to make a better world, “to take [us] to the New Jerusalem.”

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