Category: capitalism

Analysis of ‘This Is Spinal Tap’

This Is Spinal Tap: A Rockumentary by Martin Di Bergi is a mockumentary film co-written and directed by Rob Reiner (who plays Di Bergi), his feature directorial debut. It stars him, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, with Tony Hendra, RJ Parnell, David Kaff, June Chadwick, and a host of celebrities playing small parts throughout the film. Most of the film is improvised by all of the actors, though only Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer are credited with ‘writing the script.’

As a satire on rock musicians and the industry, This Is Spinal Tap was released to critical acclaim, but initially found only moderate commercial success. After being released on VHS, though, it found greater success and a cult following. Many media sources now place it among the best and funniest films ever made.

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

While the foibles of confused, often stoned musicians, as well as incompetent management, are obviously major sources of humour throughout the film, perhaps the most important satirical target is the tension between artistic integrity and creativity on the one hand, and the mechanics of the profit-driven music business on the other. Put another way, capitalism kills art.

A hint at the contradiction is given away right at the beginning of the film, when Di Bergi introduces himself as a filmmaker who makes “a lot of commercials,” then he gives a brief description of an inane ad he filmed, hoping you’ll know which one he’s talking about. This comment in a sense parallels what’s to come, for the fictional hard rock band Spinal Tap would like to be regarded as legitimate artists, in spite of the often vulgar subject matter of their songs, which seem merely to copy whatever the musical clichés of the time happen to be. They’d even like a substantial amount of the American audience simply to know who they are, yet they’re “currently residing in the ‘Where are they now?’ file.”

Speaking of clichés, we get an example of one in humour a few times during these beginning minutes of the film. I’m referring to the Rule of Three in comedy: list three items, the last of which is the surprising, absurd punchline. Di Bergi was impressed with Spinal Tap’s “exuberance, their raw power, and their punctuality.” Then he says he “wanted to capture the sights, the sounds, the smells” of a touring rock band, After that, we hear from some fans why they like Spinal Tap: their music gives a female fan “a lot of energy”; a male fan says, “The metal’s deep”; and a potential groupie, it’s safe to assume, says she likes “the way they dress, the leather.”

It’s noteworthy that Di Bergi says that the US tour we see Spinal Tap on in this rockumentary is their first in almost six years to promote their new album, Smell the Glove, for that long gap in touring is surely among the main reasons, if not the main reason, for waning American interest in the band’s music. Consistent touring and playing of concerts is crucial for promoting a band and maintaining interest in them.

In direct contrast, the success of Rush in the late 1970s and early 80s has been attributed to diligent touring, in spite of the limited radio airplay their long songs got (George-Warren, Romanowski, Pareles, p. 847).

An omen of what’s to come during Spinal Tap’s disastrous American tour is when their limo driver (played by Bruno Kirby) is to pick them up from the airport, and he’s holding a sign saying, “Spinal Pap.” Later, when driving the band around, he tells Di Bergi that the band’s success is “a fad” and “a passing thing.”

The first song we see them play onstage is “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight.” The second verse, after the refrain, deals with wanting to have sex with an underage girl. The references to her being “just four feet” tall, and still having her “baby teeth” I prefer not to take literally for obvious reasons; I assume it’s just comic hyperbole.

Apart from the outrageousness of this naughty humor, I see the blatant sexual references in this song, in “Big Bottom,” and in “Sex Farm” as, apart from the obvious groupie adoration, a comment on how pandering to rock fans’ lewd desires cheapens one’s art in an attempt at increasing the band’s popularity and boosting sales. (I wonder, incidentally, if the singer wanting to get his hands on the underage girl is an oblique reference to stars like Jimmy Page having baby groupies like Lori Maddox, or the singer of the Knack‘s having his teen Sharona.) The irony in all of this pandering is how the business end of Spinal Tap is failing…as, perhaps, it should be.

A satirical crack at how rock performers all too often copy others, in a cheap attempt at a quick leap to success, is when singer/rhythm guitarist David St. Hubbins (McKean) formed a band with lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Guest) back in the mid-1960s called The Originals, but who had to change their name–upon learning of another local band with the same name–to “The New Originals.” A Canadian band, back in 1965, released a cover of “Shakin’ All Over” with the band’s name given as “Guess Who?” in the hopes that they’d be associated with the British Invasion (one might think of The Who, whose popularity blossomed the year before), and therefore boost the band’s career.

Eventually, David’s and Nigel’s band would be called The Thamesmen, which sounds derivative of The Merseybeats. One song from this period seems to sum up the whole tension between making music and needing to sell a product: “Gimme Some Money,” or GSM for short. The song is an obvious parody of the 12-bar blues-based rock ‘n’ roll songs of the mid-60s (à la Yardbirds, etc.).

The Thamesmen’s drummer at the time was “Stumpy” Pepys (played by Ed Begley Jr.), who died in a bizarre gardening accident that the police deemed “best left unsolved,” as Nigel says. This death introduces an, indeed, bizarre series of drummers’ deaths that makes one wonder if the other members of the band are guilty of foul play.

Their next drummer, “Stumpy Joe,” died from choking on vomit (someone else’s?). This joke seems to be inspired by John Bonham’s death by choking on vomit (Jimi Hendrix died similarly). Drummer Peter “James” Bond died, apparently, by spontaneous combustion onstage during a festival at the Isle of Lucy (Was Desi Arnaz there, by chance?). Their current drummer, Mick Shrimpton (Parnell), will explode onstage, too.

My speculation that Tap are secret suspects in these deaths is satirically based on how certain bands, like the Beatles and Genesis, had to go through a number of drummers to find the right one, then the band could go on and succeed. It could be argued that bands like the Beatles and Genesis were great bands right from the start, only they needed better drummers. Genesis went through three drummers (Chris Stewart, John Silver, and John Mayhew, these first and third drummers being fired) before settling on Phil Collins, who of course was crucial in building the band’s cult following during its prog rock phase, then–when he later replaced Peter Gabriel as lead singer–first hired Bill Bruford as touring drummer before settling on Chester Thompson, and the band switched to simple pop and became superstars.

Pete Best, surely the most unlucky man in rock music history, may have gotten a raw deal when he was fired just before the Beatles’ meteoric rise to superstardom, but Ringo Starr was clearly a far better drummer. The killing off of Spinal Tap drummers, while the band is struggling to cement their success, seems to symbolize this revolving door of drummers prior to a band’s striking it big commercially. Best must have felt ‘killed’ by the Beatles when he was fired.

Though Tap is soldiering on in their American tour, playing songs like “Big Bottom” (musically represented by a lot of bottom–David, Nigel, and regular bassist Derek Smalls [Shearer] all playing bass, keyboardist Viv Savage [Kaff] playing synth bass, and Shrimpton hitting a preponderance of tom-toms), the business end is having difficulties. Gigs are being cancelled, and Smell the Glove‘s release is being delayed over its controversial cover.

Bobbi Flekman (played by Fran Drescher), artist relations for Polymer Records, complains to Tap’s manager, Ian Faith (Hendra), about the cover, which shows the sexual degradation of a naked woman on all fours, with a dog collar on her neck and a glove shoved in her face to smell. Neither Ian nor the band can understand what is so offensive about the cover, since they–addled by their sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll hedonistic lifestyle–cannot fathom the idea that women are actually autonomous human beings with hearts and feelings.

Flekman argues that the Beatles were able to release a top-selling album with a cover that was nothing but white. (What’s ignored here, of course, is that The White Album, like any Beatles album, is guaranteed good music, unlike the sleazy nonsense that Tap produces, something trashed by the music critics.)

Next, Flekman discusses the cover with Ian and the band from a business angle. Both Sears and Kmart won’t sell the album because of the cover. Now, the issue isn’t so much the sexism of the cover, but rather how hard it will be to sell the album when so many conservative stores won’t sell one with a “sexy” cover. She argues that they could have pressed the stores to take the album if Tap’s previous work had been more successful. Sexism wouldn’t matter so much if sales were better, apparently. (Of course, the herpes sores on the lips of David, Nigel, and Derek suggest that the three lads have been made to smell the ‘glove,’ as it were, of a certain female.)

In any case, Smell the Glove ends up being The Black Album, though without an interesting cover, be it a sleazy one or not, it is doomed to poor sales. Apparently, a sexist/sexy album cover would have resulted in better sales after all, and that’s part of the satirical point of the movie. Good sales are valued more than good art. “Death sells,” as Ian says in his defence of the ridiculously nondescript death-black cover, but sex sells far better.

Attempts by Spinal Tap to incorporate high art into their music are vitiated by their tasteless expression of lust and their pandering to the lowest common denominator. Examples of this incompatible merging of high and low include Nigel’s pretty piano trilogy in D-minor called “Lick My Love-Pump,” the inexplicable quotation, on Nigel’s lead guitar, from the minuet in Luigi Boccherini‘s String Quintet in E Major in the otherwise meat-and-potatoes hard rock song, “Heavy Duty,” and the pompous way “Rock and Roll Creation” and “Stonehenge” incorporate elements bordering on, if not lapsing into, prog rock (e.g., changes in time signature, guitar leads with an arpeggiated diminished 7th chord…for that ‘classical’ effect, etc.).

As far as the lyrics of Tap’s songs are concerned, Derek’s ludicrous characterization of David and Nigel as “poets,” like Byron or Shelley, would be more accurately described, in the comic achievement of Guest, McKean, Shearer, and Reiner, as brilliantly cretinous. In a similar vein, Derek absurdly praises “Sex Farm” as taking “a sophisticated view of the idea of sex…on a farm.” All of this, on the musical and lyrical level, satirizes the contradictions between aspiring to higher forms of art and pandering to vulgar tastes for the sake of making more money.

Connected with this satire of the incompatibility of higher art with vulgar tastes–the incongruity of artistic freedom with churning out a product that sells–is the contradiction between musicians who have an obvious spark of talent and drug users’ dimwittedness. Note Nigel wanting to demonstrate a guitar’s sustain without even plucking a note; or his belief that the number eleven is what makes an amp louder than ten; and–upon realizing that making a woman the sexual submissive, rather than doing so with the boys in the band, is what was so offensive about the original Smell the Glove cover–Nigel’s and David’s musing of the “fine line between stupid and clever.” In spite of Bill Hicks‘s insistence that great music was made by people really high on drugs, I don’t think I’m being controversial in saying that drugs’ overuse doesn’t help with normal mental functioning–remember what happened to Syd.

David’s girlfriend, Jeanine Pettibone (Chadwick), comes to see him, and Nigel’s nose is out of joint. Ian won’t be happy with what he sees as her meddling, either. Her arrival, which coincides with that of Smell the Glove, or The Black Album, is significant, for her involvement is a parody of Yoko Ono’s involvement with the Beatles, right around the time when The White Album came out, from which John Lennon said, “the break-up of the Beatles can be heard on that album.” The unfair blame put on Ono for the break-up of the Beatles is parodied and paralleled by the sexist animosity Nigel and Ian shower on Jeanine, since Tap comes dangerously close to breaking up themselves.

Tap’s cheap pandering to whatever the musical trends of the time happen to be is reflected in the chameleonic changes in their style over the years with both the Thamesmen and Tap. After their mid-60s blues-rock pastiche, “Gimme Some Money,” the Thamesmen switched to psychedelic rock with “Cups and Cakes,” reminiscent of songs like Strawberry Alarm Clock‘s “Incense and Peppermints” and the Beatles’ “Penny Lane.”

When Nigel and David changed the band’s name to Spinal Tap, the pandering to current trends continued with “(Listen to the) Flower People,” just in time for the Summer of Love. And just as Black Sabbath shifted away from the peace-and-love hippie scene, preferring dark, Satanic themes, so did Tap replace its hippie audience with a heavy metal fanbase, as can be heard in the Tony Iommi style of the evil tritone chord progression opening “Rock and Roll Creation,” over which Nigel adds Iommi-style blues licks.

Though the fictional discography of Tap would date the album, The Gospel According to Spinal Tap (or Rock ‘n’ Roll Creation, with its cover design parodying Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti), in 1977, when punk rock’s and new wave’s return to simple, three-to-four minute songs made the more pompous arrangements of the early 70s anachronistic, I for that reason would date the album back about five years earlier.

Similarly, I’d date “Big Bottom” about ten years after the given release date of 1970, and “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” at least five to seven years later than the given 1974 date (after all, a song with similarly controversial subject matter, by the musically talented but despicable Ted Nugent, came out–“Jailbait“–in 1981). The release of “Sex Farm” in 1980 sounds about right, since its lyrics’ lewd subject matter sounds like a parody of AC/DC’s cock rock lyrics.

All of this pandering to the popular tastes of the time, a dumbing-down intensified with the tasteless lewdness of the lyrics, reinforces the film’s satirical targeting of music for money, a sacrificing of art on the gold altar of capitalism.

The cheap appealing to sexuality continues with our understanding that there are “armadillos” in the tight trousers of David, Nigel, and Derek…though in the embarrassing airport metal detector scene, we seem to know why Derek’s surname is what it is. Just as Tap’s artistic aspirations and pretensions are phony, so is their swaggering sex appeal.

Indeed, the band’s career is less about art than it is about partying, as we can see on the face of Viv Savage during Tap’s performance of “Heavy Duty.” (Seriously, moviegoers must be wondering how to get in contact with the wasted keyboardist’s drug dealer–Viv’s obviously on really good shit! Is his dealer still alive? Hope springs eternal!)

Problems at the business end continue when a planned album signing of Smell the Glove in a record store results in no fans showing up. Ineffectual Polymer Records promoter Artie Fufkin (played by Paul Shaffer) blames himself, but the problem goes far beyond him and even Tap’s similarly incompetent manager. The satirical point behind the film is that a band so dedicated to pandering, instead of to music as art, doesn’t deserve to be successful.

The comedy of This Is Spinal Tap hits so close to home–“It’s funny ’cause it’s true!”–that a number of rock stars (e.g., Steven Tyler) who saw the film failed to see the humour in it. Being lost backstage at a gig, and being unable to find the stage, is a common problem for rockers, which should be easy to understand when one considers how a band goes to so many different gigs, all for such brief times, that they can’t be expected to know the–I can imagine–often labyrinthine structure of the halls in these buildings.

Just as John Lennon allowed Yoko Ono to give her input during the Beatles’ recording sessions, thus angering the other three through Lennon’s breaking of the rule of not allowing girlfriends or wives in, so does David allow Jeanine to interfere, thus annoying Nigel and Ian. Her absurd idea of putting makeup on the band members’ faces, to represent their astrological signs, is an obvious sendup of Kiss.

The very song, “Stonehenge,” is a great poking of fun at the growing “Englishness” of pop and rock since the British Invasion, as is the American comedy trio of Guest, McKean, and Shearer doing British accents (just as, on the other side of the coin, it was common for British rockers to be “fake Americans”. That would explain Nigel’s pronunciation of “semi” and Derek’s “zipper”. Jeanine says “airplane” and not “aeroplane”, and pronounces exit ‘egg-sit’ instead of the British ‘ex-it’).

This mocking of British pomposity is augmented not only through the inclusion of a Stonehenge monument onstage, but its careless measurement of 18 inches instead of the correct 18 feet. Nigel’s playing of a mandolin towards the end of the disastrous performance–with the miniature monument in danger of being trampled by a nearby dancing dwarf–adds to the pomposity in its implied parody of folk rock moments by bands like Jethro Tull.

Another example of Spinal Tap aiming for high artistry, but failing hilariously, is in Nigel’s guitar solos. The example given shows him ‘shredding‘ with his left and right hands so badly out of sync, it’s as if the distance between them were as wide as that of the Grand Canyon. Even more absurd is the self-indulgent noise he makes, a parody of Jimmy Page’s bowed guitar (see here, starting at about 11:30, for an example), not with a bow, but with a violin!

Ian’s quitting Tap can be compared with the death of Brian Epstein, since with these managers out of the picture, the bands they were holding together would then begin to fall apart, as we see when Nigel suddenly quits out of frustration at the Air Force base gig.

Ian’s and Nigel’s misogynistic attitude towards Jeanine’s growing involvement in the band’s affairs is topped by David’s saying that her help won’t be compensated for with any remuneration, an interesting irony considering how henpecked he is by his girlfriend.

More satiric examples of rock’s pretentious attempts at high art come with Tap’s performance of “Jazz Odyssey” in front of a festival crowd, who have no patience to hear a tedious and poorly-planned improvisational jam. Later, when it really seems as though Tap is soon to end, David and Derek discuss a few ‘high art’ projects they haven’t had time to do because of their full-time commitment to the band: a musical based on Jack the Ripper (Saucy Jack), and David’s acoustic guitar pieces played with the London Philharmonic. It’s easy to see how they “envy” themselves with such absurd ideas that will never get off the ground.

With the band’s future seeming moribund, Nigel reappears before the next gig with news from Ian that “Sex Farm” is on the charts in Japan. When no one else will have Tap, Japan will save them. So Nigel is back in the band, and they all fly to the Far East.

During a resulting concert there, we see a few examples of racist and sexist humour, the kind one wouldn’t think filmmakers would be able to get away with today. First, Japanese fans in the audience are all seen moving their arms, with pointed fingers, in the air to the beat, suggesting the Asian stereotype of mass conformity. After this, we see at the show that Ian has returned as manager, and Jeanine is sitting with a book and keeping her mouth shut as he stands by her, watching with his cricket bat, as if ready to whack her with it if she dares open her mouth.

I’m guessing that–apart from there being plenty of shots of the Japanese fans enjoying the show most individualistically after the stereotyped shot, and apart from our understanding that Ian is no less incompetent a manager than Jeanine (though as a professional, he shouldn’t be, while her inexperience makes her mistakes perfectly understandable)–the racism and sexism are deflated elsewhere in the film through its acknowledgement of these issues as serious problems (i.e., the original cover design for Smell the Glove, and Di Bergi asking if Tap’s music, with its mostly white audience, is racist…not so if Tap is now big in Japan!).

Another example of the film’s satirizing of capitalism’s degenerative effect on art is David’s purchasing of a set of tapes called The Namesake Series, on which famous people with the same surnames as those of famous authors read their books. The reciters get increasingly absurd in their incongruity with the writers they’re reading (i.e., McLean Stevenson reading Robert Louis Stevenson, and Julius Erving reading Washington Irving).

As the end credits are rolling, Di Bergi asks each member of Tap what he’d do if he wasn’t in rock-and-roll. Derek says he’d work with children (Doesn’t he already?). David says he’d be “a full-time dreamer.” Shrimpton is fine without rock-and-roll, as long as there are still sex and drugs in his life. Viv Savage says he’d “get stupid” and make a fool of himself in public. Nigel says he’d sell hats.

Note how none of them say they’d take their creative instincts into other avenues of expression. (In contrast, when Captain Beefheart and Grace Slick retired from music, they focused on the visual arts.) Without rock-and-roll, and their attempts to pander to vulgar tastes to make money off of it, these five guys would either have a regular, mundane job selling a product or service (I assume Derek would become a grade school teacher), or just be a wasted slacker or a rake.

These seem to be the options that a capitalist society offers the working class: as an artist, be a panderer; otherwise, do a dull nine-to-five job (if you like the hours), or be a ‘loser.’

The market is so free, isn’t it?

Analysis of ‘Messiah of Evil’

Messiah of Evil, or Dead People, is a 1974 supernatural horror film written, produced, and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. It stars Marianna Hill and Michael Greer, with Anitra Ford, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr., and Joy Bang.

Though a lesser-known film, Messiah of Evil has been generally well-received. It’s wonderfully atmospheric, with beautiful, vividly colourful visuals. It’s been described as “unsettling” by Nick Spacek of Starburst Magazine, having given the film a score of ten out of ten. It was ranked #95 on IndieWire‘s 200 Best Horror Movies of All-Time; they said, “it’s full of  iconic and memorable scenes that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work.”

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

As with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Messiah of Evil does a subtle critique of capitalism. We see a satirical commentary on consumerism in the supermarket scene, with the ghouls eating all the meat in the meat section, then feeding off of Laura (Ford). We’re reminded of a similar satire on consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, with the zombies haunting the shopping mall.

Recall that this film came out in 1974, when the same manifestations of political upheaval happened that inspired much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which came out the same year and also dealt with cannibalism. Early on in Messiah of Evil, we see Arletty (Hill) drive her car to a Mobil gas station, giving us an association with oil in the early 70s, when the oil crisis happened, an issue I discussed in my analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Note the tension of the Mobil gas station attendant (played by Charles Dierkop), who is first seen shooting at someone (or some animal, as he seems to claim to have been shooting at). Then, when the creepy albino truck driver arrives (played by Bennie Robinson), the attendant, knowing how dangerous this albino is (with the dead victims in his truck, one of whom has a slit throat and was the chased victim seen at the beginning of the film), urgently presses Arletty to drive away without need of paying for her gas with her credit card. Finally, the attendant is killed by the ghouls of Point Dume (an obvious pun on doom), where she is headed to find her father.

My point is that the 1973 oil crisis marked the end of the post-war economic expansion era, which included welfare capitalism, strong unions, Keynesian government intervention to smooth over economic crises, and a strong push for progressive social reforms. The end of this era also meant the beginning of a reactionary, neoliberal push to the right; these trends have continued unswervingly over the past forty to fifty years, leading to the extreme income inequality and endless imperialist wars we’ve been suffering these years.

The evil spreading from Point Dume to the rest of the world, as is understood to be happening by the end of the film, can be seen to allegorize how neoliberalism has engulfed the world by now. The “messiah of evil,” that is, the antichrist, or as he’s called in the film, “the dark stranger,” appeared a hundred years before the events of this movie, when he returns; so he first appeared around 1873-1874, and has returned around 1973-1974. His first appearance would have been around the beginning of the Gilded Age, a time of terrible income inequality (the “gilding” being a gold covering of a far less valuable material, symbolizing wealth masking poverty); and his second appearance coincides with the beginnings of neoliberalism and our new Gilded Age.

Note how the gas station attendant tells Arletty that Point Dume is a “piss-poor” little town. Contrast this poverty with evidently rich Thom (Greer), in his nice suits and his hedonist mini-harem of women, Laura and Toni (Bang), soon to be replaced, it might seem, with Arletty.

One critic of the film, Glenn Kay, complained that the lead characters’ motivations are never explained in a satisfactory way, especially those of Thom; Kay also said that the titular Messiah is never properly identified. What Kay seems to have missed, though, is what is amply implied, but deliberately not explicitly revealed: Thom is the Messiah of Evil. In the flashback sequences, Greer plays the “dark stranger”; if one looks carefully at him in those shadowy scenes, one can recognize Greer’s tall, thin build, with the broad shoulders, in the black coat and hat. In an interview (<<bottom page), Greer even said he was soon to play “the devil’s son” in this movie.

So the hell that is brought to this town, and from thence to the rest of the world, is the evil of the rich, taking from the poor (Thom is wealthy, coming to the “piss-poor” town of Point Dume.). Recall 1 Timothy 6:10. Also note that the Beast came out of the sea (Revelation 13:1), just as the dark stranger comes out of the sea on a night with a blood-red moon.

In her search for her father, Arletty comes to a motel room and meets Thom, Laura, and Toni. Thom is listening to a dirty, poor old drunk named Charlie (Cook Jr.) tell the history of his birth, and of Point Dume. A hint as to Thom’s unsavoury character is how, instead of answering Arletty’s questions about her father, he rudely tells her to close the door, so he can continue to listen to Charlie’s story without any interrupting noise. Thom is fascinated to learn about Point Dume’s legendary history of the “blood moon” and “dark stranger” because he is intimately connected to them.

Arletty discovers a diary her father has written about his disturbing experiences in the town. His art, often black and white images of men in suits (suggestive of businessmen, or capitalists), reflects the change in his mental state, and like the diary, seems to be an attempt, ultimately failing, at therapy through expressing his pain. There seems to be estrangement between him and his daughter; he’s warned her never to come to Point Dume.

Thom, Laura, and Toni come to stay in her father’s home, where she is, for the three have not only been kicked out of their original motel for their questionable behaviour (we learn that Charlie has been killed), but no other hotel or motel will take them in. Since Thom is the antichrist, the refusal to him and his ‘groupie’ friends of accommodations seems like a Satanic version of the Christmas story, when pregnant Mary and Joseph couldn’t find an inn to stay in for the night, and had to make do in a manger.

Since I am linking Thomas with not only the devil, but also class conflict (he’s a Portuguese-American aristocrat), it might seem odd that he would have difficulty finding accommodations. Similarly, towards the end of the movie, he is fending off the ghouls with Arletty. I think the point is that Thom is hiding his true identity from her, because he has special uses for her…so they don’t kill her in the end. Part of the power of evil is how we have difficulty identifying it.

To give explanatory context to the seeming contradictions discussed in the previous paragraph, consider a few quotes by Baudelaire and Ken Ammi about the Devil either supposedly not existing or being the good guy. Similarly, 2 Corinthians 11:14 says that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” Indeed, in dialectical contrast to the black clothes of the dark stranger, Thom is always wearing light-coloured suits.

Furthermore, while wealthy Thom is largely presented as if he were one of the sympathetic protagonists of the film, many billionaires in today’s world have postured as if they’re friends of the common people: Trump, Soros, Musk, etc., and many of the common people are fooled by this charade. Just as we shouldn’t be fooled by these narcissists in real life, though, neither should we be taken in by Thom, as the mindless ghouls are. Arletty is right, towards the climax of the film, to trust her initial instincts and stab Thom in the arm.

Another example of Thom’s unsavoury character comes out when it’s obvious to Toni and especially Laura that he aims to seduce Arletty. One of the key problems plaguing all human relationships is the jealous competition over who one loves the most…me, or my rival(s)? The prototype of this problem is discovered in the Oedipal conflict over whether the desired parent loves the child, his or her other parent, or his or her siblings. Laura is so disgusted with Thom that she leaves…for this, there will be fatal consequences.

She foolishly chooses to go to town that night by foot. On the way, the albino truck driver drives by and offers her a ride, which she foolishly accepts. He’s playing the music of Wagner (specifically, the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin), whose name he incorrectly pronounces the English way (actually, an innocent goof made by actor Robinson, but one allowed by Huyck, who found it amusing), instead of the proper German way. Allowing the error in turn allows me to indulge in an interpretation of it: I see in the albino’s mispronunciation his limited, working-class education.

Some interesting associations can be made about the driver and his odd choice to play Wagner’s music in his truck (as opposed to listening to, say, pop music, or R and B). He’s an albino African-American, playing the music of a composer who was an old Nazi favourite. The linking of a ‘white’ black man with music associated with Nazism might make one think of Dr. Josef Mengele, who did such things as alter his patients’ eye colour to make them ‘more acceptable Aryans.’ Recall also that fascism exists to protect the interests of the capitalist class against socialism in part by turning the working class (people like the albino trucker) against the left and towards the right, as Trump did with his followers.

Beyond these political implications are other creepy things about the truck driver. His albino whiteness reminds us of that of Moby-Dick, especially in the chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which it’s discussed how frighteningly unnatural the colour white can be. Finally, the disgusting fellow likes to eat living rats!

Laura naturally doesn’t want to stay in the truck of this freak, so she gets out and continues on foot to the town. She ends up in a Ralph’s supermarket, where she sees ghouls in the meat section eating all the meat like a bunch of gluttons. A number of the men among them, in suits and ties, remind us of the black-and-white men in the paintings of Arletty’s father, which gives us a clue as to what he, in his physically and mentally deteriorating condition, has been obsessed with.

The feasting ghouls all look over at Laura, and deciding that her flesh must be much tastier than what they’re currently eating, get up and run after her. Terrified, she runs, but can’t get out in time to save herself.

A key to understanding how this film is a critique, however subtle, of capitalism is seeing how the ghouls eating the meat in the supermarket, then eating Laura, is symbolic of consumerism. Note that in this feeding, we have a pun on consumer, as both eater and as excessive buyer of goods and services.

One way the capitalist class retains its power over us is by keeping us mindlessly buying things–rather like zombies–so we fill their wallets with money, instead of thinking about how to change the system. Volume One of Das Kapital begins with a discussion of the commodity, the basic unit of our economic system, seen as either a use-value or an exchange value, traded in for money. When our buying and selling focuses on only the things involved in the transactions (money and commodities), rather than the people involved, what results is what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity, which exacerbates alienation.

We get a sense, during the supermarket scene, of this excessive preoccupation with things, with products, over people when we see the greedy eating of not only the meat in the meat section, but of Laura, too, who is thus reduced to meat, a commodification of her body, as will later happen to Toni in the movie theatre scene.

Feminists have often written and spoken of how women’s bodies are commodified and exploited through such things as prostitution, stripping, and pornography. The cannibalistic eating of Laura, whom Thom has described as a model (Ford herself was a model), and later of Toni, can thus be seen as symbolic rapes.

Violence against women, as seen in the cannibalistic eating of Laura and Toni, as well as violence against the poor, as with the killing of Charlie, is an example of what I’ve described elsewhere as “punching down.” The capitalist class wouldn’t be able to keep its power over us if we “punched up” instead. We buy the capitalists’ products (we consume them), and we hurt each other (consuming each other, metaphorically speaking), instead of rising up in revolution.

This punching down connects the black albino listening to Wagner with the zombie-like ghouls eating meat, then eating Laura. Fascism is about punching down–that is, attacking foreigners, people of colour, leftists, homosexuals, etc.–to ingratiate oneself with the ruling class, or in a symbolic sense, making oneself ‘whiter,’ more class collaborationist, more pro-capitalist.

Another example of this film pushing the marginalized into the mainstream, that is, making them conform, is the choice of Greer to play Thom. Greer was known not only as one of the first openly gay actors to appear in major Hollywood movies, but also to act in early films that dealt with gay themes, like The Gay Deceivers and Fortune and Men’s Eyes. So in Messiah of Evil, we have in Greer a publicly-known gay actor not only playing a straight man in Thom, but also playing a womanizer.

On a comparable note, Thom as the antichrist is portrayed throughout the film as a normal man–that is, his evil is normalized. We wouldn’t know he was the dark stranger, a descendant of him, or his reincarnation–whichever–if we weren’t paying close attention. The same can be said about how neoliberalism has been insinuated into our lives over the past forty years without most of us even noticing this insidious evil–it has also been normalized for us. The bogus promise of economic prosperity that the “free market” is supposed to provide is an evil that’s been presented as a messianic cure to the ills of “big government” by such demagogic economists has Milton Friedman.

As for Toni, we can sense that her days, if not her hours, are numbered when she sings the famous first verse of “Amazing Grace,” but stops singing conspicuously at “I once was lost, but now…” once Thom enters the area. Like Laura, Toni is getting sick of Point Dume and wants to leave. She can’t even get entertainment from the radio, since it isn’t receiving any stations. Thom suggests that the bored girl go see a movie (he’ll have Arletty to himself that way).

Her in the movie theatre is yet another example of the film doing a social commentary on consumerism, our tendency to pay for pleasure instead of dealing with our relationship problems, such as her jealousy over his preference of beautiful Arletty. Thus we see in both Toni’s jealousy and her retreat to the movies a reinforcement of social alienation.

She watches a Western called Gone With the West, an indulgently violent parody of the genre. The zombie-like ghouls enter later in a large group; their mindless watching of the film is a social commentary on how so many of us do the same thing–pay to be dazzled by the media, which is part of the superstructure influenced by (and influencing) the base of society, or its means and relations of production.

It doesn’t take long for her to realize she has unwelcome company in the theatre, right from the sight of a ghoul staring at her just before the lights go out and the cowboy film starts. She snaps out of the lull the movie experience has put her in, and the ghouls notice her awakening. Then they, including the albino, go after her and indulge in more cannibalism. It’s as though they were punishing her for having woken up and begun thinking for herself.

Another way the capitalist class keeps us under their control is through that superstructure described above–in this particular instance, the media (movies, TV, the radio, the news,…and in today’s world, social media). The superstructure’s media wasn’t nearly as bad back in the early 70s as it is now–with 90% of American media controlled by only six corporations, who thus have control over most of our access to information (which is now extended to a global network)–but it was bad enough back then to deserve a social critique in Messiah of Evil.

I consider this film to be quite prophetic–whether intentionally so or not–through its symbolism and allegory, it being a film that came out during the huge political upheavals of the early 1970s (the Watergate cover-up, defeat in Vietnam, racial conflict, and economic convulsions), these being upheavals some of whose repercussions are being felt in full flower today; I discussed such prophetic, if you will, filmmaking in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (link above).

The sickness that takes over the people of Point Dume, each with a bleeding eye, can be seen in the context of my capitalist allegory to symbolize how the mindset needed to keep us all subjugated to the new neoliberal order has negatively affected our mental health. We see the world in pain, for we ourselves are in pain–we weep blood instead of tears.

Along with this growing sickness, the ghouls all act as an undifferentiated group, with no sense of individuality. They go to the beach at night, looking up at the moon (waiting for it to turn blood-red) in collective expectation of the return of the dark stranger, an act called “The Waiting.” Similarly, working class people today, far from experiencing the liberation promised after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, find themselves passively accepting worse and worse jobs, with low pay, reduced benefits, etc. They feel like mere cogs in a machine, pressured to work harder and harder, alienated from their work. The limited range of opinions allowed in the media result in conformist thinking among the masses, just like those ghouls watching the cowboy movie with blank faces.

There are moments when the film is outright surreal, such as when insects come out of Arletty’s mouth. This sense of the surreal adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the movie, and it can explain certain aspects of the plot that don’t seem to be properly developed or explained.

An example of such an unexplained moment, one that seems contradictory to my presentation of Thom as the real villain of the film, is when he, walking the streets of downtown Point Dume alone at night, is briefly chased and attacked by ghouls. The shots of the chase and attack are presented in a choppy way, as jump cuts, suggesting a dream-like quality, as if Thom has merely imagined the attack.

No bad person believes he’s evil; the villains of history have always imagined that their atrocities were meant ultimately for the greater good. These bad people also narcissistically imagine themselves to be the victim, rather than the victimizer…so why would Thom be any different, in wanting to associate himself with the real victims of the story? Recall in this connection what I said above about how the powerful and wealthy like to be associated with the common people, sympathizing with their interests. Thom’s imagining of himself being attacked can be understood in this light.

After Thom gets away from his attackers (imagined, as I see them, for surely they’d still be giving him chase if they were real), he stops to catch his breath, and a poor woman appears, begging him for help from the ghouls. He turns away, especially when he sees her eye bleeding. Of course he won’t help her: he’s the messiah of evil who is bringing on these evils, and he wants her to complete her transformation into another ghoul.

Arletty’s eye is bleeding, too, and like her father in his deteriorating condition, she’s beginning to cut herself. It’s around this time that she sees herself in the mirror, with a bug on her tongue, and she vomits out a host of insects.

Two police arrive on the streets, where Thom is wandering, to deal with the ghouls. One of the cops is bleeding from an eye, and the other shoots him in the neck and tries to run away. The ghoul cop then shoots him dead. In the context of my capitalist allegory, it’s easy to see how a cop could be spontaneously bleeding from an eye and becoming a ghoul: cops have historically existed to serve the ruling class; even if a small minority of cops, like the non-ghoul cop, are good people at heart, it’s the whole system of law enforcement that they work for that is the problem.

Something needs to be said about the origin of the “dark stranger.” He was a former minister (hence, his status as “messiah”) and a member of the Donner Party, who were a group of American pioneers migrating to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. During the winter of 1846-1847, they were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains; some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, and two Native American guides were deliberately killed to eat the bodies. Our dark stranger seems to have derived his taste for human flesh from this grisly episode, and in Point Dume, he’s been spreading his “religion” with cannibalism as, if you will, a new form of the Eucharist.

It’s interesting to consider the murder and cannibalistic eating of the Native Americans in the light of not only the film but also of the migration of the pioneers out west. The migration is an example of settler-colonialism, associated with the genocide of the natives. It’s also related to imperialism, the theft of others’ land to exploit it and thus enrich oneself with it. Settler-colonialism and imperialism in the modern world are also manifestations of capitalism, which further solidifies the connection of Messiah of Evil with capitalism.

Arletty has been told that her father’s body was found on the beach, him having been building a huge sculpture there, but the tide, it seems, collapsed it on top of him. She doesn’t believe it was really his body on the beach, though, because the coarse hands of the body weren’t the same as those of her father’s. It’s later confirmed that her father is still alive, for he returns to his home to face Arletty. His transformation into ghoul is also just about complete.

He tells her the history of the dark stranger, of how he attacked and ate some of the flesh of a hunter who, as he lay dying, tried to warn others of his killer. They thought him delirious, just as many are thought crazy who try to warn people today of the evils of neoliberalism, which has come “to a world tired and disillusioned, a world looking back to old gods and old dark ways, our world.”

Remembering Charlie’s warning, she has to set her ghoul father on fire to destroy him. In his wild mania, he spreads blue paint all over his face and hands; it’s as if he’s making a desperate attempt to be at one with his art to treat his growing mental illness. Her being forced to commit such a violent, fiery patricide can be seen, in the context of my capitalist allegory, to represent how neoliberalism has exacerbated modern alienation, in this case, alienation in the family.

Thom returns to the house the next morning. His frown at seeing her father’s charred corpse can easily be seen as his sadness at the sight of one of his ghouls–his children–killed. Other ghouls are waiting on the glass roof to attack; for all we know, he’s summoned them there. She, screaming in her traumatized state, attacks him with the shears she used on her father before burning him, cutting a big gash in Thom’s arm.

After he lies in bed, resting a while and recovering from his wound, the ghouls on the glass roof break in, fall into the room, and attack him and Arletty. He helps her fight them off, though in a minimal way, and they run out to the beach. Again, all of this would seem to make him look like a sympathetic character, but I suspect his intention is really just to lure her out to the beach, and his disappearance in the water is to lead to an at least implied plot twist, in which he later reappears from the water as the dark stranger with the appearance of the blood red moon.

As he and Arletty are running together along the shore, we hear Phillan Bishop’s eerie synthesizer ostinato in 17/8 time (subdivided 4+4+4+5). The two briefly embrace like lovers: after all, this is part of Thom’s attempt at a physical and spiritual seduction of her.

The ghouls start to congregate at the beach, staring out into the ocean as they’ve done every night, waiting for the blood moon and the dark stranger. Thom and Arletty go out into the water in an attempt to escape the ghouls by boat. He seems weakened from his arm wound, making it hard for him to swim.

According to the Wikipedia article on the film, Thom drowns; but I don’t think that’s what’s really happened to him, though Arletty seems led to believe this was his fate. As I said above, he merely disappears to get ready for his return as the dark stranger, the Beast, the antichrist (Revelation 13:3-4).

The ghouls get her out of the water at night, but they don’t kill her. They dress her in a pretty gown to offer her to the returning dark stranger at night, under the blood moon and among the ghouls’ bonfires. She’s too horrified, I’d say, to say Thom’s name upon recognizing him. Instead, we get a loud, hysterical scream from her.

She’s taken to an insane asylum, and like her father, she takes up painting, presumably as a kind of art therapy to soothe her madness. Trying to warn the world about the coming evil causes one to think she’s insane. Indeed, this evil is so traumatizing, so crazy-making, that all she can do is scream…yet no one will listen.

The film ends as it began, with a return to a shot in a hall in the insane asylum, with light in the middle, where Arletty can be seen wandering, and dark shadows around the edges of the shot. Just as the dark stranger has returned, so has this shot from the beginning returned, a coming full circle…just as the Gilded Age has returned to us today.

We hear her distraught narration, her trying to warn people of the spreading sickness that makes one a ghoul. Similarly today, some of us try to warn people of the growing sickness caused by neoliberalism and imperialism–the alienation and its attendant mental illness, its pressure to conform to today’s ways, as the ghouls all conform to the grisly ways of the messiah of evil. Yet, just as no one will hear Arletty’s screams, no one will listen to our cries of help.

“No one will hear you SCREAM!!!”

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

I: Introduction

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

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

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

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

II: Politics and Lies–a Brief but Necessary Digression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Deathly Desires

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

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

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

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

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

IV: The Graveyard Scene

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

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

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

V: Franklin and the Hitchhiker

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

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

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

VI: Vegetarianism

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

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

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

VII: Abuse, Trauma, and Projection

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

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

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

VIII: A Brief Psychoanalytic Digression

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

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

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

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

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

IX: When Victimizers are Victims, Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

X: The First Killings

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

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

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

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

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

XI: Punching Down

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

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

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

XII: The Climax

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

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

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

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

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

XIII: An Abuser’s Mask of Sanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV: Mirroring Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV: Escape

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

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

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

XVI: Leatherface, the Ultimate Victim

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

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

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

Terraces

The upper classes
are kept up by the middle classes,
who are scared of dropping to the lower classes.

The wealthy
should be lowered to the middle,
so that we can bring the poor up from their misery.

The super-rich
will never be brought down,
so the poor must rise up to take them down.

The establishment of a temporary workers’ state
can equalize us by keeping a tight leash
on the rich, stopping their rise;

then the capable
can produce all of the things
that everyone needs, down to the neediest.

Analysis of ‘Pulp Fiction’

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, based on stories by him and Roger Avary. It stars John Travolta, Samuel L Jackson, Bruce Willis, Tim Roth, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman, with Harvey Keitel, Amanda Plummer, Eric Stolz, Rosanna Arquette, Maria de Medeiros, and Christopher Walken.

Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Travolta), Best Supporting Actor (Jackson) and Actress (Thurman), and Best Film Editing (Sally Henke). It won Best Original Screenplay.

The film is widely considered Tarantino’s magnum opus, and as a cultural watershed, it has influenced many other films and media in terms of style. Pulp Fiction is on many critics’ lists of the greatest films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The main themes of the film are sin and death (as in, “The wages of sin is death“), as well as redemption, or at least attempts at it.

There is a vague sense of these themes already as Pumpkin (Roth) is telling Honey Bunny (Plummer) that he doesn’t want to rob liquor stores anymore because it’s too dangerous: either the couple will have to shoot the owners of the stores, or the owners, like “Grandpa Irving…with a fuckin’ Magnum in his hand,” will shoot them. Sin leads to death. Pumpkin attempts redemption, in a way, by not wanting to rob liquor stores anymore, but fails in that attempt by saying he wants to rob the restaurant he and Honey Bunny are dining in.

Failure at redemption in this film is best summed up in something Manohla Dargis says at the end of the Foreword to the script for Pulp Fiction: ‘When Jules [Winnfield–Jackson], Tarantino’s killer who witnesses divine intervention, says, “I’m trying real hard to be a shepherd,” it’s a miracle that he’s trying at all.’ (Tarantino, p. 4)

The plethora of pop culture references in Pulp Fiction–from its soundtrack, starting with “Misirilou” and “Jungle Boogie,” and continuing with references to McDonald’s burgers and TV show pilots, to all of the many movie allusions–is a reflection of what could be called the sin of idolatry, the worship, as it were, of pop music and movie stars, as well as commodity fetishism. We are all mesmerized by the production of images, sounds, and commodities, oblivious to the effort of workers in making these things all a reality.

Before I continue with the conversation between Jules and Vincent Vega (Travolta) as they approach the apartment where they’ll kill Brett (played by Frank Whaley), Roger “Flock of Seagulls” (played by Burr Steers), et al, I want to discuss my interpretation of who Marsellus Wallace (Rhames) represents. I see the crime boss as God, but in more of a Demiurge, Old Testament sense, than a Christian one.

The stealing of the briefcase by Brett et al is a sin not in the mundane sense of, say, stealing diamonds, but more as a form of blasphemy. Some in the mid-1990s believed that Wallace’s soul was in the briefcase, and I tend to go with that. The briefcase thus is in a way rather like the Ark of the Covenant, its contents representative and associative of God’s presence. The Ark of the Covenant was kept in the Holy of Holies, by the way, which was the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle, where God’s presence appeared.

With these interpretations in mind, we can now begin to understand what’s going on when Jules is telling Vincent why Marsellus had Antwan Rockamora, or “Tony Rocky Horror,” thrown out of a window for having apparently given a foot massage to Marsellus’ wife, Mia (Thurman). According to Vincent, such physical familiarity with the crime boss’s wife is in “the same ballpark” as having performed cunnilingus on her, or, to use Jules’s most apt choice of words, “stickin’ your tongue in her holiest of holies.”

Both offences, Brett’s and Antwan’s, are comparable to the desecration of a holy place, a kind of blasphemy. If Marsellus is God, Mia (a possible pun on Maria) is a kind of ‘Mother of God,’ as it were. Getting too physically familiar with her, given that she, as his wife, is bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh, is tantamount to getting too physically familiar with him. Fornicating with her is thus comparable to raping him. I’m reminded of the 75th of Martin Luther‘s Ninety-Five Theses: “To consider papal indulgences so great that they could absolve a man even if he had done the impossible and had violated the mother of God is madness.” (Lull, page 28)

The juxtaposition of Brett’s and Antwan’s sins is significant, one dealt with immediately after the other. Mia later telling Vincent in Jackrabbit Slim’s that Antwan had only shaken her hand, and that only he and Marsellus knew why the latter had the former thrown out of a window could be the mere denials of an adulteress; and a “foot massage” could be a euphemism for, if you’ll indulge me, foutre, since a direct discussion of adulterous sex with Mia the ‘Queen of Heaven‘ would be a blasphemous taboo.

Remember how Jules compares Brett’s theft of the briefcase, a stealing of Marcellus’ soul, to having “tried to fuck ‘im and Marcellus Wallace don’t like to be fucked by anybody except Missus Wallace” (remember this in light of the later incident with Zed [played by Peter Greene]). Immediately after Jules says this, we get the Ezekiel quote, linking these incidents with God and sin all the more.

Before I go into the Bible quote, though, I’d like to discuss the significance of Jules asking Brett what Marsellus Wallace looks like. Note that there is no image or form for the Jewish or Islamic God, and to give God an image or form would thus be blasphemy. Small wonder Brett is unable to answer Jules’s question until the threat of being shot dead is too urgent to leave unanswered. All Brett can say is “What?”

If you were to look up Ezekiel 25:17, you would find only this: “And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the LORD, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.” The rest of what Jules says–inspired by the words of an offscreen narrator at the beginning of an old Sonny Chiba martial arts film, Karate Kiba (The Bodyguard, 1976)–is nonetheless central to Pulp Fiction‘s themes of sin and death. Associating these words with the Bible, and therefore with God as represented by Marsellus, is thus fitting.

The wages of sin is death, Brett. Having read the Bible, you should know that. You may have gone into this thing with “the best intentions,” but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Antwan was luckier: he only got a speech impediment. Still, all this fear surrounding the offending of Marsellus is enough to get Vincent, soon to take Mia out on a date while her husband’s away, very nervous.

Now, I’ve said that Marsellus represents God, but hardly in the Christian sense of personifying absolute good. After all, that briefcase’s combination is 666. As I said above, Marsellus is more like the Old Testament Demiurge, creator of the physical world (remember, Marsellus could give Jimmie [played by Tarantino himself] “a whole bedroom set” to replace the linen being sacrificed to help cover up Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin [played by Phil LaMarr), associated by many Gnostics with Satan.

In other posts–including two analyses I did of Tarantino films–I’ve written of mafia men, criminal businessmen, as being symbolic of capitalists, exploitative owners of businesses. Marsellus owns a large topless bar called Sally LeRoy’s. Religion has routinely been used by the ruling class to keep the masses in check. Many consider God to be protective of capitalism against ‘Godless’ communism. Marsellus is God, and he’s a capitalist.

An example of Marsellus’ exploitative nature is seen when he fixes a fight, paying boxer Butch Coolidge (Willis) to go down in the fifth round of an upcoming fight. A significant moment in Marsellus’ speech to Butch, meant to motivate the boxer to keep his end of the deal and really lose the fight, and thus to be known thereafter as a palooka, is when he says, “Fuck pride!” Pride is a deadly sin not only in the Christian tradition; Greek myth is full of stories of the fall of hubris.

I’m guessing that when Vincent calls Butch a palooka at the bar, the latter feels “a slight sting…pride,” which not only pushes him to win the fight, infuriating Marsellus, but also to shoot Vincent when he emerges from the bathroom.

After this, and just before his “date” with Mia, Vincent goes to buy some heroin off of Lance (Stolz). When we see Vincent shooting up, then driving high as a kite to the Wallace house to pick her up, we see what could be deemed a reversal of Marx’s old dictum: “Opium [or, in this case, heroin] is the religion of the people.” Glory to God in the…highest. When he goes into the house, we hear Dusty Springfield singing “Son of a Preacher Man,” reinforcing the film’s association with religious matters. Mia will “be out within three shakes of a lamb‘s tail.” (In the film, she says, “two,” but in the script, she says “three” [Tarantino, page 44].) When Marsellus’ Queen of Heaven is ready to go, we get to join in on Tarantino’s fetishization of her bare feet.

Their date in Jackrabbit Slim’s, a restaurant that pays homage to 1950s pop culture, demonstrates how capitalism exploits our idolatry of celebrities, movies, and rock ‘n’ roll. Note how an admittedly delicious milkshake in the restaurant costs five dollars. Commodities sold here are so fetishized, they’re named after famous directors, TV hosts, comedy duos, or radio/TV sitcom characters: for example, you could order a “Douglas Sirk steak,” a “Durwood Kirby burger,” a “Martin and Lewis shake” (vanilla), or an “Amos and Andy shake” (chocolate).

Waiters and waitresses do cosplays, if you will, of movie or rock ‘n’ roll stars: Vincent’s and Mia’s waiter is Buddy Holly (played by Steve Buscemi), and another one is dressed like James Dean; waitresses include Marilyn Monroe, Mamie Van Doren, and…Jayne Mansfield must have the night off. Performers impersonate Ed Sullivan, Ricky Nelson, etc. Of course, getting Travolta to dance is a pop culture reference in itself, even though Vincent’s iconic dance scene with Mia was written before Travolta got the role.

When Vincent and Mia return to her home, her wearing his overcoat, he’s feeling nervous about the temptation to fuck his boss’s wife. She wants drinks and music, which in a way could remind us of Mrs. Robinson’s attempt to seduce Benjamin Braddock in her home. Mia plays a cover of Neil Diamond‘s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon,” performed by Urge Overkill. The becoming a woman soon sounds a lot like Benjamin becoming a man soon, thanks to Mrs. Robinson. This is Vincent. He’s a little worried about his future.

He goes to the bathroom, the first of three times we see him do so in the film. Whenever he leaves the bathroom, there’s the danger of death. Since the wages of sin is death, using the bathroom–to take a shower, as we’ll see Butch do later, or to clean oneself out (to remove the filth and sin inside you) with the toilet, as Vincent does, and as Jules and Honey Bunny say they’ve got to do–is symbolic of an attempt at redemption, a cleansing of oneself of sin. As clean as you may be when you come out of the bathroom, though, you know you’ll have to return to the water of that Ganges.

Vincent does a monologue in the bathroom to help himself resist the temptation of seducing the drunk and stoned Mia, reminding himself that Marsellus’ wanting him to take her out while he’s away is a test of Vincent’s loyalty to his boss, just as God tested such men as Abraham. In sticking to his commitment not to take advantage of Mia, Vincent thinks he’s leaving the bathroom cleansed of sinful thoughts, redeemed, and safe from death…

…except that Mia, thinking the bag of heroin in his coat pocket is cocaine, has snorted a line of it, is ODing on it, and is dying.

Now he has to redeem himself again by saving her life, so he rushes her to Lance’s house for an adrenalin shot. After all, isn’t her taking his drugs up her nose, making her a “fucked up bitch,” a lot like her taking his d… up her…, as Antwan may very well have done? Ironically, a phallic needle stabbed into her breastplate, jizzing adrenaline into her heart, saves her. Her shock from coming out of it, seeing that needle in her chest, seems comparable to that of the Mother of God if she were violated. Girl, you just became a woman.

The next sequence shows Butch as a child watching a cartoon on TV. It’s one of those low-budget productions, using Synchro-Vox technology, superimposing talking lips on a static cartoon drawing–Clutch Cargo.

Staring in a daze, transfixed before a TV, being lulled into its illusion and suspending disbelief: all of these are so symbolic of the idolater adoring his image, his fetish, imagining there’s the spirit of a god inhabiting the carved piece of wood or metallic statue. And yet the poor quality of Clutch Cargo‘s limited animation is so obviously fake. The impressionable boy is totally immersed in the story, all the same.

Some critics think that Pulp Fiction‘s allusions to TV are more central to the film than its references to other movies or to popular music. Apart from Clutch Cargo, consider the many TV references in the film: Speed Racer, The Brady Bunch, The Partridge Family, The Avengers, The Three Stooges, The Flintstones, I Spy, Green Acres, Kung Fu, Happy Days, and of course, Mia’s fictional TV pilot, Fox Force Five.

All of this TV idolatry reinforces the theme of sin in Pulp Fiction, a movie title inspired by old magazines “containing lurid subject matter.” Butch is told by his mother to turn off the TV and listen to Captain Koons (Walken) tell the story of all the trials and difficulties of getting a watch from Butch’s great-grandfather to his grandfather, then to his father, who gave it to Koons in a POW camp in Hanoi where the two had to hide it in their rectums to prevent it from being confiscated by the Vietnamese, and finally Koons is giving it to little Butch. These men are now the boy’s new heroes, new idols replacing those on the TV for his pagan adoration. Accordingly, the boy watches the captain with as rapt a look on his face, while Koons tells his story, as little Butch must have had while watching the cartoon on TV.

The childhood memory of Koons giving him the watch seems to have been a dream, for immediately after it, we see present-day Butch wake up from it in a shock, as if it were a terrible nightmare. The dream ought to have been disturbing for him, since he’s been reminded of the heroic efforts of the men who passed on the watch to him, while he’s about to let himself be made into a mere palooka.

The disappointment he feels like he’ll be to the men in his family looking down on him from heaven feels like too much for him, so he feels that “slight sting…pride.” The outcome of the boxing match he’s supposed to lose illustrates just how deadly a sin pride can be, for not only does Butch not lose the fight–he beats the other boxer so badly that he actually kills the man.

He rushes away in a taxicab in such a hurry that his boxing gloves are still on. His driver, a pretty Colombian woman named Esmerelda Villalobos (played by Angela Jones), has listened to the outcome of the fight on the radio, and she’s fascinated to have met a man who’s actually killed someone with his fists. Sin and death so permeate this film, not only do we have a plethora of murders, profanity (including outright pornographic dialogue), racial slurs (i.e., Tarantino’s by-now-typical fetishizing of the n-word), theft, idolatry of pop culture, etc., but we also even have admirers of crime.

As far as attempts at redemption are concerned, or at least attempts at repentance, when Butch learns from his driver that brutal beating of his opponent in the ring actually killed him, all he can muster is, “Sorry ’bout that, Floyd.” Then, when she asks him how he feels about having killed the man, he says he doesn’t feel at all bad about it. So much for repentance. “If saying ‘sorry’ ever meant anything, what are the police for?” as my wife would say in Chinese.

Hiding away with his girlfriend, Fabienne (Medeiros), Butch hears her talking about how she wishes she had a pot belly (translation: she wants to be pregnant). He says he’d punch her in her ‘pot belly,’ which, after walking in the shadows of his heroic father (as well as Koons), grandfather, and great-grandfather, sounds like the unconscious expression of a Laius complex. Butch doesn’t want there to be any more sons to have to pass a watch on to.

A symbolic attempt at redemption occurs during his shower (recall the bathroom as a place of purification), but he fails to attain grace when he taunts Fabienne by calling her a “retard,” getting her angry. His ‘taking it back’ sounds as insincere as his having said “Sorry” to Floyd for beating him to death in the ring.

Her forgetting to get the watch when packing all of their things forces Butch to go back to his apartment to get it, risking facing Marsellus’ men, at least one of whom (namely, Vincent) is waiting for him there. Butch’s killing of Floyd, then running away, is cowardly compared to what the previous men in his family went through, especially to keep the watch.

Now, in retrieving the watch from such a dangerous place, Butch can prove that he’s as brave as his dad, and his dad, and his dad. In effect, Butch is redeeming himself here. Indeed, in a scene cut from the completed film, when Butch has driven back to the apartment, he says in a monologue, “This is my war…This watch is a symbol…of how your father, and his father before him, and his father before him, distinguished themselves in war. And when I took Marsellus Wallace’s money, I started a war. This is my World War Two.” (Tarantino, page 114)

Butch goes into his apartment and gets the watch. Thinking he’s safe in there, he goes to the kitchen and puts some Pop Tarts in the toaster (more commodity fetishism, as with the watch), but he sees a small, compact submachine gun on the counter. He picks it up.

Vincent emerges from the bathroom, his second time to do so in the film (because of Pulp Fiction‘s scrambled order of scenes), but his third and last chronologically, of course, because this time he gets killed. Recall how I pointed out above that the use of bathrooms in this film symbolizes only attempts at purification–and therefore at redemption–and yet sin is still there (Vincent’s intention of killing Butch), so the wages of sin is still death.

Fittingly, Butch doesn’t fill Vincent with bullet holes until the Pop Tarts pop up from the toaster and are ready to be eaten. Commodity fetishism is a…product…of capitalism. Capitalism kills.

Butch wipes his fingerprints off the gun and leaves. He is driving back to Fabienne most confidently, but at a stop light, he sees crime boss Marsellus walking by, just as Marion Crane, in her car, saw her boss walk by in Psycho.

Yes, bosses can be that scary.

After Butch rams Fabienne’s car into Marsellus, he comes to and tries to shoot Butch, then Butch runs into a pawnshop, where he and Marsellus fight until the owner, Maynard (played by Duane Whitaker) pulls a gun on them, and the two end up in Maynard’s back room basement/dungeon, tied up and gagged. A corrupt cop named Zed arrives (Peter Greene, as I mentioned above), and he pulls a “squeal like a pig!” routine on Marsellus.

Given how extremely allusive Pulp Fiction is, we can see how this particular scene has references not only to Deliverance but also to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Allusions to the latter film are not limited to Butch’s considering the use of a chainsaw as a weapon to fight off Maynard and Zed; recall how Maynard slams the door shut to the room in which the rape is to occur, similar to how Leatherface slams shut that metal door after having cracked Kirk’s skull open with that big hammer and dragging the body into the back room where other terrible exploitations of the human body will soon occur.

Consider my use of the word exploitation in the context of the rape of Marsellus, who as a crime boss is a capitalist. Maynard, as the petite bourgeois owner of the pawnshop, is also a capitalist. Zed, as a cop, works as a protector of private property, of the capitalist system. None of this, however, means that all of them have to be friends.

As Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929) In this case, one capitalist fucks many others, that is, Maynard has his cop friend fuck many others, since I suspect that Maynard and Zed have pulled a Deliverance on many people, capitalist or non-capitalist.

As a crime boss, Marsellus represents the lawless, anti-government, “free market” version of capitalism. Maynard, with his cop-friend in Zed, represents the more state-oriented version of capitalism. This latter version isn’t any more ethical than the first, mind you. The differences don’t matter: capitalism is capitalism–it fucks us either way.

The connection of this scene with capitalism should be clearer when we remember that Butch’s and Marsellus’ original offence was having barged into Maynard’s pawnshop, his private property, to fight to the death. Incapacitating them, having Zed arrest them, then haul them off to the police station should be enough. Instead, Maynard and Zed think they have the right to rape them.

The owners of private property have no qualms whatsoever about exploiting the very bodies of those who have no such property. Maynard’s and Zed’s mistake is in assuming that Marsellus is not also an owner of private property…in fact, much more private property than the two hicks combined.

This barging into someone else’s property, only to be subjected to unspeakable horrors, is something Pulp Fiction echoes from Deliverance (the four city men canoeing into the mountain men’s area of the forest), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Kirk et al going into Leatherface’s house), and Psycho (Crane and Detective Arbogast entering Norman Bates’s private world).

Maynard’s and Zed’s even worse mistake is thinking they can get away with raping God, as I see Marsellus. Note that immediately after the Butch sequence, we return to the scene of Jules telling Brett his Ezekiel quote, beginning with him reminding us that Marsellus doesn’t like getting fucked by anyone other than his wife. So when Butch returns with the samurai sword, kills Maynard, and points it at Zed, Marsellus “will strike down upon [Zed] with great vengeance and furious anger…and [Zed] will know [Marsellus is] the LORD…” Zed took away Marsellus’ manhood, so Marsellus takes away Zed’s manhood by taking a gun and blowing his dick off.

Fair trade.

Zed’s about to feel the full weight of the wrath of Marsellus (i.e., Medieval, pliers, a blowtorch), but Butch, in having rescued the crime boss from his rapists, has achieved redemption for his sins. Butch has only to leave LA, never to come back, and never to tell anyone about the degradation Marsellus has just been put through.

In ‘The Bonnie Situation,’ when the fourth man (played by Alexis Arquette) comes out and shoots at Jules and Vincent at point blank range, but doesn’t even scratch either of them with the bullets, Jules concludes that God must have intervened and saved His two gangsters’ lives. Well, of course: Marsellus wants his soul back, and he needs Jules and Vincent to bring the suitcase containing it back; they can’t do that if they’re dead, now, can they?

There’s an interesting irony in the fourth man missing his targets, which in turn brings about Jules’s need to repent of his sin and redeem himself. Sin, or hamartia, literally means ‘missing the mark.’ Sin has saved Jules’s soul.

As they’re driving back to give the suitcase to Marsellus, with Marvin in the backseat, Jules and Vincent are discussing the miracle that saved their lives. Skeptical Vincent (who later dies, recall–he of little faith) is swearing, and repentant Jules is chiding him for blaspheming (though later, Jules himself will be cursing and swearing plenty; after all, so much of what we see is only an attempt at redemption).

Marsellus helps Jules and Vincent out of their next predicament, Vincent’s accidental shooting of Marvin in the car, by sending Winston Wolf (Keitel), a cleaner, who tells the two gangsters how to remove all evidence of the killing. Marsellus is God, and Wolf is one of His angels.

As Jules and Vincent are cleaning up Marvin’s bloody mess in the car, Jules–in spite of his apparent religious conversion–refuses to forgive Vincent for his careless, gory mishap with his gun. Vincent, reaching the limit of how much abuse he can take, tries to get Jules to understand that one should forgive those who admit to wrongdoing (Luke 6:37). In other words, repentance should lead to redemption.

Jules will have none of that (recall Butch’s empty-sounding “Sorry” to Floyd, and his tepid taking-back of his “retard” insult to Fabienne). Vincent’s warning that he could blow if he hears much more abuse only makes Jules nastier. Jules is about to blow up like a nuclear bomb. In fact, not only is Jules more abusive, he also insists that Vincent pay more for his killing of Marvin by cleaning up the victim’s brains and skull in the back seat. So much for even trying to repent and redeem oneself.

The cleaning of the car, as well done as it is, may not purify Vincent of his sin of accidentally…hitting…the Marvin mark, but Winston spraying a hose of cold water to get the blood off of Jules and Vincent just might do it, if only symbolically.

Redemption still comes at a price, that is, to the two gangsters’ pride, in how they have to replace their bloody suits with Jimmie’s dorky-looking T-shirts and shorts.

At the restaurant (where Pumpkin and Honey-Bunny are), Jules explains why he doesn’t eat pig’s meat, which he insists isn’t because of being Jewish (or Muslim, for that matter), though that might as well be why, since he considers the pig to be a filthy animal, and the wrathful God assumed to reign in the universe of Pulp Fiction sure seems to be of the non-Christian Abrahamic type. Indeed, we only hear “Jesus Christ” when someone is swearing. There’s no Divine Rescuer dying on a Cross to bring redemption to the sinful world of this movie. Everyone has to try to achieve it by himself.

A funny thing is that, after Jules hands off the case to Marcellus and quits being a gangster, he says he’s “gonna walk the Earth.” I’m reminded of Job 1:7, when Satan says he’s been “walking up and down in [the Earth].” The suggested association of Jules with Satan (though in Job, he admittedly isn’t the embodiment of radical evil as he is in Christianity) reinforces the sense of how tenuous Jules’s commitment to redemption is.

Vincent’s response to this is that Jules’s wandering of the Earth, perhaps never knowing where God wants him to be (after all, as I see it, Marsellus is God in this film, and Jules imagines his redemption, in all irony, is to leave God!), means that Jules will become a bum. Remember that Marsellus, as a crime boss, is a capitalist, and trying to live outside the capitalist system–especially in the post-Soviet, neoliberal world of Pulp Fiction, is at least to risk homelessness.

The invisible hand [!] of God stopped those bullets from killing Jules and Vincent, but only to get the case with Marsellus’ soul in it back to him, not to make Jules quit working for his boss. Jules thus has a most misguided idea as to what redemption is…and this ties in with the film’s theme of how redemption is so often just attempted.

Still, Jules isn’t completely wrong. Skeptical Vincent stays working for Marsellus, and he’ll be killed leaving Butch’s bathroom. He’ll get a kind of omen of this danger upon leaving the restaurant restroom, as he did leaving Mia’s bathroom.

When, during the restaurant robbery, Pumpkin points his pistol at Jules, telling him to open the case, he has the same look of awe on his face that Vincent had when looking inside it at Brett’s apartment. No, the case doesn’t contain diamonds, or cocaine, or anything ordinary like that. That orange glow must indicate something…spiritual.

When not only Jules is pointing his gun at Pumpkin, but Vincent, out of the restroom, is pointing his gun at Honey Bunny, she’s so scared, she’s “gotta go pee.” Since the wages of sin is death, she’s got to rid herself of the filth inside her by using what Vincent just did.

Jules has Pumpkin get his “Bad Motherfucker” wallet out of the bag of all the restaurant customers’ stolen wallets; he gives Pumpkin all the money in it–“about fifteen hundred dollars.” Jules is buying Pumpkin’s life with it. He’s paying a kind of ransom so he doesn’t have to kill Pumpkin.

Next, we get the third recitation of the Ezekiel quote, but instead of it being an expression of the wrath of God, Jules says it calmly. Now he’s actually thinking about what the words mean, instead of just saying them to sound like a badass before killing someone.

Jules has always said it as a judgement of the sin of the man he’s about to shoot. Now, as he says it, he’s judging himself. He’d like to think he’s “the righteous man,” as we all do when we judge the sins of others. But as much as he doesn’t like to admit it, he has to: Jules is “the tyranny of evil men,” killing for a capitalist crime boss.

His last words are so important, for they encapsulate so many of the themes of Pulp Fiction: he’s trying really hard to be a shepherd. It’s all about the attempt to redeem oneself of one’s sins, not whether one succeeds or not. The attempt at purification could be literal, as it is here with Jules and Pumpkin, or it could be symbolic, like all those trips to the bathroom, to clean oneself out from the inside by pissing or shitting, or to clean oneself on the outside, as Butch does during his shower.

Redemption is never fully attained: Jules hasn’t shot Pumpkin or Honey Bunny, but he hasn’t foiled their robbery of the restaurant, either. The couple leave with their bag of money feeling that robbing people is, if anything, even more dangerous than it was with the liquor stores.

The God of Pulp Fiction isn’t the Christian one, and the lack of Jesus is a conspicuous absence. There is no Good Shepherd: there’s only Jules trying to be one. This trying to be good, when we’re among the most sinful, is often the best kind of good we can hope for. There are no illusions here about a Holy Spirit guiding us down the path of righteousness; we just do the best we can…if we’re even doing that.

These attempts, however bumbling, awkward, and foolish, they make at redeeming themselves are part of what makes the characters of Pulp Fiction so relatable to us–at least on an unconscious level; and this, I believe, is a big part of what makes this film so enduringly popular.

Quentin Tarantino, Pulp Fiction, a Quentin Tarantino Screenplay, New York, Miramax Books, 1994

The Danger of Counterrevolution

Introduction

Thanks to bourgeois propaganda, when the average person hears a communist say a word like counterrevolution, it is assumed that the speaker is paranoid about his ‘idealistic’ system being overthrown and replaced with something ‘reasonable’ like bourgeois liberal democracy. Recall, for example, the scene in The Last Emperor, when a communist shouts at Puyi that he is “a traitor,…a collaborator, and…a counterrevolutionary!” (You can find the lines almost mid-way into the script here; I can’t find a YouTube video of the scene, but I remember how hysterically the man shouts the line.)

The fact is, though, that as the past thirty to thirty-five years have shown, the danger of counterrevolution is no paranoid fantasy, and ‘liberal democracy’ is not all it’s cracked up to be, as I intend to prove.

Stalin, during a speech at The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I. (December 1926), famously said, “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.” 

Such a black reaction is exactly what has happened in the world.

Since I don’t wish to go through another rehashing of my defenses of socialism and communism, you can look at these, Dear Reader. My focus here is on how the post-Soviet world has been an unmitigated disaster, one that makes the faults and problems of socialism trivial in comparison.

New World Order

When George HW Bush did his “Towards a New World Order” speech on…egad!…September 11th, 1990, he was talking about the emerging post-Soviet world, since the West knew that the USSR was soon to be dissolved (for this was their plan all along–counterrevolution, with Gorbachev‘s help). Though “new world order” wasn’t meant to be understood as the totalitarian world government of the conspiracy theory, this new world order that emerged in the 1990s would certainly have disastrous consequences.

In his speech, Bush was talking about a new era of international cooperation, promoting peace and democracy, and all that kind of bullshit, all while the run-up to the Persian Gulf War was going on. We can always rely on politicians to put a positive spin on something that will ultimately prove diabolical. As would become apparent soon enough, this post-Cold War world order would actually be one of unipolarity, with the US as the one world superpower, the global policeman.

Though of course I don’t agree with the conspiracy theorists about the exact character of this new world order (i.e., such absurd ideas that it’s based on Satanic secret societies, the end-time emergence of the Antichrist, etc.), I would characterize this totalitarian, one-world government as being based simply in Washington, DC. We’re dealing here with plain-old American, capitalist imperialism, a globe-spanning empire with US military bases all over the world, backed by its quisling NATO allies.

Accordingly, among the first things we saw these imperialists do, after reuniting Germany and thus including the former East Germany in NATO, was to lie about not moving NATO “one inch” eastward, when moving eastward would most certainly be the plan. Now, NATO allies, former members of the Warsaw Pact, are right against Russia’s border, antagonizing and provoking the nuclear-armed country.

Similarly, the former Yugoslavia was being carved up. All attempts to preserve socialism in the area were being thwarted, with a socialist champion in Slobodan Milošević being demonized in the media. This demonizing would soon become a standard way of manufacturing consent for more and more wars, a normalizing of pro-war sentiment that is getting increasingly dangerous.

The False Dichotomy of Conservative vs. Liberal

Before I continue discussing the depredations of post-Soviet imperialist war-mongering, I need to discuss a popular political myth: the confusion of liberals with socialists. It is assumed, far too often, that the American Democratic Party, the Liberal Party in Canada, the Labour Party in the UK, George Soros, etc. are on the left.

THIS IS NONSENSE.

Just because the Republicans in the US, the Tories and Canada and the UK, etc., are further to the right than their liberal counterparts, this doesn’t make their opposition way over at the other extreme. Their liberal opposition is ‘leftist’ (if it can be called that at all) only as a matter of degree…and by degree, it’s usually only a few degrees left of the Attila-the-Hun political right, which should tell you something.

It’s truly remarkable, especially over the past fifteen or so years, how much more conservatives and liberals have agreed, on most policies, than they have disagreed. Nevertheless, the mainstream media in its usual mendacity exaggerates the significance of any disagreements we see between conservatives and liberals. I’m not a fan of Noam Chomsky, in whom we can see an example of a ‘leftist’ who’s really just a liberal, but he does have one useful quote that fits the occasion: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”

I wrote an article on the liberal mindset, which you can look at here, Dear Reader, but I want to go more into the problem now. Liberals are not on the left; rather, they bend and sway left or right depending on which way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. Back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, liberals tended to sway towards the moderate left. In the 90s, they drifted to the centre, and since the 2000s, they have drifted further and further to the right. Now, liberals are virtually indistinguishable from conservatives, except perhaps on such social issues as the support of transgender rights, and as for economic reforms, they’ll advocate raising taxes on the rich, acknowledging that an unregulated market is far from infallible. Apart from these, the difference between the two tends to be a matter of…to Trump, or not to Trump…

As far as the issues that really matter to the world are concerned, though–keeping the class system intact, as well as furthering the interests of imperialism and Western hegemony–liberals are quite at one with conservatives. Prominent Democrats supported the Iraq War (including Hillary Clinton, Biden, and John Kerry); liberals like Hillary Clinton supported the US/NATO ruining of Libya, they supported the destruction of Syria (even cheering for the Trump administration’s bombing of the country), and now, they support Ukrainian Nazis, even to the point of the Canadian Liberal Party’s embarrassing celebration of a Ukrainian ex-Nazi from WWII!!! (Recall also Chrystia Freeland‘s Ukrainian grandfather, who worked for a pro-Nazi newspaper back in WWII.)

Still, the myth that liberals are far detached from conservatives persists, and both conservatives and liberals proudly distinguish themselves from each other. Conservatives often idiotically call liberals “communists” and “socialists,” and liberals consider men like Trump to be utter abominations in politics, even though the things the Trump administration did–awful things, to be sure–were essentially the same things Obama did and Biden is doing.

As surreal as it is to distinguish two approximately equal sides, it is nonetheless a politically useful thing for the ruling class to do, especially if liberals can be convinced that a right-wing policy is acceptable when liberals get behind it, whereas if conservatives support it, only then is it evil.

Examples of this double standard include NAFTA, which George HW Bush originally tried to push through, but couldn’t quite do it because of considerable Democratic opposition at the time. Then Clinton signed it in late 1993 without much difficulty. NAFTA devastated Mexico’s rural sector and increased poverty. This is the kind of thing that began to happen in the post-Soviet world, with a weakened socialist movement to curb the excesses of capitalism.

Elsewhere, Republicans would have loved to cut huge gashes out of Welfare during the Reagan years, but again, Democratic opposition prevented it at the time. Then Clinton came along, and in the mid-1990s he gutted Welfare with little, if any, Democratic opposition. Again, this kind of thing would have been much harder to do if the Soviet Union had still existed, and with it the threat of more socialist revolution if the capitalist class continued to provoke the working class.

The Clinton administration also interfered with the Russian election in 1996, ensuring that America’s puppet, Yeltsin, would stay in power instead of voting back in the Communist Party, still popular with many Russians (and there are right-wing morons out there who think that the Democrats are all “communists”!). Poll after poll has consistently shown that at least slight majorities of Russians preferred the Soviet system to the current one, or at least dislike the current one, while feeling some nostalgia for the Soviet one. It’s easy to see why there was such nostalgia. An attempt was made in 1993 to bring down Yeltsin’s government and restore the Soviet system, but he brought out the tanks and prevented it from happening. No, the return to capitalism in Russia was no triumph of freedom and democracy, and it wasn’t “the end of history”: it was a counterrevolution, plain and simple.

Normalizing War

In the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, though many were so shaken up by 9/11 (including myself, I must guiltily admit) that we supported the invasion, many others had the good sense–and no illusions about the true motives of US imperialists, of which I, at the time, was quite ignorant–to oppose the upcoming war. When the invasion happened, and Saddam’s supposed WMDs were nowhere to be found, the world was righteously angry with the Bush administration for its lies, as well as those of the Labour Party’s leader, Tony Blair.

The world had already demonized Milošević, who recall was found innocent of war crimes. Saddam was demonized in the media for supposedly having WMDs and working to enrich uranium to make nuclear weapons, and it turned out that there was no evidence of any of these dangers. Has the Western world since learned from our mistakes in hastily vilifying those heads of state that the American government wants us to vilify? Not at all, it would seem.

They demonized Gaddafi, and with the destruction of Libya came his sodomizing with a bayonet. Obama may have regretted the debacle in that country, but his remorse rings hollow given the subsequent demonizing of Bashar al-Assad and the ravaging of Syria soon after. Liberals and fake leftists backed this ‘civil war’ in part because the Obama administration was behind the plan for regime change, imagining that the fraudulent White Helmets were doing a legitimate service. Currently, the US army is controlling a third of Syria and stealing the country’s oil and wheat, while the media is mostly silent about these crimes.

With the multiplying of all these wars, something once abominated from the days of the hippies to the protest against the Iraq War, anti-war activism has since become scanted. There was minimal outcry against the war in Yemen, while the governments of the US, Canada, the UK, and European countries were selling billions of dollars in weapons to the Saudis so they could kill Yemenis. While some, during a DNC rally back in 2016, were shouting “No more wars!” during Leon Panetta’s speech, other voices were chanting “USA! USA!”; in a video I remember seeing of the situation, the voices of the latter group were drowning out those of the former group.

…and to bring matters to the worst state they could possibly be in, the US and its allies have, for the past five to ten years, been provoking two nuclear-armed countries, Russia and China, all because their rise means the decline of the US as the sole superpower in the world. Don’t listen to the propaganda against these two countries being ‘autocratic’: the US, with its rule-by-the-rich, dual party system, its surveillance of the people, its extreme income inequality, and its censorship of the media and internet (to say nothing of 90% of its ownership by only six corporations, who therefore control the access of information to Americans), is hardly in any position to be judging the democratic faults of Russia, China, or any other country on the Earth.

Again, there is far too little opposition to Western hostilities against Russia and China, which are far more threatened by the US and its allies than vice versa. Russia and China don’t have their navies along the east and west coasts of the US, but above I mentioned the NATO buildup along the Russian border, and American military bases are surrounding much of China in what has been compared to a noose.

This is beyond dangerous. The one peace dividend we were supposed to have gotten from the dissolution of the Soviet Union was that at least the Cold War was over, and so we didn’t need to worry about nuclear war with Russia anymore. Now, we’re in a new Cold War with both Russia and China. I remember when the Doomsday Clock was set to two minutes to midnight: now, it’s at ninety seconds to midnight.

Neoliberalism

As we can see, nothing good has been gained from the counterrevolution against the socialist states of the twentieth century. People are by no means freer. Many have been plunged into poverty, while a few rich oligarchs have risen to the top. Cutting taxes on the rich and deregulating the market have not brought about economic prosperity to the world as was promised by the market fundamentalists; in fact, we’ve had two major economic crises over the past fifteen years. The neoliberal agenda is the true god that failed.

…and yet, millions are still fooled by the fairy tale of the “free market.”

Again, I do not wish to repeat all my arguments that debunk the idea of “true capitalism” as being the “free market.” If you want to see those, Dear Reader, you can go here, here, and here. Even market fundamentalists have the modicum of intelligence needed to understand that the current political way of doing things has been an absolute nightmare.

They just can’t admit that the problem is capitalism.

Owning private property (factories, farmland, office buildings, apartment buildings, etc.,…not toothbrushes or underwear!) is part of capitalism. Producing commodities to maximize profits is capitalism. Accumulating capital is capitalism, hence the name of this particular mode of production. How much, or how little, the state is involved in the economy is completely irrelevant if the above conditions apply.

The past thirty years have been nothing less than a disaster–a capitalist disaster called neoliberalism, which means the new liberalizing of the market. Yes, neoliberalism, like imperialism (hence, all these wars), is a right-wing ideology. This is part of why conservatives and liberals are far closer to each other than is commonly assumed.

This capitalist disaster has hurt us both locally and globally. We see it locally in such forms as the homelessness epidemic, a problem exacerbated recently by the Covid pandemic, which in turn exacerbated the injustice of the superrich getting even wealthier through the profits made from the vaccines and online shopping on sites like Amazon.

The global hurt of this disaster has been in the form of imperialism, as I brought up above. The market fundamentalists tend to deny how imperialist war and plunder are connected with capitalism, since they naïvely think that capitalism is just about Mom and Pop store owners innocently buying and selling things on a market, and that warmongering is just a ‘government thing,’ rather than acknowledge that the government works for the capitalists.

On the other side of the coin, such liberals as the hippies dream of a world at peace, and wring their hands asking why we can’t have peace and love, yet they make no attempt to answer why we can’t. To solve the problem of war, we must understand the problem, and an understanding of the problem of war must centre on economics.

The survival of the capitalist system depends on endless expansion, to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This means that when markets dry up in one’s own country, one must seek out markets in other countries. Exporting capital to other countries is one of the major factors resulting in imperialism, as Lenin argued. The truth of this should be easy to see when we consider the real reason for the Iraq War, which was for the imperialists to get their filthy hands on Iraqi oil, not that nonsense about ‘freedom and democracy.’

Similarly, the real motive behind achieving regime change in Libya was to stop Gaddafi from creating financial independence from the West in Africa by establishing the continent’s own currency. The purpose of regime change in Syria was to stop Assad from making business deals with Russia and Iran, two major economic rivals of the US, over Syrian oil, when the US wanted an oil pipeline to be built to provide Europe with the oil.

Part of the purpose of the US and NATO provoking Russia to invade Ukraine was to end German use of cheaper Russian oil, and to have Germany buy the more expensive American oil instead. Hence, the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, of which–along with Norway’s help–was most obviously the doing of the American government…they practically confessed to it.

…and all of this bellicosity against China? The American government wants to stop the Chinese government and industry from profiting off of TSMC. The building of a new TSMC in Arizona is in the works, along with the hiring of many Taiwanese there, in a desperate attempt to replicate the success of the original TSMC. There has even been talk, if a war with China happens, of the US army bombing TSMC in Taiwan! So much for ‘defending Taiwan from China,’ or for defending ‘freedom and democracy.’

Ultimately, imperialist war is linked with capitalism because war is a business. Smedley Butler knew this ages ago. As all of this killing has been going on, weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Northrop Grumman have been laughing all the way to the bank. These companies must keep the war going to perpetuate a maximizing of profit. To know what’s going on in the world, follow the money.

These defence contractors are currently capitalizing big time on Israel’s current, ongoing genocide in Gaza. This killing could provoke a larger conflagration in the region, making WWIII even deadlier than it will be with China and Russia.

Conclusion

Though the socialist states of the twentieth century certainly had their share of faults and problems (particularly after the death of Stalin, and these problems were at their worst under Gorbachev’s leadership), they at least were a counterbalance to, and represented a hope of one day defeating, Western imperialism. They gave support to liberation movements, in the Third World especially, and they fought the hardest against fascism, and after WWII, the capitalist West took the surviving Nazis in and gave them lucrative jobs in NATO, NASA, and the American and West German governments, punishing only a minimum of them.

At their best, the socialist states also provided a safety net for the poor, provided free healthcare, free education up to university, and universal housing and employment. With the demise of most of the socialist states, there has been a sad decline in the enjoyment of these social benefits.

Meanwhile, the imperialist war machine has gone on for decades unchecked, as I demonstrated above, with manufactured consent for war largely replacing the peace movement, and uncritical acceptance of the demonizing of the leaders of any country who dare to defy the rule of the American empire.

These evils all resulted from counterrevolution, and they all prove how real the danger of counterrevolution really is. If we socialists ever manage to spread communism around the world the way we did in the twentieth century, we must be all the more determined to root out and prevent the spread of reactionary ideas…not because we “hunger for power,” but because we hunger for world liberation.