Wealth trickles down to the poor, they say, like
how
the
sons
of
God
went
down
to
wed
our
girls.
But that descent led to the Flood, so many drops
of
rain
on
to
the
land
to
end
all
of
life.
Thus, those in power will not allow the trickle-down,
even though their Church insists the Word was flesh,
the
Son
of
God
come
down
to
us
to
save
us.
does.
gold
as
sky,
the
met
and
rose
who
Word,
and
The trickle-down’s a myth to trick us, like the Flood,
Duel is a 1971 thriller directed by Steven Spielberg originally for TV, then extended for theatrical release. It was written by Richard Matheson, his screenplay based on his short story of the same name. The film stars Dennis Weaver.
Duel received generally positive reviews, with especial praise for Spielberg’s direction. It’s now considered a cult classic and one of the best made-for-TV movies of all time.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the short story.
Matheson’s story was based on an incident while driving home from a golfing match with a friend, the very same day as the Kennedy assassination: November 22nd, 1963. He was tailgated by a trucker, and wrote the idea down soon after.
The juxtaposition of events leading to his inspiration is interesting in itself: a golf game, the assassination, and the aggression of the truck driver. In a sense, we can see in these three things a common theme–competition, and a particularly aggressive form of it in two of them.
The whole point of an assassination, whatever the political reasons may be for it, is competition over who will lead the country: kill the president, and replace him with someone more desirable, or at least less threatening to the current system. Driving can lead to a kind of competition over who ‘owns the road,’ with the frustrations of that leading to road rage.
Obviously, the man driving the tanker truck in the film, he who is terrorizing and endangering the life of David Mann (Weaver), has an aggravated case of road rage. In the short story, it’s discovered that the trucker’s name is Keller, a pun on killer that’s so obvious, it’s mentioned as such in the story. Just as obvious is Mann’s name as a pun on man, since he’s an everyman, nobody special, just an ordinary salesman who is forced into being his own hero.
…and why is Keller trying to kill Mann? For the unpardonable sin of passing him on the road, or so it would seem. Actually, we really don’t know for sure what really is Keller’s problem with Mann. Sometimes not knowing a killer’s motives, as with Michael Myers, can make a movie all that scarier…fear of the unknown, and that kind of thing. Never seeing Keller’s face (or even knowing his name, as far as the film is concerned) adds to the tension. We see only his arms and brown, snakeskin boots.
Because we never learn who the truck driver is or what his full motives are, it’s been said that the truck itself is the real antagonist, not the driver. Spielberg himself went along with such an interpretation, seeing his film as an indictment of the mechanization of life. Though it’s his film, I must respectfully disagree with his interpretation.
Machines and technology aren’t in themselves the problem; it’s how we use them, for good or ill, that must be focused on. Even today, with AI technology, it isn’t AI per se that we should worry about, but rather its application. AI, as well as automation in general, could be a most liberating thing, freeing us from our work so we can maximize our potential and enjoy life…provided that the production of commodities is to serve universal human need. In a society that produces commodities to maximize profit, though, as we have now, that very AI and automation will only result in plunging millions of people into joblessness.
So if it isn’t the tanker truck itself, as a symbol of the apparent evil of machines and technology in general, that is the source of hostility in the film, as I would insist, then what is that source? I’d go back to what I said towards the beginning of this analysis, and say that the source of this hostility is aggressive competition, fueled by alienation.
Marx described alienation as manifesting in many forms, but the form that matters in this film is alienation from other workers. Now, Mann being a salesman and Keller being a trucker means, of course, that they aren’t directly competing with each other for higher wages from the same boss; but one can see a broader, more general kind of competition between the two, symbolized by Mann’s attempts to get past the slow-moving truck up ahead, and to get safe from the attacks of Keller’s truck when it’s fast-moving.
The tanker truck is old and dilapidated, as opposed to Mann’s red Plymouth Valiant. The vehicle one drives typically gives one a sense of one’s social status, hence the great pride people often have in their cars. Keller must envy other men for driving much nicer-looking vehicles that his beaten-down truck. Small wonder that he wants to dominate the road with his truck, which at least is so much bigger and more powerful than Mann’s car, as ugly as his truck is. He needs to compensate for his feelings of social inferiority by bullying the drivers of nicer-looking cars.
In the short story, the truck is full of gas, so it explodes when it falls off the cliff at the end. In the film, though, the truck is empty, so there’s no explosion after it falls. Keller driving an empty truck on the highway (recall how old and dilapidated it is), unless he’s driving home from having delivered the gas, suggests that maybe he’s angry because he’s out of work. Mann, in contrast, is driving through the Mojave Desert on a business trip…not that Keller knows anything about that, of course, but he has every reason to believe that Mann has it a lot better than he. In the short story, Mann imagines Keller must have a police record, having harassed other drivers as a habit.
Mann is the only substantial character in the story, Keller being faceless, mysterious, and without any dialogue. Though it’s called Duel, the story might as well be called Solo, since Mann is so lonely throughout most, if not all, of it. His feeling friendless just adds to the film’s sense of alienation, since his cries for help fall largely on deaf ears.
The film begins with Mann driving out of the city, the camera looking out of his windshield from his POV, thus establishing our sympathy for him. He’s playing the car radio, and we hear a married man on a talk show explaining how, because he hates work, he’s become a househusband while his wife is the breadwinner. Because of this arrangement, he feels emasculated, his working wife seeming to be the true head of the house, the ‘man’ of the house.
In the man’s shift from a pro-feminist career choice to an anti-feminist resentment over feeling ruled over by his wife, we can see how the humiliation he feels reflects already the themes of competition and alienation in the film. He feels that, as the husband, he should be above his wife. We will soon also see how this man, who does’t appear in the short story, is a double for Mann, who in his own way also feels dominated by his wife, a housewife played by Jacqueline Scott.
Mann stops at a gas station where the attendant tries to sell him a new radiator hose, which Mann suspects is just the attendant trying to get some more money out of him for something he doesn’t really need. This is yet another example, however small, of capitalism engendering alienation: one is far more interested in making money than in helping people. (As we’ll later learn, though, the attendant’s warning about the radiator hose is justified, so the alienation is really manifested in Mann’s refusal to listen to him.)
Mann, by the way, has by this point already passed the truck and been mildly annoyed by Keller. Mann uses the gas station telephone to call his wife, who as I said above, seems far more the boss of his home than he is. He calls her to apologize to her for something that happened the night before. A man at a party made unwanted sexual advances on Mann’s wife, and she’s mad at him for not standing up to the aggressor. This is yet another example of the theme of aggressive competition, in this case, of who gets to have Mann’s wife.
She also gripes at him to finish his business trip as soon as possible so he’ll return home as soon as he’s promised to. This means that he’s also going to have to compete with the time. Of course, we know by the end of the film how that competition will turn out for him.
Keller is at the gas station, too, honking his horn again and again. The attendant thinks Keller is pressuring him to hurry up and fill up his truck with gas, but we should already have an inkling that the honking of the horn is meant to irritate Mann.
Mann is out of the city by now and entering the loneliness of the Mojave Desert. He has only Keller to keep him company.
Being tailgated by Keller, Mann puts his hand out the window and waves to have the truck pass him. This is an act of goodwill by Mann, since he doesn’t want any conflict or competition with Keller. Later, when Keller’s out front and driving slowly in a deliberate attempt to annoy Mann, he imitates Mann’s waving to have him pass, but as Mann is trying to pass in the lane for oncoming traffic, a car is approaching at that very moment, almost causing a collision. Keller’s ironic act of ‘goodwill’ is to have Mann killed!
One thing to keep in mind, as a side note, about this film is that the soundtrack–composed by Billy Goldenberg for strings, harp, keyboards, and lots of percussion, along with Moog synthesizer effects–is mostly not conventional music in the sense of having themes, melody, and harmony. It has a largely metallic, jarring sound, since nothing in this story is harmonious in terms of human relationships.
The short story begins by pointing out how Mann passed the truck at 11:32 a.m., as if this is focal to the plot. About twenty minutes into the film, Mann manages to pass the truck by finding a small dirt road to the side of the highway, racing through it, and coming around back to the original road to be in front of the truck. Mann is exultant to the point of gloating that he’s finally passed the truck. He’s briefly experiencing the joy of winning out in a competition.
We soon get a sense of Keller’s vindictive rage at this outsmarting of him, a kind of narcissistic rage, so Keller races up behind Mann, honking his horn and threatening to rear-end him. Mann’s car spins off the road, near a diner, and crashes into a fence. The truck passes by and continues down the road, and Keller seems no longer interested in terrorizing Mann.
A couple of old men have seen the crash, and one of them goes up to Mann to see if he’s OK. When Mann says that the truck driver was trying to kill him, the old man won’t even consider the possibility that he’s describing the situation as it actually was, and insists that Mann simply has a bit of whiplash. This lack of validating Mann’s experience is yet another example of alienation in the film. Mann feels so alone and friendless.
He crosses the road, enters the diner, and goes into the men’s room to put some water on his face and calm down. Imagining the nightmare to be over, he looks at himself in the mirror as he’s processing what just happened. Lacanian psychoanalysis can deepen our understanding of Mann’s mental state, particularly with the symbolism of the mirror he’s looking into.
The terror of having almost been killed by Keller’s truck, of Mann’s body being mangled to pieces, is in a way symbolically comparable to the fragmented feeling an infant has of its own body prior to seeing itself for the first time in a mirror. The specular image gives the child a sense of his own self as a distinct ego, as opposed to his prior perception of himself as formless, divided, and fragmented. This establishment of self brings about the Imaginary Order, as opposed to the traumatizing, formless, ineffable state of the Real, caused in Mann’s case by Keller’s threat to his life, the threat of destroying Mann’s body.
Looking in the mirror calms Mann because it helps him re-establish his sense of self and a sense of order in the world he lost when Keller plunged him into the Real. Still, as any Lacanian knows, the ideal-I seen in the mirror reflection is self-alienating, because although Mann sees himself, that image is over there in the mirror, not in here in Mann’s body. Mann sees what seems like another person rather than himself, because he’s over there and not here. This Lacanian angle on alienation is just another example of the film’s theme of social estrangement in general.
What’s worse, the lack of sympathy for Mann from anyone in the diner just reinforces his estrangement. When the owner of the diner asks him what went wrong outside, Mann is so shaken up that he can’t put his trauma into words. This inability to verbalize an experience is the essence of the Real. To feel a connection with society, one must be able to use the commonly-shared form of language to communicate one’s feelings, to enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic. Mann can only say that the incident with Keller was “just a slight complication,” to which the owner replies that it “looked like a big complication,” getting laughter from the diner’s patrons, and further alienating Mann.
Even worse than this, Mann looks out the window of the diner and sees Keller’s truck parked outside! No, his nightmare is by no means over. The calm he felt in the men’s room, symbolized by his seeing himself in the mirror and re-establishing his sense of self (the Imaginary) in the chaotic world of the Real, was an illusion. He sits at a table, all alone, knowing that no one in the diner is his friend.
Rather than even consider that Keller is the crazy one, everyone thinks Mann is the crazy one. What’s more, it seems that Keller has entered the diner, judging by the number of men who are wearing similar brown boots and jeans. Which one of these men is Keller, though?
Mann believes at one point that he has identified Keller in a scene not in the short story–he sees a man at a table eating a sandwich. In his nervous confrontation with the guy, who naturally denies even any knowledge of what Mann is talking about, he knocks the sandwich out of his hand, angering him and getting knocked to the floor. The man then storms out of the diner.
The patrons of the diner think Mann is all the crazier now, and he is, after all he’s been through. Significantly, he sees Keller’s truck being driven away, as well as the man he had the altercation with driving away…in a different vehicle. Keller has succeeded in passing on his craziness to Mann–what can be called an instance of projective identification–and so he can drive his truck away feeling some spiteful satisfaction.
Keller’s frustrations with life have led to his aggression against Mann, whose frustrations have in turn led to his aggression against the man eating the sandwich. Most people think that the frustrations of life are just that…life, as in “That’s life.” It doesn’t occur to most of us that our discontents and grievances are mostly caused by the capitalist class, who in the years since the making of this movie have not only been squeezing the poor harder and harder, but have tricked us into thinking that this squeezing harder–neoliberalism–is just ‘reality.’ As a result, we take our frustrations out on each other rather than on the ruling class.
This taking it out on each other–what the ‘duel’ between Mann and Keller represents–is often referred to as “punching down,” or at least punching horizontally, as opposed to what we should be doing, which is “punching up,” or critiquing the power structures that hurt us all…or even better, as I see it–organizing in solidarity to overthrow the ruling class.
“Punching down,” caused by alienation, only exacerbates alienation.
‘Punching down” comes in many forms, not just the kind of fighting we see in the diner, or between Mann and Keller on the road. The working class, often swayed by the demagoguery of the right, tend to blame their problems on immigrants, refugees, and illegal aliens, coming within their country’s borders, rather than blame the capitalist class for causing the economic problems and imperialist mayhem in other countries, which forces the afflicted in those countries to come into ours in the hopes of finding a better life.
If foreigners aren’t being blamed for society’s ills, then either those receiving welfare are, or LGBT people, POC, or people thought to be masterminding some evil, Satanic plot are (the Jews, Freemasons, etc.). Their scapegoating, or that of other ‘ne’er-do-wells,’ is the kind of reactionary nonsense we’ve been hearing in recent songs like “Try That In a Small Town,” or “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
Some people on the left may try to defend the message of this second song on the grounds that at least part of its lyric diagnoses our problems correctly (“I’ve been sellin’ my soul…for bullshit pay”); and while acknowledging the stupidity of the line, “if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds/Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds,” defenders of the song insist that we need to blur over certain ideological differences in order to unite the people against the rich, and to have a dialogue with the right to persuade them to join the left. While, ideally, we on the left would much rather convince those on the right to abandon their reactionary views through rational argument, the rightists all too often regard us on the left as too “extremist” or “Satanic” to take our ideas seriously. Therefore, no reconciliation can be made, and alienation continues.
To get back to the movie, Mann leaves the diner and continues to drive. He comes to a school bus stuck on the side of the road because its engine is overheated (this scene isn’t in the short story). He stops to see if he can help the driver and the kids get the bus moving by pushing his car against the back of it.
Not only can he not make the bus budge, he gets his front bumper stuck under the bus’s rear bumper. The kids find his frustrations amusing, laughing and making faces at him. This moment demonstrates the absurd lengths to which alienation can take us: surely even little kids have enough sense to understand that this man is trying to help them; if he can’t, outside of anyone else’s help (coming soon, but they don’t know this yet) they’re all stuck in the middle of nowhere. These kids should be cheering him on, appreciating his efforts.
Mann gets out of his car and sees Keller’s truck in a tunnel down the road: naturally, he begins to panic and tries to persuade all of the kids, who are playing out by the side of the road, to get back in the bus for fear of crazy Keller driving at them and killing them in his attempt to kill Mann. The kids, however, and even the bus driver, think it’s frantic Mann who is the crazy one. Alienated Mann has no friends at all in this film.
He gets back in his car, manages to free his bumper, and hurries away as the truck comes over. Keller, with his big, powerful vehicle, gives the bus its needed push. By succeeding in helping the bus driver and kids where Mann has failed, Keller once again projects his craziness onto the victim who also failed to convince the bus driver that Keller has been trying to kill him. Psychopaths and narcissists are often very good at convincing you that it’s their victims who are the crazy ones.
Keller, of course, is and has always been the crazy one, and he demonstrates his craziness once again by coming up behind Mann, who’s stopped at a railroad crossing, and tries to push Mann’s car onto the railroad to make him crash into the oncoming train. Mann prevents this just barely by hitting the brake and putting his car into reverse.
Once the train is past, Mann floors the gas and crosses the tracks, then goes off the road. After Keller continues down the road, Mann follows slowly, hoping to distance himself from his enemy as much as possible. We can see another driver passing him at a more normal speed for a highway. Many of us can’t stand drivers who go so slowly (I sure don’t!), so Mann’s need to slow down to thirty mph, just to avoid a truck he’s about to meet up with again, isn’t going to make him any friends.
Indeed, Keller has pulled up on the side of the road and has been waiting for Mann to catch up. The antagonizing is about to continue.
Mann stops at a gas station whose owner also sells rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and lizards. As she’s taking care of his car, he uses a phone booth there to call the police and tell them about Keller, who’s pulled over on the side of the road and is then turning back to the gas station.
Mann can’t get any help from the seemingly lackadaisical police, especially since Keller races his truck at the phone booth, forcing Mann to rush out of it. The truck not only terrorizes Mann, smashing the booth, but it also smashes into a number of the gas station owner’s cages of animals. Keller’s punching down, as we can see, doesn’t only affect Mann, but potentially many other people. Mann’s gentle coaxing of a tarantula off of his leg is symbolic once again of how not only is Keller, but all of life on Earth, it seems, is against Mann.
He gets in his car and drives away to temporary safety, then decides not to move for at least an hour. He’d have Keller win the competition fully, just to be rid of him.
Finally, he starts driving again, but it isn’t too long before he sees Keller’s truck again, sitting by the side of the road, waiting for him. In his nervousness, Mann screeches to a halt with his car perpendicular to the road, unintentionally blocking it so other drivers can’t go straight through. Indeed, one approaching driver has to slam on the brakes to avoid ramming into Mann. His tires screech as he passes around Mann’s car, and as he’s driving away, we can see him raising a furious fist at Mann for leaving his car in such a foolish position on the road. Mann just can’t make any friends today.
Mann drives closer to the truck and stops. Keller starts his engine, Mann tries to drive past, but Keller blocks him, forcing him to turn around. Mann gets out of his car, and in exasperation, he walks toward the truck, meaning to confront Keller face to face; but the truck goes further away.
Keller’s distancing himself from Mann tells us two things: first, in a world of alienation, there can be no real communication, no human-to-human contact. Hence, we never see Keller, nor do we hear him say anything. His only words are in the animalistic honking of his horn.
The second thing this tells us about Keller is that he, like all bullies, when you get right down to it, is a coward. It’s easy to terrorize somebody when driving a big, powerful truck. It’s not so easy to do so man to man, without a shield of anonymity, as internet trolls have nowadays.
Mann flags down a car with an elderly couple in it. He begs them to drive to where there’s a phone, and call the police to tell them Keller is trying to kill him; but the couple is uncooperative, and they drive away at the sight of the approaching, threatening truck. Alienation is so extreme, no one helps anyone.
He gets back into his car and sees Keller with his hand out of the truck window, tauntingly offering to let him pass again. Mann races past, with Keller chasing behind.
Mann imagines that if he can go up the grade, that is, a slope leading up to a summit, Keller won’t be able to maintain the speed needed to continue chasing him. Keller manages to keep up fairly well, though, amazing Mann with his vicious determination.
Worse, Mann’s radiator hose breaks, causing his engine to overheat and forcing the car to slow down. He should have listened to that gas station attendant after all!
He reaches the summit and goes back down in neutral, but Keller is catching up. In his stress, Mann has bitten himself, and his mouth is bleeding. This self-inflicted wound of his is symbolic of how, as with his scoffing at the gas station attendant’s warning about the radiator hose, alienation and competition cause one to hurt not only others (as Keller is doing), but also oneself.
Eventually, Mann manages to pick up speed again, and he reaches the edge of a canyon where he’ll have his final showdown with Keller. As Matheson said of his story, this moment is really where the duel happens; previously, it was just Mann trying to avoid the competition Keller has been imposing on him. Mann has finally grown the guts to fight back, being so desperate and having no other way to deal with Keller.
Mann turns his car around to face the truck, he uses his briefcase to keep the accelerator down, and he steers his car right at the truck. He jumps out of the car at the last moment, and Keller smashes into it, the flames and smoke obscuring his vision, so he goes over the edge of the canyon, crashes below, and dies.
Mann rejoices over his final victory, but he’s also exhausted. The film ends with him sitting on the edge of the cliff, tossing pebbles into the canyon as the sun sets.
And so, with the end of the Duel, we go back to him, Solo.
Mann is all alone, in the middle of nowhere, with no car or any other means to get back to human society. He’s stuck in the undifferentiated, traumatizing Real, unable to get back to the Symbolic of culture, or even to the Imaginary, where he can see himself in a mirror and regain some sense of self and emotional stability. His pointless tossing of pebbles over the cliff is reflective of his loss of meaning, purpose, and–unless someone drives up, finds him, and offers him a ride back into town–hope.
His victory over Keller thus is a pyrrhic one, to say the least. He’s been left with nothing. These are the fruits of competition, so valued in the neoliberal years since the release of this film. Marx predicted that capitalist competition–in a way, something we could see as symbolized by Keller’s and Mann’s duel to the death–would end in its self-destruction under its own contradictions. We have seen such a self-destruction over the past fifteen years, with these two huge economic crises in 2008 and 2020.
The result of that destruction? We’re left with nothing, in the middle of nowhere, alienated…just like Mann, a personification of the ordinary man or woman in our lonely, desolate world.
This is why the common people should punch up, not down.
Introduction
Given the subversive interpretation of these three movies that I’m about to make, I find it fitting that the actor cast to play billionaire/playboy Bruce Wayne and his alter ego, the Batman, should be the same actor who only five years earlier played yuppie psychopath Patrick Bateman, a personification of the cruelties of capitalism, as I observed in my analysis of that film.
Though director Christopher Nolan is undoubtedly one of the best talents in filmmaking over the past two decades, he’s also a very bourgeois one, and this trilogy of films solidly demonstrates bourgeois liberal values, if, on occasion, in a somewhat conflicted way. Though Batman, Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), Rachel Dawes (Katie Holmes, and later, Maggie Gyllenhaal), Alfred Pennyworth (Michael Caine), Robin John Blake (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) are, of course, supposed to be the heroes, and Ra’s al Ghul (Liam Neeson), the Scarecrow (Cillian Murphy), the mob, the Joker (Heath Ledger), Bane (Tom Hardy), and Catwoman (Anne Hathaway) are supposed to be the villains, there’s a moral ambiguity in the Batman story that leaves a huge grey area between the black and white of stereotypical good and evil.
For the true centre of evil, as powerfully given in these three movies, is Gotham City itself, a city said–repeatedly by those who wish to destroy it–to be impossible to save. A city in which the hero, a billionaire and a glorified, militarized policeman, represents justice, and in which many are so poor and desperate that they have to resort to crime in order to survive, is one in which the mob (i.e., criminal businesses) rules–this tells us all we need to know about what Gotham City symbolizes…capitalism.
As we know, what prompted the reboot of the Batman franchise was the disastrous failure of Joel Schumacher‘s Batman and Robin (1997), which gave us the generally loathed, campy presentation of Batman, as opposed to the preferred dark antihero version as seen in Nolan’s trilogy. A nauseatingly fitting song in the soundtrack of Schumacher’s film is “Gotham City,” by R. Kelly, with a lyric that includes the line “A city of justice, a city of love, a city of peace…” a line that is as totally misrepresentative of the fictional city as it is barf-inducing in its mawkishness.
If Gotham City is a place of justice, love, and peace, why is Batman needed? Why are villains like Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, and Bane there? No, the very last things that Gotham City represents are justice, love, and peace: its name, which to me suggests a pun on Gothic, has connotations of darkness and evil that Schumacher’s film willfully avoided presenting to moviegoers in its proper tone.
In terms of theme and its presentation of the subject matter, Nolan’s trilogy has an aesthetically appealing ABA structure, as in much classical music: statement, departure, return. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises share not only references to Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, if not outright presenting them, but also the theme of fear. The Dark Knight, on the other hand, has the theme of escalation, and as far as the Joker and Harvey Two-Face are concerned, the latter is referred to and briefly shown in Rises, while the former is never referred to or shown, not even once, though the effects of his actions are thoroughly felt in Rises.
Batman Begins
With the establishment of the fear of bats of young Bruce Wayne (played by Gus Lewis), we are also introduced to his father, Thomas Wayne (played by Linus Roache). Billionaire Thomas is a doctor, head of Wayne Enterprises, and a liberal through and through. As a kind and charitable man, he is not only a child’s ideal father, he’s also the exemplar of bourgeois generosity. Still, all these virtues are a mask, a distraction from the plain and simple fact that billionaires simply shouldn’t exist, especially in a city riddled with poverty, desperation, and crime.
What must be emphasized in such a world is that the only difference worth noting between businesses like Wayne Enterprises and the mob is that the former are law-abiding capitalists, while the latter are not law-abiding capitalists. As far as law enforcement is concerned, the cops touch neither group of capitalists because they are paid for through two channels: the former, through taxes; the latter, through bribes. All three groups–legitimate business, the mob, and the law enforcers–keep the capitalist, class system intact.
The first and third of these groups thus represent the government-regulated forms of capitalism, while the mob represents the deregulated, “free market” form. Incidentally, there will emerge another character, who in his lawless, privatized form of law enforcement, will also represent that “free market” form of capitalism…the Batman.
That we.see such an intermingling of the state-regulated vs. deregulated forms of capitalism–sometimes cooperating and complementing each other, sometimes fighting with each other–in this trilogy makes it a perfect portrayal of our neoliberal world.
It’s interesting to compare and contrast the Thomas Wayne of this film with him in Joker, the film I looked at here, and more in depth here. Nolan’s Thomas is so kind, gentle, and liberal, whereas the Thomas of the 2019 film (played by Brett Cullen, who also played Congressman Byron Gilley in The Dark Knight Rises) is gruff, mean-spirited, and even Trumpish. Could it be that the superrich and those in power are…two-faced? (For reasons that should be obvious to you, Dear Reader, I’ll be exploring this idea much more in the Dark Knight section of this analysis.)
With Joe Chill‘s killing of young Bruce Wayne’s parents, it’s only natural that he, as a kid, will be focused on only his own pain. His focus on his own trauma stays with him until his young adulthood, when he considers shooting Chill when he’s about to be released early in exchange for testifying against crime boss Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson). A woman hired by Falcone shoots Chill instead.
It takes Rachel Dawes, now no longer just a childhood friend of Bruce’s, but a DA, to get him to understand that it’s the mafia of Gotham, with their control of the economy, police, and politicians, that drives the poor to such desperation that people like Chill rob and kill. Up until this point, we’ve been sympathizing with Bruce; now, we finally manage to spare some sympathy for the poor.
What’s not acknowledged in this liberal film is that Bruce Wayne’s family is part of the problem. The rich become that way not through hard work, contrary to popular belief, but through exploitation of the working class. The money the rich get through their profits, surplus value, is just money not paid to their employees. Put another way, the rich get rich through stealing from their overworked, underpaid workers…and it’s all legal.
Though as I said, this reality isn’t acknowledged in the film, that doesn’t mean there are no Freudian slips that occasionally give away the hidden meaning. William Earle (Rutger Hauer), CEO of Wayne Enterprises, tells young Bruce around the time of the funeral of Thomas and Martha Wayne that he’ll be watching over “the empire” until Bruce grows up and can take over. Don’t get me started on how capitalism leads to empire. Read this and this instead.
As a young man, Bruce travels to the Far East to learn about such things as hunger and the drive to commit crimes. Bruce, you’re still a billionaire: you can take a vacation from starvation and desperation any time you like; the scrawny, dirty East Asians all around you cannot.
His hanging out with and helping criminals steal show, in symbolic form, the blurred line between law-abiding capitalists and the criminal businesses of the mafia. Still, when arrested, Bruce insists that he not a “犯人.” In a Bhutan prison, he often has to fight off the local prisoners, who just see in him a rich white man. It doesn’t matter whether or not they know he’s billionaire Bruce Wayne: in the Third World, anyone from the First World is correctly understood to be the 1% of the Earth, regardless of whether they happen to be of the ruling class, the middle class, or even the working class of the richer countries.
The League of Shadows learns not only of Bruce being in East Asia, but also of him fighting off groups of prisoners, so “Henri Ducard” goes to the prison to offer Bruce membership in the League, as well as training, and “a path.” Upon release from the prison, Bruce goes to find Ducard in the mountains.
Bruce learns all he needs to know about engaging groups of fighters and taking them all out. He learns that “training is nothing” and “will is everything.” Ducard also tells Bruce of how, many years back, he lost his “one true love,” something that will be developed in the third film, one of many examples of the ABA structure of the trilogy that I mentioned above.
When Bruce finishes his training and proves himself to be the best pupil of the League of Shadows, he is disappointed to learn that he is expected to practice extrajudicial killings. The liberal in Bruce, something he learned from his father and from Rachel, cannot just execute a man without there first being a trial for him.
Ducard insists that in a world of corrupt bureaucrats, there is no such thing as a fair trial. What we see in the contradiction between Bruce’s liberal point of view and the hard line of the League of Shadows is what essentially amounts to a straw man, if looked at more closely. The hard line is portrayed as cruel, extreme, and unreasonable compared to the liberal position. This becomes especially apparent when Bruce learns that he’s expected to lead the League of Shadows into Gotham City and destroy it, which of course he’ll never do.
When we remember that Gotham, permeated throughout with corruption and crime, represents capitalism, which cannot be reformed or saved, the League of Shadows’ position is not so unreasonable or extremist. Also, the film portrays the group of assassins as mere destroyers, rather than revolutionaries who would rebuild a just society on the ruins of the old, capitalist one. We thus see a narrow Overton Window that misrepresents our options as only capitalism, or nihilist destruction…no room for socialism.
Wayne’s belief that there are some good people in Gotham, as against Ducard’s insistence that there isn’t even one good person there, reminds one of Abraham’s negotiating with God (Genesis 18:20-33) over whether there are any in Sodom and Gomorrah who are worth sparing the destruction of the sinful cities by fire and brimstone. Such a suggestion reinforces the idea that Gotham City is beyond redemption, in spite of Bruce’s protestations. Note in this connection the “immortality” of Ra’s al Ghul (Ducard’s secret identity, as we learn soon enough), which makes him rather Godlike in relation to Bruce-as-Abraham.
Bruce escapes and destroys the home of Ra’s al Ghul, thinking he’s left him for dead, too (though actually killing an Asian decoy played by Ken Watanabe), and saving “Ducard.” Bruce returns to Gotham to take over the helm of Wayne Enterprises, only to learn that William Earle, thinking Bruce is dead, is making the company go public. In this we see how Earle, another cutthroat capitalist, is trying to wrest the power of Wayne Enterprises from the Wayne family.
Bruce discusses with Alfred his plan to save Gotham from the mob by presenting himself as a symbol, wearing a mask to conceal his identity and thus keep safe those he cares about. Since bats have always frightened him, he’ll dress in a Batsuit. By ordering the different parts from various manufacturers in places all over the world, he hopes it will be harder to trace them all to him. Adding to this all of the equipment he’ll get from Lucius Fox (the cape, the utility belt, the Batmobile, etc.) and the cave beneath Wayne Manor, the Batman is born.
Note how the Batmobile has been reimagined to become “the Tumbler,” essentially a kind of tank. This ties in well with what I said above, that Batman is a glorified, privatized, militarized policeman. The police, properly understood, don’t ‘fight crime’ per se, or ‘enforce justice’ so much as they protect the interests of the capitalist class. The recent militarizing of the police, a perfect preparation for any attempts at proletarian revolution, has made them particularly threatening to the common people.
It is in this context that we should understand the Dark Knight, a metaphor expressing the idea of protecting a king, a wealthy, landowning ruler. It should come as no surprise that this Dark Knight should be a billionaire, called “Master Wayne” by his butler. This masked vigilante is privatized law enforcement helping the cops; this combination of private and state law enforcement is symbolic of the combination of free enterprise and state-regulated economies, just the right combination for the convenience of the ruling class: “free market” (i.e., low taxes and minimal social programs, to ensure a maximization of profit at the expense of the poor) when convenient, and government involvement (e.g., state subsidies for corporations) when convenient…the essence of neoliberalism.
Batman’s fighting of the mob, who are just another kind of capitalist (as I’ve argued elsewhere), and his helping the cops to fight the mob, should thus be seen as different factions of the capitalist class competing over who will rule the city. Some represent a more state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops), while others, in their relative or extreme lawlessness, represent the “free market” version, Batman and the mob.
Note how the “free market” representatives can be ‘good’ (Batman) or evil (the mob). The representatives of the state-regulated version of capitalism (the cops) can be horribly corrupt, too, as becomes especially apparent in the second movie.
Now, with the excesses of this kind of world, with the extreme wealthy on one side, as well as the mob and the corrupt cops, and the desperately poor and exploited on the other side, it is inevitable that all of these contradictions and conflicts will lead to massive numbers of cases of mental illness.
Here’s where Dr. Jonathan Crane, the Scarecrow, comes in.
As a psychiatrist with a fear toxin, a hallucinogenic drug, that he uses to induce insanity on anyone deemed a threat or just because it’s convenient to do so, Crane is an example of the corruption in the field of psychiatry that I discussed here. Though he thinks that his collaboration with Ra’s al Ghul, to threaten Gotham with his fear toxin, is meant to hold the city to ransom, it will actually be used by the League of Shadows to make the people of Gotham tear each other apart with fear and madness, thus destroying the city as Ra’s al Ghul intended.
Of course, Batman also uses fear to fight crime, as we see him do to Arnold Flass (played by Mark Boone Junior), a corrupt cop working for Falcone and corrupt Commissioner Loeb. Though in the scene in question, we see Batman intimidating a cop, Batman as privatized cop (even though he insists he doesn’t look like one!) is simply doing what we know regular cops do all the time, those bullies with bullets. And as the ‘good,’ privatized cop going after the corrupt state police, we see another example of the neoliberal agenda in The Dark Knight trilogy.
While Batman is one mask that Bruce wears, another is the act he puts on as Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy, going about everywhere in public with beautiful women on his arms. But of course, this playboy persona isn’t the “real” Bruce, either, since our hero is far too noble to be chasing skirt in earnest. Besides, he’s still in love with Rachel.
And since Rachel is the love interest of this conservative trilogy, she must also be the damsel in distress…in spite of, or rather because of, her pluck as an assistant DA fighting corruption in Gotham. First, Falcone hires some muscle to kill her, from whom Batman saves her; then, after she’s exposed to Crane’s fear toxin upon her discovery that it is being put into the city’s water supply, Batman has to rush her to the Batcave to give her the antidote Fox has made.
What’s interesting is how interconnected all the actors are in the conspiracy to destroy Gotham City. Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows are at the centre of the conspiracy, but not only is the Scarecrow involved–as mentioned above–with his fear toxin, but also Wayne Enterprises is, through the use of a powerful microwave emitter that will vaporize the liquid toxin so all of the people of Gotham breathe it in and go mad with fear.
Though Bruce doesn’t know about the microwave emitter until the climax of the film, William Earle and other senior staff at Wayne Enterprises surely know about it, some of them–including Earle in all probability, since he fires Fox for asking too many questions about it–also being in on the conspiracy to at least some extent. That these capitalists, along with a corrupt psychiatrist and at least some corrupt cops like Flass, have at least an inkling of the plot to destroy capitalist Gotham is symbolic of how it’s been predicted that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own contradictions.
Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, on the other hand, represent a leftist revolutionary movement, though in this bourgeois film, such a political movement can only be portrayed unsympathetically. They’re just destroyers, bent only on tearing down the old, oppressive order. As such, they’re more like nihilists or Trotskyists, since Ra’s al Ghul’s boast that the League of Shadows has existed throughout history, tearing down one decadent city after another, sounds a lot like permanent revolution. There’s never an interest in rebuilding society along socialist lines, such as providing universal free education and healthcare, subsidized housing for all, 100% employment, and a social safety net for the poor. A bourgeois film like this one is content with such omissions.
Wayne Enterprises having the microwave emitter, which can be used to make the Gotham population kill each other through maniacal fear, has its parallel in the third film (recall the trilogy’s ABA structure) with the fusion reactor, ostensibly meant to provide eco-friendly energy, but which can also be converted into a nuclear bomb that Bane will use to destroy Gotham. And Bane is an excommunicated member of the League of Shadows.
Part of the destruction of Gotham as a nerve-centre of capitalism is the burning-down of Wayne Manor by the League of Shadows, an arson even Bruce himself has spoken of wanting to commit. If revolutionaries don’t destroy capitalism, it will destroy itself by its own contradictions. But of course, liberals will fight to keep capitalism alive by attempting to reform it, either by social democrat means or through the libertarian ideal of market fundamentalism. We see this symbolically through the joint efforts of Gordon and Batman defeating Ra’s al Ghul.
…and one day, when Batman retires, Bruce can have a real love life–but with Rachel?
The Dark Knight
Batman Begins ends with Gordon, promoted to lieutenant, warning Batman of the dangers of escalation and giving him the Joker’s card. This anticipates not only the arrival of the Joker, of course, but also the main theme of the second film: escalation.
Normally, we think of the Joker as being just a murdering psychopath, a mad dog chasing tires and foaming at the mouth. Now, unlike the Joker whom Joaquin Phoenix played, Heath Ledger’s Joker has very little backstory to explain how he became a homicidal maniac, apart from his two contradictory stories for how he got his Glasgow smile.
However he got those scars, be it from an abusive father (far more likely than him giving them to himself, in an attempt to appease the woman he loved), they’re an obvious sign of trauma that, among other things presumably, drove him to a life of crime. Bourgeois ideology have very little interest in exploring the real roots of crime in class conflict; hence, we get very little, if any, backstory on the Joker, as we do in the 2019 film.
What we do know of this Joker, though, is surprising. Consider who he attacks throughout the movie. We see him and his gang of wearers of clown masks rob a bank…run by the mob. He kills cops and imitators of Batman, who as I’ve said above is a glorified cop himself. We’ve never sympathized with the mafia, and sympathy for the cops has recently–at best–been dwindling. By the end of the film, the mayhem he’s caused results in the bulk of Gotham’s criminals behind bars, aided by the myth of Harvey Dent’s heroism. Is the Joker the secret hero of this film?
Now, the Joker isn’t an anarchist in the strict sense of the term. We don’t see him set up the anarchist, i.e., stateless, version of socialism because, as I said about Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, the bourgeois liberal ideology of these films insists on an Overton Window narrow enough to exclude even the contemplation of socialist possibilities. This is because ‘There Is No Alternative to capitalism,’ apparently.
The Joker does, however, personify the anarchist solution to the problem of capitalism, if only in a stereotyped form. He speaks of the only sensible way to live being one without rules, and that he’s an “agent of chaos.” Now, such ideas are not truly anarchist, of course, but they are stereotypically associated with anarchism (meaning “no rulers,” not “no rules,” actually), and this film’s bourgeois agenda would have you continue to believe the misleading conception of anarchism, in the hopes that you’ll never consider such a radical solution to society’s ills. His saying to scarred Harvey, “Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos,” is meant to reinforce the stereotyped association of chaos with anarchy.
At the same time, who does the Joker kill, for the most part? Cops, mafia men and their bosses (criminal capitalists, remember), lawyers, judges, anyone in a position of power and authority. No rulers, in effect. Yet as with the League of Shadows, there’s no rebuilding of society, because the bourgeoisie cannot allow the people to see a newer, better world.
The Scarecrow makes a brief appearance, having sold his fear toxin as a supposed narcotic. A mobster known as the Chechen (played by Ritchie Coster), who works for Sal Maroni (Eric Roberts), is upset that the fear toxin’s ‘bad trip’ won’t produce “repeat customers.” In this scene, we see an example of how the mob are just another kind of capitalist. The Scarecrow doesn’t care about money, though: he, being a psychopath, just wants to spread fear into the world, his toxin being symbolically a projection of his own fears and traumas brought on by his having been bullied and abused as a child.
In all of the imitators of Batman, we see people admiring the notion of Batman as the ‘Great Man,’ another myth the ruling class has always used to justify its existence. The faux-Batmen can never measure up to the real Dark Knight, of course, because they wear “hockey pants” instead of the proper armoured Batsuit. In other words, these ordinary men lack the money to pay for a proper Batsuit, which Bruce can even afford to replace with one that will let him turn his head more comfortably.
The new district attorney, Harvey Dent, represents the lawful way of defeating the mob, and therefore Bruce has high hopes that Dent will make Batman no longer necessary. Then, he imagines, he can be with Rachel…only she’s been seeing Harvey.
In the shift from Batman being Gotham’s hero to Harvey being that hero, that is, from lawless protector to lawful protector, we see how capitalism can shift from a deregulated to a regulated system, depending on the social, economic, and political conditions of the time. Yet even at this early point in the movie, those corrupt cops Harvey has been monitoring have already been calling him “Two-Face.” This unflattering nickname suggests the dual nature of the capitalist system: regulated at one time, when convenient, and non-regulated at another time, when convenient.
It’s an economic system of multiple faces, with a liberal smile, a libertarian sneer, and a fascist scowl.
Since the Joker has been stealing the mob’s money, and Batman has been giving them a hard time, Sal Maroni, Gambol (played by Michael Jai White), and the other mafia men have had to meet in secret places. Lau (played by Chin Han), a mafia banker from Hong Kong, has moved all their money to keep it safe where he is.
The Joker barges in on their meeting, laughing at Lau’s feeble promise of protection, knowing that even though the Chinese would never extradite Lau, Batman has no jurisdiction: he will bring Lau back to Gotham, make him squeal, and get the cops all over the mob, which, of course, the Batman does.
Batman catches Lau in Hong Kong, making him beg Batman to let go of him and promising to give him anything he wants. This is the first time we’ve known Batman to go outside of Gotham to catch a criminal; note that Hong Kong can be seen as a capitalist Gotham in its own right. In this scene, we see again how Batman, in his lawless fighting of crime and defying China’s forbidding of the extradition of any of its citizens, represents the deregulated, privatized form of policing. His apprehending of Lau, a mafia capitalist, is also an example of how these three films aren’t so much about good vs evil as they are about competing forms of capitalism.
As a result of Lau’s squealing, Harvey, Rachel, and the police are able to arrest a whole slew of the mob; only high-ranking members like Maroni and the Chechen have the money to make bail. In this great success of Harvey’s, Bruce sees a real hope that he can hang up his cowl soon, and then be with Rachel. He hosts a fundraising party for Harvey in his new home (while Wayne Manor is being rebuilt), repeating the slogan, “I believe in Harvey Dent.”
Bruce’s entrance to his party, from a helicopter, wearing a nice suit, and with not one, not two, but three beautiful women (Russian ballerinas, I assume) on his arms, deserves comment. I’m sure I’m far from being the only man who was awed by this amazing entrance of Bruce’s, back when the film came out in theatres. A similar feeling comes when one sees the home, cars, suits, and technology of Tony Stark in the Marvel movies: the effect is to engender more simping for billionaires among young men, who fantasize about attaining such wealth themselves one day.
Now, hitting the mob as hard as Batman, Dent, and Gordon have done is not going to pass without any retaliation. Here is where the escalations begin. Maroni, the Chechen, et al decide to hire the Joker to go after Batman. By saying he’ll kill people for every day that Batman doesn’t reveal his true identity (something Batman will never do, of course), the Joker is making Batman into a scapegoat for all of these deaths. Once again, we see a blurred line separating the ‘good’ from the bad.
Commissioner Loeb’s liquor is poisoned, a judge is killed by a car bomb, the Joker crashes Bruce’s fundraiser, looking for Dent and dropping Rachel from a window, forcing Batman to rescue the damsel in distress again. Disguised as a policeman, the Joker makes an attempt on the life of Gotham mayor Anthony Garcia (played by Néstor Carbonell), for whom Gordon takes a bullet, seeming to kill him and causing his grieving wife to blame Batman.
To stop the violence, Bruce is ready to reveal himself as Batman and turn himself in to the cops, who are portrayed very sympathetically in this conservative film. But Harvey claims to be Batman, and Bruce lets him do it. Just before doing so, Harvey tries to reassure the frightened public that “the night is darkest just before the dawn,” implying that the film’s title is a pun on The Dark Night, a reflection of how bad the escalations are getting.
Of course, Harvey, as a reflection of how the law ‘should’ be enforced, as someone so ‘incorruptible,’ and as someone taking the fall for Bruce, is Gotham’s White Knight…but if you’re familiar with my ouroboros symbolism, you’ll know how quickly and easily the whitest of innocence can fall to the darkest of evil. “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.”
After the exciting car chase scene, in which the Joker fires a bazooka at the armoured police vehicle carrying Harvey, and when Batman’s Tumbler takes the hit, totaling his armoured vehicle and making Batman convert the remains into his Batcycle, or “Batpod,” the Joker is apprehended, and we learn that Gordon never died…he’s soon to be promoted to commissioner by the mayor, too.
The pressure is being put on both Harvey and Batman when they realize that Rachel is being targeted by the Joker. They are increasingly being tempted to sidestep the rule of law to stop the bad guys, putting themselves in danger of becoming bad guys themselves. And when law enforcement, whether in its privatized or state forms, protects the capitalist system as illegally as the mob practices capitalism, we know that Gotham’s ‘good guys’ are no better than its bad guys.
When Harvey, pointing a gun at the Joker’s paranoid schizophrenic henchman Thomas Schiff (played by David Dastmalchian), is flipping a coin with two good sides, we know he’s showing his potential for evil already. He’s already Harvey Two-Face. When Batman, as the “bad cop,” is beating the crap out of the Joker, and Gordon as the “good cop” assures the other cops watching the beating that it’s “in control,” we see again how the police’s defence of private property is nowhere near as justified as it would seem to be. Such a lack of justification is all the more apparent when we see Batman, the privatized form of ‘law enforcement,’ is also willing to bend the law by using a cellphone surveillance system to monitor all of Gotham, violating citizens’ privacy, in order to catch the Joker.
The Joker’s method is a form of accelerationism. He pushes the law enforcers to their limit to get them to show their repressed, ugly sides. Killing Rachel and burning half of Harvey’s face, as well as burning one side of his coin, has turned him from a liberal defender of the class system to one comparable to a violent fascist. The Joker tries to do the same with Gotham’s citizens, with the threats to blow up hospitals if Wayne Enterprises employee Coleman Reese (played by Joshua Harto) isn’t killed for trying to reveal Batman’s identity, and with the threat to blow up the two boats (with the “sweet innocent civilians” on one, and Gotham’s “scumbag” convicts in the other), but without the same success.
When the Joker, disguised as a nurse in Gotham General Hospital, tells Harvey that no one gets upset if a truck of soldiers gets blown up, a theory was formed that the Joker could be an Iraq War veteran, his trauma from that causing his psychopathy. When people from the bottom part of society are killed, like troops or a “gangbanger,” who cares? But if someone from the top, like a mayor, is killed, “then everyone loses their minds,” because such upper echelon deaths are not “part of the plan.”
The Joker, as an ‘anarchist’ of sorts, is trying to prove the point that no one group of people is inherently better than another. We’re all beasts, underneath it all…but more importantly, no one has the right to exercise authority over another; so if those in authority can decide who dies and who doesn’t, so can people like the Joker. The film portrays his attitude as being merely loving of destruction for its own sake, as with the League of Shadows: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” This is how the bourgeoisie wants us to understand socialists’ aims to be.
Though Harvey himself–overwhelmed with how deep the corruption is among the Gotham police, how the Joker and the mob can so easily pay off cops like Wuertz (played by Ron Dean) and Ramirez (played by Monique Gabriela Curnen) to have Rachel killed–betrays the very justice system he condemns these cops for betraying, Gordon and Batman know they can’t let the public know of Harvey’s crimes, including the killing of cops. All of those Harvey has had incarcerated would go free, and Gotham would no longer have any hope in eradicating crime.
The lie of the efficacy of conventional law enforcement must be maintained in this lie.
This lie must be maintained in Gotham City because it must be maintained everywhere that the capitalist system is upheld. If not, we’ll have either socialism, or barbarism.
…and we all know that socialism cannot even be considered.
So Batman has to be a kind of Christ-figure and take the fall for something he didn’t do: kill all those Harvey killed. Gordon reluctantly calls it in, to have his cops chase Batman for the killings, as well as for the threat Harvey made to his wife, himself, and his little boy.
Everybody knows that the police all too frequently use excessive force, engage in police brutality, and kill needlessly (often blacks, often with impunity). Such is the two-faced nature of law enforcement and the protection of private property. In his attempt to tear the whole system down, to remove all systems of authority–which, one might hope, would be replaced with a socialist system that produces commodities for the general need, instead of for profit–the Joker, in trying to make Gotham “[his] city,” was trying to save it.
The Joker is not interested in having huge sums of money, comparable to the way an anarcho-communist wants a society without money, so he burns it. Batman “completes” him in a dialectical sense: the Joker imagines he’ll be fighting Batman forever, an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object, in an eternal contradiction between, on the one hand, the capitalist use of state (or privatized) authority for the sake of the protection of private property, and on the other hand, the revolutionary aim of destroying those very capitalist forms of authority.
But instead of saving Gotham in the accelerationist way the Joker initially intended, the corrupt police system has remained intact; still, at least all the major criminals are behind bars. So as far as the Joker being the real hero of the second film is concerned, some might say, what he has ended up achieving is close enough.
The Dark Knight Rises
Though the streets of Gotham are generally clean, our protagonists are scarred right down to the bone. Gordon is racked with guilt over years of never telling the truth about Harvey Dent, and how he threatened the lives of the Gordon family, causing his wife to take their son and leave him. Bruce, with an injured leg, is still mourning the loss of Rachel, and has become something of a recluse.
As I mentioned above, though the Joker is never, not even once, mentioned in this third film, the effect of what he did in the second is still felt, throughout this one. Also, as I said before, this film’s themes and subject matter return us to those of the first film…fear in particular.
Bruce was mourning his parents in the first film, grieving for years afterwards; now, he’s mourning Rachel, wounded by her loss for years. His emotional wounds are symbolized by that bad leg of his. As at the beginning of the first film, at the beginning of this one, there is no Batman. Batman began in the first movie; the Dark Knight must rise in this one.
Another motif in this film, a new one, is hell. Bane and his men, the villains according to the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology, work and plot in the underground of Gotham. After Bane beats Batman in their first fight, incapacitated Bruce is put in an underground prison somewhere in the Middle East, a hell in which all hope is to be abandoned precisely because the tantalizing hope of climbing up and escaping is frustrated by its near-impossibility.
Despair is dialectically strengthened by this perpetually frustrated hope. Finally, there’s one obvious underground hell to outdo all hells: the Batcave, the headquarters of our privatized, militarized policeman who defeats the mob (hope), but keeps alive the very capitalist system that spawns more mafia (despair).
Selina Kyle is an interesting case of the dialectical opposition between seeming to be one kind of person vs actually being a completely different kind. At first, she seems timid and submissive, then revealing herself to be sly and a formidable fighter. As a cat burglar trying to find a way to wipe out her criminal record, she’s a villain going so far as to steal Bruce’s fingerprints to bankrupt him and help Bane in his revolution; yet she also turns heroine, helping Batman in the end and even killing Bane with the guns of the Batpod.
For these reasons, she is yet another example of the moral ambiguity of this trilogy. That moral ambiguity, of course, goes both ways: the one in accordance with bourgeois values, as described in the previous paragraph, and the one in accordance with the Marxist values I’ve been trying to argue for here. As I said above, billionaires shouldn’t exist; and though her saving of Batman is in aid of capitalism, her earlier helping of Bane is the helping of a revolution that needs to be properly interpreted. Recall what she whispers in Bruce’s ear: “There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches, because when it hits, you’re all gonna wonder how you ever thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.”
Bane’s agenda, being a return to that of Ra’s al Ghul and the League of Shadows, is the destruction of Gotham, a city regarded as far too corrupt to save…and as a symbol of capitalism, I’d have to agree that it can’t be saved. Still, as with the previous two films, the revolution ends in mere destruction: we don’t see any socialist rebuilding of society because the trilogy’s bourgeois ideology won’t have it.
What sets Bane’s revolution apart from those of Joker and Ra’s al Ghul is that Bane doesn’t just destroy Gotham immediately after beating Batman and putting Bruce in the underground prison in the Middle East: he takes over the city and protects his revolution with his men and their use of such weaponry as Tumblers from Wayne Enterprises. Such a protection of his revolution, through military force, suggests the Marxist-Leninist notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in this bourgeois film is inevitably portrayed as a kind of death cult.
The use of the Wayne Enterprises weaponry, the blowing-up of all but one bridge connecting Gotham City to the outside world, and the relatively brief time that Bane’s men control the city, implies that Bane’s revolution, if understood as a kind of leftist one, is comparable to the short-lived Paris Commune, where cannons were kept to protect the working-class revolution.
The conversion of the fusion reactor core into a decaying neutron bomb seems meant to remind us of the fears the West has had of nuclear weapons programs in the USSR, Mao’s China, and the DPRK. Of course, so many of us in the West conveniently forget which government created the original nuclear weapons program and used it the one and only time to kill people.
If Bane’s revolutionary government and kangaroo courts seem terrifying and oppressive to you, Dear Reader, recall that, apart from the films’ propagandistic, denigrating portrayal of such revolutionary change as I’ve explained above, the Dent Act, incarcerating people based on the lie and, indeed, cult of personality surrounding Harvey, is hardly innocent, democratic, or respectful of the rule of law. Bourgeois government is predicated on force and violence every bit as much as, if not more than, proletarian government. In The State and Revolution, Lenin explained how any state, whether capitalist or socialist, is used by the dominant class to rule over the dominated class. In socialist governments, the workers rule over the capitalists; in bourgeois governments (the vast majority of governments around the world), it’s the other way around. Either way, someone is stepped on; why not have the common majority control the rich minority for a change?
Gotham Mayor Garcia has refused to repeal the Dent Act, in typical bourgeois state fashion. Gordon, for all his ‘goodness,’ hasn’t grown the courage to admit that the circumstances surrounding Dent’s death were depicted dishonestly. The rich of Gotham, the real thieves of the poor there, continue to live in luxury without ever being held accountable.
One such example of such a vampiric capitalist crook is John Daggett (played by Ben Mendelsohn), who hopes Bane will help him absorb Wayne Enterprises, and arrogantly thinks his wealth gives him the right to boss others around…fatefully, even Bane. It’s easy to feel no sympathy for him when Bane kills him, but Bruce, Gordon, Garcia, et al are in principal no better…except in how they lack Daggett’s obnoxious attitude. A capitalist nonetheless is still a capitalist, and a protector of such vampires is still a protector of them, whether polite or rude. The same applies when comparing the vices of Trump with those of Biden, Obama, Gates, etc.
Officer John Blake, being a Robin-esque cop, blurs the line between state and privatized police in a manner comparable to Batman, but as an orphan, he reminds Bruce of his social duty as a “billionaire orphan” not to forget the orphans he used to give charity to. In the end, he gives Wayne Manor to those orphans who have grown too old to stay in orphanages. Such charity is as far as liberals will allow, when the best solution to the problem of the homeless, orphan or non-orphan, is to provide housing for all, as such examples of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Cuba do.
Blake, becoming fed up with the shackles of state law enforcement by the end of the movie, will give up on being a cop. He’ll discover the Batcave at the very end, and we are to assume that he will take up the mantle of Batman once Bruce has left Gotham and retired his role as the Dark Knight…or perhaps ‘Robin’ will become Nightwing. In any case, his switch from state cop to privatized cop once again reflects the trilogy’s implied neoliberal agenda.
While The Dark Knight Rises is generally a well-made film, it is also riddled with plot holes, these mostly being based on how incapacitated Bruce becomes by the middle of the story. One must assume that the strapping-up of his bad leg is left intact by Bane’s men when he is taken to the underground prison; otherwise, that near impossible leap he makes to escape the prison just becomes all the nearer to impossible.
Also, though his cellmate fixes the vertebra in his back, surely it continues to hurt like the hell he’s trapped in, right up to his leap to freedom, again, making the leap all that harder to do, as well as making it harder for him to fight Bane again…let alone defeat him. And how was Bruce, without his money, a passport, or any of his Batman equipment, able to get back to Gotham without being detected by Bane’s men?
Apart from filling in these gargantuan plot holes with an added, impractical story arc that would have lengthened an already long film by at least another thirty minutes (Bruce presumably contacting a rich, influential friend in the Middle East, someone to lend him some money, help him get a new passport to get him back to the US, etc.), seeing him back in Gotham, with all of his miraculous return’s willing suspension of disbelief, reinforces the ruling class’s myth of the “Great Man,” able to overcome impossible odds by “the most powerful impulse of the spirit.”
The ability or inability of escaping the prison is to be understood dialectically. The only ones who have ever escaped–young Talia al Ghul, as we eventually learn, and Bruce–did so without the aid of a rope, which makes them have to look fear right in the face. Having the security of the rope, however, ensures failure.
One surprising plot element of this third film, which is a kind of return to an element of the first film, yet in the form of its dialectical opposite, is Alfred’s commitment to helping Bruce, through thick or thin. In Batman Begins, Alfred twice says he’ll “never” give up on Bruce. Yet in The Dark Knight Rises, in the hopes of getting Bruce to give up on trying to revive Batman and to save his life from almost assuredly being killed by Bane, Alfred does give up on Bruce! He quits!
This giving up, this quitting, is related to despair, another major theme of this third film, related to the hell motif described above (recall how Bruce, having been taken to the Middle East prison, that underground hell, wishes in his despair that Bane would kill him). The wish to destroy Gotham, as opposed to the wish to reform the city and purge it of its mafia element, is also related to despair. No inkling of an intent to rebuild Gotham along, say, socialist lines is even to be considered, of course. It is either to be a reformed capitalism, or it must be “ashes.”
Note how Gotham as a symbol of capitalism is expanded to one of American patriotism with the little boy singing The Star-Spangled Banner. The football fans, deeply moved by his “lovely, lovely voice” (which even Bane acknowledges as such), give the boy enthusiastic applause. Shortly afterwards, Bane blows up most of the football field; since his revolution is, as I described above, akin to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, these detonations are symbolic of an anti-imperialist act, tearing American hegemony and hubris down to size.
The entirety of the Gotham police are, around the time of these detonations, trapped in the underground hell of the city. When Batman frees them, they can do battle with Bane’s army, who, far better armed, threaten the cops with violence if they don’t back off…in a manner we expect of riot police. Such an understanding exposes this presentation of belligerents as a form of projection: those cops were trapped in an underground hell because they are like John Milton‘s fallen angels turned demons. Still, we sympathize with them, not those who threaten them on the street the same way riot police would threaten protestors.
If we are to think of the Gotham kangaroo courts as being unfairly denigrated as such due to the trilogy’s biased bourgeois ideology…that is, if we should really condone the people’s condemnation of the rich, and those who work for the rich, like Philip Stryver (played by Burn Gorman), for “living off the blood and sweat of people less powerful,” then does this suddenly make Dr. Crane, the judge of these courts, a good man, in my estimation? No…as a psychopath no less corrupt than the other bad ones of Gotham, Crane is a mere opportunist in the new order, taking advantage of the vicissitudes of the time, and avoiding punishment with all the other guilty Gothamites. Having him as judge, though, for the purposes of the film’s bourgeois agenda, only reinforces the notion of the cruelty of these courts.
As far as the chanting, in 5/4 time, of “Deshi Basara” (“Rise!”) is concerned, the sympathetic, galvanizing character of the music, first heard when we see Bane’s men take over and crash the plane with the CIA men in Uzbekistan, is a case of a Freudian slip in this otherwise bourgeois film. The cruelties of the CIA over the years are so many that one should find it hard to sympathize with their agents, so seeing Bane bash the face in of one of them, while “Deshi Basara” is playing, should be quite gratifying to watch.
Conclusion
Nolan flatly denies that there’s any political message in his Batman trilogy, but the political elements, regardless of whether you assess them my way, the opposite way, or any other way, are so obvious that they scream out at you. The only way Nolan’s denials could have any honesty in them (apart from being a deflection of leftist criticisms, he presumably just wants to prevent any limits to the films’ interpretations) is that neoliberalism as an ideology has so smothered all of political and cultural life over the past several decades that many of us simply haven’t noticed it as such. (Of course, to be fair to Nolan, capitalism as a standard economic way of doing things was already so entrenched in the comic and previous TV shows, cartoons, and movies, that Nolan had only this to work with in his adaptation.)
The bourgeois liberal way of doing things is so ‘standard,’ such a default position, that the average moviegoer sees the resolution of the trilogy as satisfying. Though Bruce most charitably has given Wayne Manor to the orphans and given his estate to Alfred, he must still have plenty of money for himself (the fraudulent circumstances of his bankruptcy having been exposed), for how else could he and Selina have gone to Florence, where they see Alfred at a restaurant? Since Blake has found the Batcave (with the help of a package from Bruce), he is obviously to be the next Batman, anticipating future crime in Gotham, crime of a magnitude requiring another superhero crimefighter…or, as I would call him, another glorified, militarized cop.
All of these things mean that the class structure of Gotham City has remained intact, with a few rich at the top and a multitude of poor people at the bottom. New mafia will rise up to replace Falcone and Maroni; they will exploit the poor, driving them to desperation and more crime. Blake with have to deal with this problem, as well as any new ‘supervillains’ bent on destroying Gotham, since such a capitalist city needs to be destroyed. The trilogy ends with these contradictions only seeming to be resolved, to a ‘reasonable’ extent, at least.
Getting rid of a few billionaires (Bruce and, I assume, some of the exiled Gothamites who fell through the ice and drowned), while providing Bruce’s home to some orphans, may seem to liberals to be a generous sacrifice, but such concessions are far from enough to solve the problems of extreme class conflict. Furthermore, portraying the revolutionary but real solutions to these problems as cruel and extremist only further ensures that no real solution will even be tried, because such a solution will be deemed unthinkable.
There may be sunny skies at the end of the third movie, but a dark night will rise on Gotham again, and soon, a night that may never end in a dawn, as many of us fear the 2020s are such a night.
Orca: The Killer Whale is a 1977 film directed by Michael Anderson and produced by Dino de Laurentis. It stars Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and Will Sampson (whom you may recall as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). The film costars Bo Derek, Keenan Wynn (who had a small part in Dr. Strangelove), and Robert Carradine (who would later play Lewis Skolnick, the geek with the grating laugh, in the Revenge of the Nerds franchise).
Orca was a modest box office success, but it got mostly bad reviews from the critics who, as with audiences, felt it was too imitative of Jaws, which came out two years earlier. Certainly, de Laurentis wanted to capitalize on the success of Jaws, having called writer/producer Luciano Vincenzoni to tell him to “find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white.”
Yet, as with Richard Harris, I must say that the claim that Orca merely imitates Jaws is unfair. Any similarities between the two films are only superficial. The differences between the two are far more apparent, if you’ve been paying attention while watching.
Jaws is essentially horror, while Orca is more of an adventure film. The shark is terrorizing people on a beach because it relentlessly wants to eat, but the orca wants revenge on the man who killed its mate and unborn calf. This second point leads us to the most important difference between the two films: while the shark in Jaws is a terrifying man-eating machine, the male orca is sympathetic.
In many ways, Orca is a kind of Moby-Dick in reverse, with a killer whale monomaniacally seeking revenge on the captain of a ship. Since orcas are monogamous and remarkably intelligent, the film could even be seen as a love story, with the male orca seeking his revenge out of love for his killed mate. All of these things make Orca much more than a mere ripoff of Jaws, and frankly, I’m surprised that moviegoers and critics at the time of the film’s release paid so little attention to these differences.
I’m not saying that Orca is an unsung masterpiece–it’s far from that; but it has deserved far better than to be so glibly dismissed as a lackluster copy of Jaws.
Why I decided to do an analysis of the film is because of the recent spate of news stories about orcas attacking yachts. Some of us on the left have joked, through the sharing of memes on Facebook, about orcas leading a kind of proletarian revolution against the ruling class!
Now, some reporters have claimed that the orcas ramming into yachts are just playing: I find this interpretation to be rather dubious, given the advanced intelligence of the animals, and the fact that I suspect that the ruling class, which owns the media, want to reassure themselves that there’s nothing to worry about. Other reporters have attributed the orcas’ attacks to some form of trauma. I suspect such an interpretation to be closer to the truth when we consider the awful pollution in the oceans and the hunting and killing of various marine animals like sharks.
Now, the intelligence of orcas is, as amazing as this might sound, comparable to that of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old humans! Their way of communicating seems almost to be a kind of language! When we accept these remarkable facts about orcas, we shouldn’t find it all that far outside the realm of possibility that their attacks on yachts could be a deliberate act of retaliation against the very wealthiest of people who enjoy the benefits of human domination and plunder of the oceans.
Orcas have the ability to communicate what they’ve learned (i.e., hunting skills) and pass it down from generation to generation. Though my speculation is far from proven, it isn’t inconceivable that they could have somehow linked fishermen’s boats, those who hunt and kill marine life, with those particularly beautiful yachts owned by the richest of us humans, and communicated this insight, or at least an inkling of this insight, to their young ones over time. “The ones in the yachts are the fish-killers’ leaders–attack them.”
Who knows? It’s an interesting thought to entertain, in any case.
As far as these ideas can be connected with the film, we learn that Nolan (Harris), Irish captain of his boat, the Bumpo, is in the waters around Newfoundland first hunting sharks, then orcas, to make enough money so he can go back to Ireland. As the captain of his crew, he’s the boss; as a killer of marine animals for money, he’s a petite bourgeois capitalist exploiting the sea for his personal gain, and his violence against the male orca’s mate and unborn calf thus drives the male to seek revenge by attacking Nolan’s boat in a manner comparable to the recent orca attacks on the yachts.
Here is a link to quotes from Orca, and here’s a link to the full movie, minus the opening and closing credits.
The film begins with the beautiful sight of two orcas–presumably the male and his pregnant mate–swimming about in the ocean, and on two occasions, we see them jumping up out of the water in graceful arcs with the setting (or rising?) sun in the background. The soft music we hear gives off an almost romantic atmosphere, of the monogamous pair as being deeply in love. This is far removed from the tense atmosphere of a young woman skinny dipping and being attacked and killed by a great white shark.
In the next scene, cetologist Rachel Bedford (Rampling) has tapes recording orcas’ communicating onshore while she is scuba diving and checking the recording equipment in the water. A great white shark appears, making Rachel try to hide from it. Nolan and his crew hope to catch the shark, while Ken (Carradine), a marine biologist and colleague of hers, is in a boat helping her record the whalesong.
The shark attacks Ken, but an orca intervenes just in time, smashing into the shark and killing it, saving Ken’s life (Is this our male orca protagonist?). Rachel, now on Nolan’s ship, points out that only an orca is powerful enough to kill a shark like that. The audience, apparently, is now supposed to think, Wow, move over, Jaws. Orcas are way more badass than great white sharks.
Still, this scene, with its brief tension, is nothing like any of the shark attacks in Jaws, with the E-F ostinato in the double-basses and bassoons to prepare us for the terror. The orca, as of this moment in the movie, isn’t the antagonist, as the shark in Jaws is: he’s a friend to man; and though he will want revenge on Nolan, since we have sympathy for the killer whale, it’s rather that Nolan is the antagonist, however remorseful he is over killing the orca’s mate and unborn calf.
In the next scene, Rachel does a lecture on the orca for a class of university students, with Ken operating slides. We learn of the orca’s power, speed, capacity for friendliness or vengeance–depending on how we treat it–but especially of its remarkable intelligence.
Rachel learns that Nolan has been attending her lectures; his learning about the orca is not for his personal enlightenment, of course–he wants to catch one and get a lot of money for it. She tries to warn him not to try, but of course, her words fall on deaf ears.
We note by this point in the film that Rachel is also the narrator of this story; her narration will have more significance in this reverse Moby-Dick in that, at the end of the film and with the outcome of the confrontation between Nolan and his crew on the one side, and the vengeful orca on the other, that she will be the only survivor left to tell the tale. Her expert knowledge of orcas parallels Ishmael‘s knowledge of whales. Call her Rachel.
Nolan’s wish to catch an orca for money is, of course, pure exploitation, the pain of which is especially keenly felt when we consider how the orca’s intelligence, ability to communicate, monogamy, and existence as a mammal makes it comparable to human beings, and therefore it’s an animal we should be able to empathize with. Still, Nolan smirks in contempt at the idea.
Notice that in this conversation between Rachel and Nolan, the fear isn’t of the marine animal killing people, as in Jaws, but vice versa. She knows he won’t succeed in catching a killer whale, but he might harm one or two in the attempt…which, of course, he soon will.
The next scene shows a group of orcas swimming about together. Soft music is playing in the background, reinforcing our sense of appreciation for the animals, since they look so peaceful together. It should arouse our empathy for them…more of a strong contrast with the fear and antagonism felt for the great white shark of Spielberg’s film.
As Nolan’s ship is sailing out to catch an orca, Annie (Derek) tells him that these animals are monogamous, and so catching and taking one away will separate it from its mate and family, a terrible thing to do. He, of course, has no interest in contemplating the consequences of his actions.
We see that group of killer whales again, and so does Novak (Wynn), who calls out to Nolan and the rest of the crew to get ready. All of this sympathy for the orcas has now built up to the point where, when Nolan attacks them, we really know that they are anything but the film’s antagonists, as the shark in Jaws is. These two films are clearly quite different from each other.
Nolan shoots a harpoon at the orcas, nicking the back of the upper fin of the male orca we’ll be seeing for the rest of the film. We’ll now be able to identify him by that injury, which is symbolic of the greater pain caused by Nolan that will drive the orca’s lust for revenge.
That greater pain comes when we see Nolan’s harpoon hit the orca’s pregnant mate. We hear her squeals of pain: even Nolan is disturbed by the expressiveness of her squeals. He notes that she sounds almost human.
The wounded female comes toward the ship, and Annie notes that the female, swimming into the ship’s propeller, is trying to kill herself. Her blood is mixing all over with the water. This, properly understood, is the true moment of horror in the film…though one must have sympathy for animals to understand.
Nolan tells Novak, “help me get this crazy fish onboard.” I’m reminded of when Ishmael insists that sperm whales like Moby Dick are fish, in spite of their status as mammals, like the orca.
More horror comes when, once the mother orca is taken onboard and raised up, she miscarries, and her unborn calf comes out. Nolan himself is disturbed by the sight, being reminded of a time when his pregnant wife was killed with their unborn child in a car accident involving a drunk driver.
As all of these horrors are happening, the male orca, of course, has been watching. He and his family are the victims of human rapaciousness motivated by the urge to make money, not humans victimized by a marine predator. The scene in Jaws, when the boy on the beach is eaten by the shark, we see the famous dolly zoom on Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider) watching the killing in shock, and the boy’s mother searching for him and finding only his blood and mangled inflatable swimming float–this is the opposite of what we’ve just seen in Orca. This film is not imitating Jaws.
The male orca roars in grief at the sight of the calf falling from its mother onto the floor of the ship’s deck. This is too painful for Nolan to see, too, so he gets a hose and sprays the calf so it will fall off the ship and into the water. On the one hand, he’s sensitive enough to be horrified at the sight of the consequences of what he’s done, but he isn’t sensitive enough to dispose of the calf in a respectful way.
This is what happens when man treats animals with no respect. In what is now the US, when the Native Americans killed any bison, they were grateful to it for what it provided them with, wasting none of its body. In contrast, the white man recklessly killed almost all the bison before finally coming to his senses in the late 19th century. By the time Nolan realizes what he’s done, the male orca is already eyeing him with thoughts of revenge.
This callous killing of animals for commodities or for sport is the kind of thing that enrages animal rights activists, of course; but with our male orca here, wailing for vengeance against Nolan and having an intelligence comparable to that of humans, we can see this film as allegorical of the struggle of animal rights activists against capitalists like Nolan, however petite bourgeois they might be, who hunt and kill for money. With this allegory, we can see a connection between Orca and the recent killer whale attacks on yachts.
(And as a side note, it is interesting to see in this connection how Jaws, with a marine animal that is feared and must be killed, is the successful movie; but Orca, with a sympathetic marine animal that has been wronged by man, is the failed movie.)
As the Bumpo is sailing back to shore in the evening, the orca has been following it. He rams into the ship, causing Annie to fall, injure her leg, and need a cast. The orca continues attacking the ship, and Nolan gets a rifle, meaning to shoot it. Realizing the female is still alive (though only barely so), the crew decides to drop her and release her back into the sea.
Novak, up at the ship’s boom, cuts the female loose; but the male comes up out of the water, grabs Novak with his teeth, and drags the man off the ship and into the sea, killing him. The male orca and Nolan exchange antagonistic looks. The next morning, the male pushes the now-dead female ashore. Other orcas are with him. Sympathetic music reminds us of who the film’s hero is.
Nolan goes over to the shore where the female orca has been left. He’s feeling more and more remorseful over what he’s done. Though he’s a petite bourgeois capitalist killing marine animals for money, he has a sensitive side, just as many capitalists do, they who may try to make work more comfortable for their employees; but it isn’t their personal attitude that is or isn’t the problem–it’s the social relations of production that are the problem. So Nolan can have a heart and still be the principal wrongdoer of the film, because his wrongdoing stems from his livelihood.
Rachel, who is also at the shore by the dead orca, realizes that, since Nolan left his ship nearby, where the male pushed his dead mate, that the male followed him. A local aboriginal man named Jacob Umilak (Sampson) appears and agrees with Rachel. He tells Nolan of his people’s experiences with orcas, of the error of trying to kill them, and of how the orca will “always remember the human being who had tried to harm them.”
Nolan may be remorseful, but he still doesn’t want to face the consequences of his actions. Umilak advises him to stay away from this whole fishing area. Rachel insists that the male orca has seen him…and remembers him.
In his growing guilt, Nolan visits the local church, where after asking the reverend if it’s possible to sin against an animal, he’s told that one can sin against a blade of grass. The reverend’s answer is poignant, given how man has been sinning against the whole Earth, especially over the past four decades since the release of this film, all for the sake of maximizing profits and maintaining imperial power.
A particularly important point is made when the reverend says that one sins against oneself. Nolan’s killing of the orca’s mate and unborn calf, while reminding him of the drunk driver’s killing of his pregnant wife and unborn baby, is also the beginning of the chain of events that will lead to the death of his whole crew, the mutilation of Annie, the death of Umilak, and Nolan’s own death at the end of the film. And since Nolan is a petite bourgeois capitalist, his self-destruction from his misdeeds is also symbolic of how the capitalist will destroy himself in the end, the contradictions of his mode of production ultimately causing it to fall to pieces, through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
After church, Nolan and crewman Paul (played by Peter Hooten) are walking along the pier, where they meet Al Swain (played by Scott Walker), a member of the fisherman’s union. Al is very unhappy about the presence of ‘Nolan’s’ orca haunting the local waters, scaring away the fish and jeopardizing the livelihoods of the fishermen there.
In this discussion, we hear again, in allegorical form, the contradictions between the capitalist and the unionized working class. Nolan’s initial pursuit of a killer whale for money, though he regrets it now, has still caused difficulties for the money-making of Al and his fellow fishermen. All the same, Nolan is reluctant to do anything about it.
Right after Al’s discussion with Nolan, we see, in the nearby water, the orca fin with the nick in the back. It’s a tense moment, with tense music, but it only superficially reminds us of Jaws. The orca doesn’t go after and eat anybody: it rams into another moored boat, causing it to sink. Nolan’s misadventure is, however indirectly, harming the fisherman all the more.
That night, fishermen bring a killed orca ashore, in the vain hope that they’ve killed the right one. Rachel drives up there, finds Nolan drinking a beer, and gives him a book about “whales and dolphins in science and mythology,” thus linking her more with Ishmael. (A passage in the book that Nolan reads aloud even makes a reference to Herman Melville.) She is trying to cure Nolan of his ignorance of orcas.
Al reappears to tell Nolan that they’ve fixed his boat, the Bumpo. It’s been repaired so Nolan can hurry up, sail out, and kill the orca, which he of course is still unwilling to do. Al knows the orca is still around, recognizable by the nick in his fin, so he hasn’t finished tormenting the village in his quest for revenge. The symbolic contradiction between petite bourgeois Nolan and proletarian Al continues.
Later that night, Nolan is walking alone by the water. He senses the presence of the orca out there in the dark; the orca brings his head up above the surface to confront Nolan, letting out a ‘screw you’ squeal. Again, the two exchange hostile looks. Nolan thinks of the unborn calf falling out of the mother’s body, immediately linking the memory with that of the car crash that killed his wife and unborn child. He can’t kill the orca because he knows he’s in the role of the drunk driver in this situation.
Al gathers up all the fishermen to tell them that no marine organization, nobody, and especially not Nolan, is going to help them, so they’ll have to kill the orca themselves. Workers have never been able to rely on the bourgeois or their organizations to help them; they have to help themselves. Umilak is at Nolan’s home, to tell him that the fishermen all think Nolan is a coward for not confronting the orca, though Umilak believes Nolan is sincere when he says he has special, personal reasons for not wanting to kill the orca.
That night, having set up a kind of scarecrow on the pier to attract the orca, Nolan is thinking of shooting the animal; but having also read in Rachel’s book a confirmation that orcas can communicate, he wishes he could tell the orca that the killing of his mate and calf was an accident, and that he is sorry. He’s full of conflict.
The orca, however, is still single-minded in his wish for revenge. He rams into some pipes and knocks over a lantern, causing a huge fire in the area. Then he attacks Nolan’s house on the side of the water, causing much of it to fall into the water. Annie, still in a cast, is staying in his house, and she falls with the sinking house, her legs dangling in the water. The orca surfaces and bites her injured leg off.
This mutilation, reminding us of how Captain Ahab lost his leg to the white whale and drove him to his monomaniacal lust for revenge, now puts Nolan into a similar rage, calling the whale a “revengeful sonofabitch.” He finally has his motivation to sail the Bumpo out to sea and give the orca the fight he’s been provoking Nolan into.
In a phone conversation Nolan has with Rachel that night, just before the attack on his house, she tells him that, whatever the whale wants, if he’s anything like a human being, what he wants “isn’t necessarily what he should have.” In other words, the orca’s desire for revenge is as mad as Ahab’s is against Moby Dick. I’d have to disagree: losing one’s mate and unborn offspring to a whale hunter seeking money is a lot worse than a whale hunter seeking money losing his leg to the whale he tried to kill.
Rachel’s implying of moral equivalency between Nolan and the orca, between Nolan’s wrongs against the orca vs the orca’s wrongs against him and his crew, is typical of Hollywood liberalism. While Annie, having clearly shown empathy towards the suffering of the orca and his slain family, didn’t deserve to have her leg bitten off, she, as one of Nolan’s crew, still was involved in the orca hunt that led to all of this suffering. Nolan can’t expect to get away with what he’s done unscathed…be the scathing that of his own person or of someone associated with him.
Since I see the orca as representative of the proletariat fighting back against the bourgeoisie–be they the super-wealthy in their yachts, or petite bourgeois like Captain Nolan–their wrath and the destruction it causes is justified, even when it gets messy and spills over into areas outside the immediate perpetrators of the original outrages. It’s virtually impossible to mete out punishments in exact proportion to the extent of the original crime. Life is not so clear-cut when it comes to karma.
Though Nolan, Paul, Umilak, Ken, and Rachel go out in the Bumpo to confront the orca, the captain still has mixed feelings about killing the animal. His remorse over what he’s done to the orca’s family still tempers his rage against the orca’s destruction of his home and maiming of Annie. So he hasn’t the single-minded vindictiveness of Ahab or the orca; and while in Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Matt Hooper, sailing on the Orca [!], are determined to kill the shark, Nolan is still not so sure of his purpose: kill the orca, or let the animal kill him?
Again I must say: Jaws and Orca are quite different from each other.
With Umilak, an aboriginal, among the crew on their quest to get the orca, we see another, if slight, parallel with the multicultural crew of the Pequod–recall Tashtego, the Native American on Ahab’s ship.
Nolan has the ship sail to the exact same place where he maimed the orca’s mate, but the orca makes the crew follow him north to an area with icebergs. One is reminded of the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his monster up in the Arctic. Indeed, in wronging the orca, Nolan has created a monster of his own, which he too must confront in the icy cold.
Leading up to this final confrontation, Ken, leaning over to the side of the ship, is grabbed by the orca’s jaws, pulled over into the water, and killed. When the crew reaches the icy area, Paul, having gotten into a lifeboat, is knocked out of it by the orca, and he drowns. Umilak, having sent out an SOS so a helicopter can come and rescue any survivors, is crushed in an avalanche of ice.
Nolan manages to hit the orca with his harpoon, but the orca outsmarts him, having sunk the ship and isolated him on a large piece of floating ice. The orca tips the ice, making Nolan fall into the water. Delighting in the final achievement of his revenge, the orca swims a perimeter around Nolan, who is struggling to keep his head above water. Rachel can only helplessly watch from another iceberg.
The whale uses its tail to throw Nolan in the air, making him smack into an iceberg and killing him. Note how he not only doesn’t kill the orca, the way Brody kills the shark, nor does Nolan explode, as the shark does. We aren’t exultant over the death; we’re saddened by it, as we are by Ahab’s tragic self-destruction.
A helicopter soon arrives to rescue Rachel…and she only is escaped alone to tell thee.
Seriously, though Orca is no Moby-Dick–the film has no grand theme, and its black-and-white whale doesn’t symbolize something as awe-inspiring as the white whale does–Orca isn’t a poor man’s Jaws, either. To get poor Jaws imitations, check out the awful Jaws sequels, instead.
Meanwhile, the recent orca attacks on yachts should revive an interest in this film…and, I hope, a reevaluation of it.
ORCAS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
I’m not leaving a link for my original article, Fascism Has Two Wings, because frankly, I’d rather you didn’t read it. I wrote it during my early anarchist phase, lo those many years ago, and it’s really naïve politically. The only reason I won’t delete it, like all my early political posts (most if not all of which are badly written, except for the Shakespeare analyses and synopses), is because occasionally I like to look back at them and see how my thinking has changed and grown over the years. But my looking at them still makes me blush that other readers are ever looking at them.
Anyway, my idea for that article was to argue that, essentially, fascism has both a right wing and a left wing, though I presented the idea most clumsily, saying that some on the left may start there, then when in power, shift over to the right. This idea may be vaguely true of some liberals in, say, the Democratic Party (but were they ever truly left?), or of Nazbols and Strasserists, as well as some in the SA, who were later purged from the NSDAP when Hitler, having come to power, moved the party unequivocally to the far right, to please his new big business backers (and even the idea of ‘left-wing Nazis’ stinks of the libertarian agenda).
Well, now that I’ve transitioned fully from anarchism to Marxism-Leninism, I can see not only the wobbly aspects of those early arguments, but also the worst idea that I put forth in the article: namely, that the Bolshevik shift to authoritarian thinking was a move to the right. I now cringe whenever I read that misinterpretation of what happened back in the early 1920s. There, now you know all that you need to know of what I wrote in the original article, and you can spare yourself the pain of reading those oh, so poorly-conceived ideas!
Let us now move on to my more refined way of thinking about both left-wing and right-wing fascism. Now that I have a dialectical grasp on things, I can explain what I mean by ‘left-wing fascism.’ I speak in contrast to Marxist-Leninists when I call out the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultra-leftists.
Now, it’s not necessarily that they are fascistic in nature. They are generally sincere in their wish to make progressive change in the world, to establish socialism. The problem is their naïve utopianism, their wish to have pretty much everything all at once or as soon as they imagine is possible; and the danger of pushing for too much, too soon is that–taking dialectics into account–it can backfire and result in a swing to the far-right.
I’ve discussed in other posts my conception of the ouroboros as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between opposites. The serpent’s biting head and its bitten tail represent the meeting of extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which is symbolized by the serpent’s coiled body, along which every intermediary point of the continuum has its corresponding spot on the snake’s body. I feel that the image of the ouroboros makes it easier to conceive how the excessive, impatient demands of the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultras–their far-too-left leanings–slip over to the serpent’s bitten tail, then slide over to the biting teeth of fascism, even though this may not be the ultras’ conscious intention.
Lenin had to deal with the impracticality of the ultras, and he wrote of the problem in his “Left-wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. They were unwilling to make necessary compromises, such as cooperating with parliamentary or reformist socialists. They were overly preoccupied with doctrinal ‘purity.’ These people were stirring up needless trouble at a time when the new socialist state was in dire need of stability, in the middle of the Russian Civil War. This kind of petty squabbling was the last thing Lenin needed as the invaders were trying to re-establish capitalism.
While Trotsky was useful at the time leading the Red Army against the invading White Army, after Lenin’s death, the power struggle between him and Stalin over who would succeed Lenin was, for Trotsky, less about what was right for the USSR than about his wish to lead the country and have power. In his book, The Revolution Betrayed, he went on and on about the perceived faults of the Soviet Union under Stalin, with the sole solution offered of overthrowing his rival for power, rather than simply suggesting ways to remedy those faults. After his exile, he was even willing to cut a deal with the Nazis and Imperial Japan if they’d help him oust Stalin! This sort of thing is what I mean when I talk about a fascist ‘left wing.’
To paraphrase something Michael Parenti once said, these anti-communist leftists love any kind of revolution except a successful one. After that, they only want to find fault with the new socialist system. Now, constructive criticism of the new system is a perfectly worthy thing to engage in, since it aims to make the system better; but the ultras’ fault-finding is generally meant to tear down the system for not being perfect enough.
These people will carp at you for ‘not being left-wing enough,’ for not being ‘politically correct’ enough. This sort of bickering only causes resentment and increases alienation; it can even make some want to give up on the left and switch to the right. The CIA appreciates this kind of bickering–it’s a kind of left-wing fascism.
We can often tell the difference between, on the one side, Marxist-Leninists, and on the other, the ultras, with the issue of the war between Russia and Ukraine. This is a very sensitive issue, since I don’t like war at all, yet the Russian people must be defended against an enemy that isn’t made up solely of Ukrainians, but also their US/NATO backers.
Many on the left, addled by the dubious reporting of the liberal mainstream media, think that the Russian invasion of late February 2022 was “unprovoked,” and that Putin is the bad guy behind the war. Now, to be sure, Putin is far from being my political ideal: he’s a bourgeois, reactionary politician; his stance on LGBT issues is far too conservative for my tastes. Still, we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, and he’s the one who, with Xi Jinping, is leading the resistance to US/NATO world hegemony.
This left opposition to Putin is another example of the impracticality of the ultras. They want to oppose all bourgeois states at the same time, treating them all as equally oppressive, rather than considering the reality of primary vs secondary contradictions. No, the Russian Federation isn’t the Soviet Union, regrettably; but Russian communists have pushed Putin to do something about the ethnic cleansing of Russians in Ukraine for the eight years between the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 and the Russian intervention in 2022.
The ultras tend to want everything all at once, instead of being pragmatic and realizing that achieving our goals must be done in stages. The first priority is to deal with the primary contradiction I mentioned above, to wipe out US/NATO hegemony, which has had its boot on the head of the rest of the world especially for the past thirty years. Once that wiping out has been achieved, then we can think about such problems as reinstating a socialist government in Russia, dealing with income inequality in China, etc.
Rainer Shea recently wrote an article in support of the Russian operation in Ukraine; I shared it on Facebook, and I got a snarky comment from a “leftist” who’s all preoccupied with Russian “imperialism,” yet apparently oblivious to US/NATO imperialism. Here’s a quote of her comment:
‘Ukraine has a Nazi problem like the United States has a Nazi problem like Russia has a Nazi problem.
‘I don’t wish death on all of them because a small percentage of them are Nazis.
‘Putin is a fascist imperialist. I hope both the Russian and Ukrainian working classes come together and overthrow BOTH of their corrupt countries.
‘It isn’t very “Leftist” to support imperialism either.’
Note how the first two lines of her comment trivialize the Nazi problem in Ukraine by implying it is a mundane problem of fringe minorities in countries around the world. While it is, of course, true that militaries in all countries attract at least a few fascist sympathizers (I saw a few when I was a reservist in the Canadian army in the early 1990s), such a smug generalization blinds one to the well-documented history of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers that goes back even before WWII and Stepan Bandera. (The mainstream media even used to acknowledge the truth of this sort of thing.)
These people, though a minority of Ukrainians, nonetheless have great influence over the Ukrainian government and military. The Banderites back in WWII helped Nazi Germany kill thousands of Jews and Poles, and today’s Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers, euphemistically called ‘nationalists,’ revere Bandera; they also like to tie Russian collaborators to lampposts. In their eight-year ethnic cleansing of Russians, about fourteen thousand people have died. No, Ukraine’s Nazi problem is far worse than that of most other countries; similarly, the American Nazi problem that my commenter mentions so briefly in passing has also been far worse, as seen in such issues as its helping of Ukrainian Nazis (link above), Operation Paperclip. and the employment of ex-Nazis in West Germany, NASA, and NATO after WWII.
To get to the second line of her comment, I see the most heinous straw man. I have never expressed a wish of death on all Ukrainians, nor did Shea in his article, regardless of whether the Nazi sympathizers in that country make up a small percentage or a somewhat larger percentage (something I highly suspect). Actually, whenever we hear the Western slogan “…to the last Ukrainian,” we can get a good idea as to who would actually like to see all the Ukrainians die. Since she has more sympathy for the West’s side in this conflict than for the Russian side, I suspect a little projection in her attitude about how wrong it is to want all Ukrainians killed.
Next, we have the ridiculous “Putler” argument in the third line. As I said above, Putin is not my political hero. I won’t put up Russian flags or pictures of him on my social media profiles, as a number of my Facebook friends have done. Still, while as I said, I don’t approve of his conservative stance on LGBT issues, calling him a ‘fascist’ on the basis of that is a bit much (fascists have treated LGBT people far worse than his laws have, and there’s much more to being a fascist than discriminating against that community), and to call him an imperialist, while making no mention at all of the Anglo-American/NATO globe-spanning empire, with US military bases all over the world, is an obscene misuse of the word.
While the Russian oligarchs probably do have some ulterior motives for waging this war (ulterior motives whose significance must be qualified with an understanding that Putin tried everything to secure peace, through the Minsk Accords with people who were hardly cooperative in the negotiations), any ‘Russian imperialism’ is minuscule compared to that of the US and NATO, who have had threatening troops along the Russian border for years, and while the US military has been occupying a third of Syria (stealing their oil and wheat), and surrounding China with military bases and navy in the South China Sea..
Indeed, with the reunification of Germany came a promise from the West that NATO, never a friend to Russia, wouldn’t move an inch to the East. Now, several former SSRs are NATO members, and they’re working on getting Sweden and Finland (the latter of which shares a long border with Russia!) to join. This Western imperialist aggression against Russia is the context needed to understand the Russian intervention in Ukraine.
Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US imperialists have worked in the hopes of never allowing any other country to grow in power and thus be a threat to American global hegemony. This is why the PNAC was founded.
The Western imperialists are fond of using the word “dictator” to describe the head of state of any country that challenges or defies the US and the “rules-based international order.” Calling Putin, who has clearly been one of these challengers and defiers, a “fascist imperialist” is just another way of saying “dictator,” which is used as a rationalization to bully a defiant country into submission to US imperialism.
Such a bullying into submission has been done to Russia before, back in the 1990s, with the forcing of “free market” capitalism on a Russian people who, contrary to popular belief, mostly wanted to keep the Soviet system. The Western imposition of capitalism on Russia all but destroyed their economy; attempts to bring back socialism were frustrated by the West’s puppet, Yeltsin. Putin’s real crime was making Russia strong again. People like the woman who commented on my Rainer Shea post clearly either haven’t studied the history, or are lying.
Let’s examine this ‘Russian fascism’ claim a bit more closely. Apart from what I said above, on the one hand, about there always being at least a small percentage of fascist sympathizers in the armies of any country in the world, including Russia, and how, on the other hand, accusing Russians of fascism is a slap in the face to the roughly 27 million Russians who died fighting Nazis (with whom Ukraine collaborated, remember) in WWII, I must react to a video an anarchist Facebook friend of mine once shared, a man who hates Putin with similar virulence; this video (one of many, I’m sure, that exist in the mainstream liberal media) dismisses, without any contrary evidence to justify the dismissal, the significance of Ukrainian Nazis while propagandizing about Russian fascist organizations, tempting me to do a similar dismissal.
How can I confidently dismiss this video’s claim of a hornet’s nest, if you will, of Russian fascist organizations as, in all likelihood, a wildly exaggerated misrepresentation of a few fringe groups, for the purpose of vilifying Putin and manufacturing consent for an increasingly dangerous confrontation? For starters, consider Russia’s 2014 Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism, something the neoliberal, Russophobic Western media would naturally try to invalidate. If the Russian government wants to criminalize any historic denial of Nazi atrocities, they’ll probably want to criminalize Nazism in general, I imagine, thus making the fascist groups in the video far more marginal that it suggests.
Yet even if this speculation of mine proves to be untrue, something else must be considered, something that should make you take this anti-Russian video with a generous dose of salt. While we’re always hearing about how we shouldn’t let ourselves be duped by “Russian propaganda,” so many of us naïvely assume that the news we receive on CNN, the CBC, the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, etc., is all objective reporting, ‘the straight facts.’ Funny how it’s always only other countries that propagandize, but never our own!
The fact is, a crucial part of Western empire management is control over media narratives, because the only way the masses in the West would ever go along with war after war these past twenty to thirty years is to keep us all believing that we are ‘the good guys,’ that Putin, Xi Jinping, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milosevic, etc., are and were ‘the bad guys,’ and therefore all of our wars against them were, are, and will be justified and necessary.
The fact that we realized the media lied to us about Saddam’s “WMDs,” and therefore the Iraq invasion was a cruel, unjustified act of US imperialism should have been enough to give us pause about any subsequent American accusations of ‘cruel dictators’ and insistence on the ‘need’ for regime change. We should have demanded proof instead of propaganda; skepticism about the real motives of the US government should have been our default position.
Instead, over the 2010s and 2020s, most of us have become all the more gullible, uncritically believing lie after lie about Gaddafi, Assad, and now Putin and Xi Jinping. None of this propaganda has made the world safer: in fact, we’re now in a new Cold War that has needlessly brought us to the brink of a very possibly nuclear WWIII.
It shouldn’t be surprising to find all of this media mendacity, especially over the past thirty to forty years. Beyond Operation Mockingbird (which could still be going on), first there was the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987, meaning the news no longer had to present all sides of a controversial issue. Then, the Clinton administration enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing mergers and acquisitions in American media, which has led to 90% of American media being controlled by only six corporations; this means that the super-wealthy capitalist class controls most people’s access to information in the US! And in today’s late stage capitalism, this control is applied in an imperialist context–hence, the media vilification of anyone (Putin, Xi, Assad, Maduro, etc.) who dares defy the American empire.
Now, this media consolidation isn’t limited to the US. As the Swiss Policy Research website has noted, we can see a media consensus among other Western countries, including European ones. It makes sense, given these countries are NATO members, and therefore have the same agendas.
But the worst, most blatant example in recent years of Western media bias has been the decision, from the beginning of the Russian/Ukraine war, to blot out and censor all Russian media, so people in the West can gain no access to it. You can complain all you want about the pro-Putin bias in media sources like RT (the former Western reporters of which, incidentally, will tell you they were never told what and what not to report): a truly free media will allow all sides of a story to be told (recall the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine). The fact that Russia’s side of the story isn’t allowed to be told in the West is the essence of real propaganda.
People complain about how authoritarian Russia and China are…and of course they are, to quite an extent. But are the Western, NATO-allied countries really any less authoritarian, with so strictly-controlled a media that gets so much money and influence from right-wing billionaires? The way Covid was dealt with in the West can only be described as authoritarian. People running for the heads of state of these countries must be given bourgeois approval, hence “liberal democracy” is really just a euphemism for dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the worst kind of dictatorship is the one that fools people into thinking it isn’t one…and in a society where the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer, many in the West are being fooled.
My commenter’s next point was about her wish that the people of Ukraine and Russia would all rise up and overthrow their corrupt governments…dream on. We won’t solve the problems of the world by wishing for solutions; we’ll solve them through action. The idea of ordinary Ukrainians spontaneously rising up against their government, in the middle of a war zone, with their Nazi soldiers forcibly conscripting untrained men to fight and die, is beyond ludicrous. As for Russia, Putin’s approval rating has generally been high, so I’d say an uprising against him is unlikely, too.
Now, what has Putin been doing? Not only is he standing up to the real empire, the Western one, he’s also helping with the de-dollarization of the world, which will be a major move in putting that empire to an end. This will replace the current unipolar world with a multipolar one, which should in turn move us in the direction of world peace, with its balance of power. The multipolar world will be far from ideal, but it will put us in a position to make socialist agitation far more doable, with an at least greatly weakened American government far less likely to interfere.
But again, this kind of wishful thinking of hers is typical of a lot of the ultras, who want all social problems remedied at once instead of proper organizing and waiting for a revolutionary situation. But worse than all of this is how, in vilifying Putin while either ignoring or giving short shrift to what should be the obvious evils of US/NATO imperialism, these ultras are helping, either tacitly or actively, the fascist elements in Ukraine that are destabilizing the country and pushing us all closer to WWIII.
This support of US/NATO/Ukrainian aggression against Russia, forcing Putin to respond in kind, is what I mean by a left-wing form of fascism (it’s also what Shea was referring to in his article, though by social fascism, he was talking about left-of-centre social democracy, which Stalin called “objectively the moderate wing of fascism”), an idealistic insistence on pushing for so extreme a ‘pure’ form of leftism that it pushes us past the bitten tail of the ouroboros to its biting head, from extreme left to extreme right.
So I’ll say to my commenter that yes, she’s right to say it’s hardly leftist to support imperialism. She’s only wrong in where she attributes the actual imperialist aggression in the world. She is either egregiously ignorant of recent history, or she’s being most dishonest about it, rather like the mainstream Western media now.
Either way, her projection of guilt is remarkably shameless.
So anyway, when all is taken into account, mine is a moderate support of the Russian operation (hoping the horrible war will end as soon as possible), a support that far from idealizes Putin or his bourgeois government, and has no illusions about its hidden agendas. Nonetheless, the US/NATO imperialists are the far greater global threat, and we have no one else at the moment to repel them, so it looks as though it will have to be Putin’s government and military, as well as those of Xi Jinping, to lead the struggle against them. Once the Western empire is decisively defeated, then we can work on fixing the imperfections and genuine faults in Russia, China, and elsewhere, however great or small those faults may be.
Criticism of Russia and China are valid to a certain point, but it mustn’t be done to the point of brushing aside the far greater evils of the Western imperialists. To do so would be to aid those evils, however tacitly that aid might be given. And in a world in which fascism is coming back in style, it’s the far more blatant fascism that must first be fought…not helped by the ‘left’ anymore than by the right. .
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D.H. Lawrence, his last–published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France–before his death in 1930. An unexpurgated version of the novel wasn’t openly published in the UK until 1960, after the publisher, Penguin Books, won in an obscenity trial. The book was also banned for obscenity in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan.
The book controversially tells the story of a sexual relationship between an upper-class woman and a working-class man, using what were originally deemed sexually explicit scenes and then-unprintable four-letter words.
Though the uncensored version of the book has been accepted since the beginning of the 1960s (recall Philip Larkin‘s poem on the new permissiveness resulting from “the end of the Chatterley ban”), Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not considered one of Lawrence’s best works. It’s been said that, though the novel has a high purpose–decrying the problems of the coal-mining industry and the soulless, emasculated modern man (as exemplified in Clifford Chatterley)–it fails in its promoting of an appreciation of sensuality as a solution.
Many film, TV, radio, and theatre adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have been made, including a 2022 film released late that year in UK cinemas and on Netflix.
Three major rifts are dealt with in the novel: mind vs body, the upper vs lower classes, and industrialization vs nature. Lawrence felt that it was a modern tragedy that the mind and body are so alienated from each other, often involving an excessive pursuit of intellectual interests while ignoring sensuality. Impotent Clifford especially personifies this problem, but it also expresses itself in the “tentative love affairs” of sisters Hilda and Constance (Lawrence, page 3). Lawrence’s ideal was an integration of mind and body through sensuality (page 340)–hence, the book’s frank expression of sex through the use of “taboo words” (page 367).
Lawrence also contrasts the beauty and vitality of nature with the mechanistic monotony of modern, industrialized life, a theme dealt with in his other novels. This issue can and should be tied in with the theme of class conflict.
As for the rift between the upper and lower classes as depicted in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I wish to begin by saying that I have no illusions about Lawrence’s politics, which in all, seem to have been all over the place, as one looks over the course of his whole life. The novel itself is a paradox, having content to upset conservatives while also having a conservative, even stylistically Victorian, formality.
The only consistent idea I can find, from a cursory reading of Lawrence’s political philosophy, is an advocacy of individualism. Such writers as Terry Eagleton and Bertrand Russell found Lawrence to be reactionary, right-wing, and even proto-fascist in his thinking (during WWI). On the other hand, and I find this significant in relation to when he wrote and circulated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he wrote in 1924 that he believed “a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about, would be the best form of government.” Also, in the late 1920s, he told his sister he would vote Labour if he was living in England.
So, though he certainly despised Soviet-style socialism as much as he did fascism (in his “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” he denounces “the State” in general–pages 352-353), sympathy for a generalized kind of socialism wasn’t all that far away from his mind. He was, after all, the son of a miner. It might be reasonable to think that he, in his later years, had at least some partiality towards libertarian socialism, if the above references are truly representative of his political thinking towards the end of his life.
In any case, in his “A Propos,” he wrote of a better time in England’s history, of men and women living in harmony with nature, moving to the rhythms of the days and seasons (page 356); from which today’s industrialized world has been a sad decline. He recognizes modern alienation, and the class antagonisms that inevitably result from it (page 365); but in my opinion, he misdiagnosed the problem, claiming that, instead of the cause being capitalism, it is a lack of pagan “blood-warmth of oneness and togetherness.”
Addled by bourgeois biases that one born in a working-class family in the late 19th century surely wouldn’t have had, Lawrence imagines that “In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying, and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream.” (pages 365-366) I find it extraordinary how someone can reconcile the squires’ attitude with the people through “the same blood-stream.” Those denying the classist nature of the world’s problems always find some bizarre alternate cause: the Jews, the Freemasons, the NWO, “corporatism,” or in Lawrence’s case, a shifting away from pagan harmony with nature and away from an embracing of frank sensuality.
Yet it is precisely the capitalist seizure of the Commons, forcing the poor farmers to move to the cities and sell their only salable commodity, their labour, to the industrialists, mining companies, etc., that has led to our modern alienation from nature, from each other, and from our sexuality. Lawrence saw the actual problems, but misinterpreted them.
Therefore, in my analysis, though my Marxist reading of his novel won’t be what he meant, I believe it will uncover the true nature of the problems he addressed in it: alienation from our species-essence (body vs mind), industrial capitalism (industrialization vs nature), and class antagonisms (upper vs lower classes).
After having had those “tentative love affairs,” Constance “Connie” Reid marries Clifford Chatterley, an aristocrat, when she’s 23, in 1917. A month after the marriage, he is sent to fight in WWI, and he returns paralyzed from the waist down, rendering him impotent.
Now, for Lawrence, Clifford is largely an allegorical figure, his paralysis and impotence making him the personification of the life of the mind without the body, since Clifford takes up writing and chats with a number of intellectuals, leaving Connie to feel isolated. Note that one of the criticisms of this novel is how characters are reduced to allegorical types, leaving them without depth.
What I would find far more meaningful is to say that it was the very imperialist war that Clifford was made to fight in that is what has scathed him so, since that’s what has literally happened! No allegorical tripe about a mind without a body–simply a recognition that class antagonisms, which he as an aristocrat embodies, led to the imperialist competition over land that was WWI, and has injured him, alienating him from his species-essence, him mind alienated from his body.
Note that class struggle, be it in the forms of the master/slave, feudal lord/peasant, or bourgeois/proletarian, causes hurt to the powerful as well as the powerless, in that the powerful are always pressured to stay on top, always in fear of losing their power. When we see Clifford so deprived of his manhood (for this fear of the loss of power extends, of course, to the patriarchal family), psychologically as well as physically (recall his later being mothered by Mrs. Bolton), we can see how true this fear of loss of power is, and how this fear is dramatized in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The threat to the power of the patriarchal family is easily seen in Clifford’s having lost the ability to procreate, and therefore to pass the family name and property directly from father to son. When he tells Connie he’s willing to have her get pregnant by another man, as long as he’s of high birth, she doesn’t love the other man, and the baby is understood to be Clifford’s, we are then reminded of a quote from James Joyce‘s Ulysses:
“Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten…Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” (Joyce, page 266)
Accordingly, Connie has a brief affair, not yet with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper, but first with a visiting Irish playwright named Michaelis. In all of this we can see the flimsy foundation that patrilineal succession is laid on: the whole point behind the maintenance of a man’s power and authority over his wife is to ensure, at least within reason, that he is, indeed, the father of all of the children in his home.
To that end, girls are expected to be virgins on their wedding night, wives are forbidden to have affairs (whereas adulterous husbands are given more of a slap on the wrist), women are discouraged from having careers (for fear of their independence leading to them having affairs), and sons, being the heirs of the family name and property, are treated better than daughters.
We already see in Lady Chatterley’s Lover the beginnings of the breakdown of the patriarchal family system, which writers like Friedrich Engels recognized as intimately linked with systems of class oppression, in how Connie has lost her virginity before even marrying Clifford. The bohemian lifestyle she learned from her father, Sir Malcolm, a painter and unabashed sensualist. Her affair with Michaelis makes her later liaison with Mellors not at all surprising.
In his “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence goes on and on about his advocacy of monogamy and marriage, which is an odd way to defend a novel in which the sympathetic characters are committing adultery, trying to get divorced, and only hopeful of getting married by the end. One should remember that there’s a difference between an author’s conscious, stated intentions in writing a novel, and his unconscious reasons for presenting it the way he has.
With the original banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence would have been accused of trying to corrupt public morals (page 345). An impassioned and lengthy defence of monogamy and marriage, as seen in his “A Propos,” is thus not at all surprising. For this reason, I would take his defence of marriage with a grain of salt.
His novel was meant, according to him, as a championing of “true phallic marriage” (page 360), of monogamy with the right admixture of sensuality, of the union of body and mind. That may be all well and fine, but the average reader probably isn’t going to receive that message; one often doesn’t remember all the details that Lawrence was hoping one would retain in reading his book, let alone link those details in a way that makes his message of advocating ‘sensual marriage’ clear.
Instead, the reader will, rightly or wrongly, more likely glean from Lady Chatterley’s Lover an advocacy of free love and sex for mere physical pleasure. All the things the moralists of yesteryear were condemning the book for. In this, we can see how Lawrence’s critics have said that his novel hasn’t quite succeeded in the purpose he claimed it had.
For such reasons as these, and now that we live in a more liberal world, one far more tolerant of novels, films, etc., the deal more frankly with sexuality, I feel that we can reinterpret the meaning of Lawrence’s novel in our own way, and therefore can reconsider and reappraise it, that is, in a more favourable way. A key hint to how that reinterpretation and reappraisal can be made is in seeing how the novel deals with class, which is also an important feature of the sexual relationship between Connie and Mellors.
Connie is from the upper classes, married to an aristocrat. Mellors is of the working class. Their coming together, as such, in a sexual union is as much a shock to people like Clifford and Hilda as is their adultery and lewdness. We Marxists might look on such a union, as I did with the sex scene between Alexander and Maria in Tarkovsky‘s film, The Sacrifice, as symbolic of the dissolving of class differences.
Now, just as with Lawrence’s pro-marriage arguments, his openly-expressed disdain for socialism, particularly the Soviet kind (page 352), as we read in his “A Propos” and in his other statements at other times of his life, is something we can take with a grain of salt, especially when we place them in historical context. Just as there was opposition to frank, four-letter expressions of sexuality back then, so was there opposition throughout the bourgeois Western world to socialism (consider the proliferation of fascism in the 1920s as an example).
Lawrence’s depiction of the hard, soulless life of the Tevershall miners could easily have been interpreted as an indirect advocacy of socialism, even if Lawrence hadn’t intended such a reading. To protect his reputation from the “commie” label would have been a strong motive for him to speak ill of socialism, regardless of his actual feelings about the ideology. After all, recall how Marx had to deal with the accusation of communists apparently wishing to abolish marriage, and to hold women in common (it can be found in The Communist Manifesto, II: Proletarians and Communists, 37-38–link above).
Now, Mellors is working-class, but he’s more than that. In the army in WWI, he was a lieutenant. He is also well-read and intelligent. When speaking, he sometimes shifts from the accent of one from the middle class to his Derbyshire accent, a more working-class dialect. When speaking in this latter manner, he often uses those four-letter words. But during his more articulate moments, we can see in him the potential of the working class to rise up to something higher.
In the case of Connie, though she’s from the upper class and married to a minor nobleman, her previous bohemian lifestyle, current affair with Mellors, and her attempts at imitating his Derbyshire accent, as well as her learning his naughty words (pages 194-195), all symbolize her willingness to come down, just as Mellors is capable of coming up. This mobility of theirs shows how, in the world of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the boundaries between the lower and upper classes are blurred.
“And now she touched him, and it was the sons of god with the daughters of men.” (pages 191-192) As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the coming-together of such worlds as the divine and human ones is something thought best to be kept separate. Connie’s and Mellors’s sexual union is just such a union socially frowned on.
Just as Connie and Mellors, as well as their coming together, are relatable and sympathetic, so is Clifford, as an aristocrat who is totally out of touch with the real world, totally unrelatable and unsympathetic. His impotence, weakness, and infantile dependence on Mrs. Bolton can all be seen to represent the modern fading-away into irrelevance of the nobility and all things feudal.
His impotence, as it relates to Lawrence’s idealizing of sensuality, is not something Clifford can be faulted with, since it was the result of a war injury and therefore beyond his control. For such reasons as this, I feel that a more legitimate criticism of him is based on his class arrogance and pursuit of money and power on the one hand, and his helpless dependance on workers like Mrs. Bolton on the other.
Indeed, his Oedipal dependence on her can easily be related to the final stage of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic, in which the slave, through the accumulated labour value of all of his or her work for the master, has rendered the master so helpless and dependent that the roles of powerful and powerless are traded. Accordingly, Mrs. Bolton’s attitude towards Clifford is paradoxically one of admiration and worship of his nobility, yet also of contempt for his arrogance. “She was very good and competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power.” (page 88) She is a mother to him, adoring her sweet baby, yet also looking down on the pathetic weakling.
In contrast to Clifford’s vain pretensions to being a part of the literary world, we have the earthy language of Mellors, with its fucks, cunts, arses, pisses, shits, etc. He is a double of Clifford in many ways, though a much more sympathetic version. He, too, has been cuckolded by his wife (Bertha Coutts), whom he hasn’t yet divorced, as Clifford never divorces Connie within the confines of the novel. Mellors is aloof and sarcastic, not wishing to socialize much, paralleling Clifford’s arrogant disconnect from the people. He, too, was scathed while serving in WWI, though he suffered pneumonia from it, rather than paralysis. Mellors, however, has a nobility from his inner character, rather than from a position of birth. He is the stud that Clifford can never be.
His use of four-letter words, as well as his sex scenes with Connie, contrast with Clifford’s abandonment of the body in a way that can symbolize something Lawrence never wrote of in his “A Propos”: the superiority of a materialist philosophy to that of idealism, making possible a Marxist spin on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Four-letter words give most physical expression to the sexual and biological acts they refer to, an all-too physical expression for prudish minds.
More can be said on the novel’s preference of materialism to idealism, as seen on page 258, when Connie says this to Clifford: “Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind…With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb.” (my emphasis)
As far as the bad-mouthing of “Bolshevism” in the novel is concerned, in Chapter IV in particular, consider the sources of it. Bolshevism is “hate of the bourgeois,” according to Charlie May, to which Tommy Dukes agrees “Absolutely”; Hammond would “deny that Bolshevism is logical,” and he says, “The Bolshevists aren’t really intelligent”; Berry considers Bolshevism to be as “half-witted” as “[their] social life in the west” (pages 38-39). There’s of course no way Clifford would ever approve of “Bolshevism.” When Connie coldly doesn’t kiss him goodnight, he imagines her to be a “bolshevik” (page 52), projecting his own coldness onto her.
But who are all of these men, in the world that Lawrence constructed? They aren’t at all sympathetic. None of them has the required, vaunted sensuality. These intellectuals are all talk and no action, engaging in empty, meaningless discussions on love, sex, and politics. They personify what I said above about how inferior idealism is to materialism.
Lawrence recognizes the evils that come from money and greed: “Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.” (page 104) Mellors, to a great extent the spokesman of Lawrence, imagines he’ll protect Connie from “the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanical greed.” (page 130)
Still, Lawrence acknowledged, through Mellors’s experiences, how “if you were poor and wretched you had to care [about money]…the care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes.” (page 155)
Shortly after the above quote, we have Mellors thinking about how much he wants to have Connie “in his arms” (page 156). He goes over to the Chatterley’s house, in his wish to be close to her. Mrs. Bolton sees him through the window, recognizes him by his nearby dog, and realizes that he is Lady Chatterley’s lover. (page 158)
This juxtaposition of his recognition of the need for money with his need to be with Connie, even to the point of going over to Clifford’s house in the hope of seeing her, is significant. Clifford has, in abundance, all the things that working-class Mellors needs: money, “the woman” (page 156), and the property.
Mellors’s making love with Clifford’s wife, the taking of the aristocrat’s ‘property’ (recall what I said above about Engels and the relationship of the patriarchal family with the origins of property), is thus symbolically a revolutionary act. We see here the connection between capitalism and patrilineage, and how Mellors’s affair with Connie–his seizing of the means of reproduction, as it were–is a defiance of these two forms of ownership. Mellors going over to Clifford’s house is also symbolic defiance.
On pages 166-167 there is a vivid description of Connie’s experience, during a car ride to Uthwaite, of “the long squalid straggle of Tevershall” (pages 165-166). Here we have a depiction of the harsh life of the English working class, of the local miners and where they live…”all went by ugly, ugly, ugly…”
As Connie looks on the ugliness of Tevershall with horror, she shudders at the thought of producing an heir to Wragby, thus continuing this classist state of affairs. Lawrence may have insisted on his diagnosis that the problem of the “Half-corpses, all of them” [that is, the Teverhsall workers] is because industrialization has cut the men away from the rhythms of nature, yet as I said above, it was precisely the development of industrial capitalism, the ruthless pursuit of profit, that brought about that cutting away.
It’s the elephant in the room that Lawrence, addled by anti-Sovietism, completely missed. “The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.” (page 171) Put another way, capitalist England stole the Commons from the English farmers, forcing them to look for work in the ugly, industrialized cities.
On pages 174-175, Connie further contemplates the ugliness and death-like state of the miners. One senses her feelings of alienation from these men, their alienation from each other, and each man’s alienation from his species-essence.
After having contemplated the miners, Connie returns home, and she sees Mellors there. Just as the miners work for Clifford, so is Mellors “One of Clifford’s hirelings!” (page 177). Immediately after, the novel quotes Julius Caesar, with two lines from Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Act I, scene ii, lines 140-141)
In the context of this section of Lawrence’s novel, with Connie’s having just contemplated the plight of the miners, of Mellors similar position as a “hireling,” and “an underling,” the Shakespeare quote, meant to rouse Brutus to join Cassius’ conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, is implicitly being used to suggest the need for a revolt of the “underlings” against Clifford.
Immediately after is a discussion between Connie and Mrs. Bolton about the death of the latter’s husband in the mining pit (pages 178-179). So again, by way of juxtaposition, we see a linking of the suffering of the miners, and of that of Mellors, with the death of Mrs. Bolton’s husband in the pit–all examples of the oppression of the working class.
Mrs. Bolton speaks of the alienation caused by those “as runs the pit…they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they’re [physically] together.” The killing of her husband was just such a separation, the taking of him from her.
Such alienation finds its opposite in the lovemaking between Connie and Mellors, especially when she orgasms in Chapter XII. “Beauty! What beauty!…How was it possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled?” (page 192) It is just after this lovemaking, her first with him that feels warm and wonderful, instead of ridiculously distant, that she repeatedly asks him if he loves her (she manages to squeak a yes out of the otherwise aloof man), and she imitates his Derbyshire dialect and dirty words. In all of this, we can sense their growing togetherness.
In the following chapter, we get a sense of Clifford’s arrogant attitude towards the miners, him wishing to prevent them from striking without their consent (page 197). Connie, with him in the woods, gets into an argument with him about the miners’ plight, and his callous attitude towards them. Again, given our sympathy to her and antipathy to him, we can safely conclude that the narrative is far more favourable to the working class than to the upper class, despite Lawrence’s denials.
After the argument, Clifford’s motorized wheelchair gets stuck on a steep incline. He wants Mellors to fix it. Stubborn Clifford insists on trying to get up the incline without any help from Mellors or Connie, but it becomes obvious that only a push from them will get the wheelchair up.
In this scene, so humiliating for Clifford, we see the fall of the pride of the man who just spoke of the strength and responsibility of the aristocracy over the workers. Clifford’s powerlessness represents the waning power and relevance of the upper classes.
Mellors’s helping of Clifford, despite exhausting himself because of how his pneumonia has weakened him, puts him in the same position as mothering Mrs. Bolton: we see again the final stage of the slave/master dialectic, with Mellors’s rising power and Clifford’s decline, a contrast paralleled with the former’s phallic potency vs the latter’s lack of it.
Yet if Clifford feels physically and psychologically emasculated, so has Mellors felt that way, if only psychologically so. He tells Connie of his past sexual experiences with those women who weren’t interested in sex, those who “had nearly taken all the balls out of [him]” (page 221). Then came Bertha Coutts, who liked sex all too much for Mellors’s liking. Too sexually aggressive for him, she had a vagina that “was a beak tearing at [him],” like a vagina dentata.
So as I said above, Mellors is in a number of ways a double of Clifford. Bertha’s sexual aggression, relative to Mellors, is parallel to Connie’s sexual aggression, relative to Clifford. Commenting on Mellors’s experience of his wife, she quotes As You Like It and says that he had “too much of a good thing.” Some criticize the novel’s depiction of Bertha, treating her sexual aggression as a bad thing, as not acceptably ‘womanly’; but it’s not that she has desires that are ‘unwomanly,’ for Melors is happy to have a woman who wants sex. It’s just that she’s too aggressive about it, even for him.
Added to Bertha’s excesses are her fleeing to another man while Mellors was in the army in India, and all of her troublemaking while Connie is in Venice, stirring up the gossip about his affair with Connie, which leads to Mellors getting fired. Bertha has psychologically castrated him many times, but he’s a far more sympathetic character than Clifford.
Mellors seems to be ambivalent about the issues that socialism raises. On the one hand, he has a bookshelf including “books about bolshevist Russia” (page 233), yet on the other, he blames “a steady sort of bolshevism [for] just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing.” (page 238) Still, he recognizes that “We’re forced to make a bit [of money] for us-selves, an’ a fair lot for th’bosses.” (page 240) He would “wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.” (page 242)
Recall what I said above about the capitalists starting industrialization, something Lawrence isn’t interested in acknowledging. Now, the Bolsheviks, of course, industrialized, too (i.e., Stalin beginning his Five-Year Plans around the time that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written), but with the aim of building up the productive forces in order ultimately to end capitalism and the alienation it causes. Capitalists industrialize only to maximize profit, not to provide for all.
In contrast to all this antipathy towards mechanistic, ugly industrialization, our two lovers adore all that is nature; and during a heavy rain, they both strip naked (Connie first) and run out into it and get soaked (pages 242-243). Back inside after having made love out there, they get warm by the fire, he strokes her buttocks and “secret entrances” (page 244), he admires her beautiful body, and they discuss plans of running away together, having their baby, and divorcing their spouses…acts of liberation!
Intertwining flowers in each other’s pubic hair, they imagine a wedding of their genitals, naming them “John Thomas” and “Lady Jane.” Incidentally, Lawrence at one point considered naming his novel John Thomas and Lady Jane.
Another example of the novel’s acknowledgement of how problematic class is comes when Hilda learns that her sister’s lover is working class. Hilda, of course, disapproves (page 262), for “she loathed any ‘lowering’ of oneself, or the family.” She imagines the affair will end, but this is wish-fulfillment. “One can’t mix up with the working people.” (page 265)
Hilda, when meeting Mellors, dislikes him even more, from hearing his Derbyshire dialect. She’d rather he spoke “natural,” or “normal English” (page 268), since it would sound more pleasing to her “solid Scotch middle class” disposition. (page 262)
Now, Connie would naturally defend Mellors against her sister’s snobbish judgements of him, but her own upper-middle-class prejudices rise up from her unconscious when she, in Venice now, has learned of Bertha’s stirring up of trouble back home (page 290). She imagines of Mellors, upon hearing of his wife’s excesses, that “He was perhaps really common, really low,” and she worries about the “humiliating” damage done to her reputation if Clifford should learn about her affair with Mellors.
Her father, Sir Malcolm, warms up to Mellors soon enough after meeting him back in England; but when Clifford finally learns of the affair, he regresses to such a childlike state that, kissed consolingly by maternal Mrs. Bolton, he is “in a relaxation of madonna-worship.” (page 320) When he learns that the other man is Mellors, though, Clifford is in such a fury that he says she “ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!” (page 326) This choice of words, by the way, is interesting in how they echo Mellors’s wish to wipe machines off the face of the earth. Note how the antipathies of the upper class are diametrically opposed to those of the working class. Mellors would wipe out machines that destroy the proletariat; Clifford would wipe out women who defy the patriarchal family. Accordingly, he refuses to divorce her.
In a letter to Connie, Mellors–who is in the process of working out his divorce from Bertha–discusses such things as the workers wanting to nationalize industry, and wanting to establish a Soviet; he shows his ambivalence about such things again (page 324). He says the men are doomed, and he makes a thinly-veiled reference to Lenin: “they go about as if there was nothing to be done. Anyhow, nobody knows what should be done.” (page 330)
He then speaks of his preference of a society unconcerned with money (one might recall, in this connection, that one of the ultimate goals of communist society is that it should be money-less). Instead, Mellors would have everybody dancing about like pagans who “acknowledge the great god Pan”–more of Lawrence’s vague solutions to modern problems.
Among the last things that Mellors says to Connie in his letter, which brings the novel to an end, is his dialectic, as it were, of chastity and fucking, the former of which he equates with the snow of winter, and the latter of which he equates with spring. He says, “So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking.” (page 332)
He puts it this way because he and Connie have to wait until both are properly divorced before they can marry and therefore resume their lovemaking. They must be patient before they can have that sensual pleasure again. For him, “it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in [his] soul.” (page 332)
This chastity is like a building-up of reserved passion, to be held in until finally they can be together again, to release that passion in a fiery explosion of sex. I’m reminded of the Hindu concept of tapas, which in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty‘s book, Siva: the Erotic Ascetic, is defined as “The heat of asceticism.” (O’Flaherty, page 324) Elsewhere in her book, she speaks of tapas in this way: “Chastity was characteristic of Indian asceticism from the very start. The Upanishads say that one may realize the Self by practising tapas in the forest, free from passion…Sexual excitement represented a threat against which the ascetic must constantly be on guard. When Brahma desired his daughter, he lost all the tapas which he had amassed in order to create…Although in human terms asceticism is opposed to sexuality and fertility, in mythological terms tapas is itself a powerful creative force, a generative power of ascetic heat.” (pages 40, 41)
So Lady Chatterley’s Lover ends with the hope that Connie, with child by Mellors, will be with him again one day. Then, the winter of their chaste discontent will be made glorious spring by this son of a fuck.
As we know, Lawrence bemoaned modern, industrialized England’s decline from its earlier world, in which men and women lived in harmony with nature, and the body and the mind weren’t alienated from each other, but unified in freely-expressed sensuality. Though his novel depicts the barriers of class in all their ugliness, he seems to prefer old English tradition to a socialist resolving of the class problem, which is odd, given his portrayal of aristocratic Clifford as not only weak and ineffectual, but also unsympathetic, perpetuating industrialization and its killing of the workers’ souls, just so he can make more money…like a capitalist.
It is for these reasons that I feel that a Marxist reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in spite of how different Lawrence claimed his intentions were in his “A Propos” of the novel, is by far the easiest and best interpretation of it. A writer may claim that his novel means one thing while he’s unconsciously meant something quite different. He might intentionally mislead us about his intentions, to protect us from knowing its real meaning and therefore not spoiling us with its secrets, or to protect himself against allegations of corrupting morals or promoting socialism, as I speculated above. In any case, I don’t feel bound to keeping my interpretations in conformity with his “A Propos,” and I therefore feel free to interpret as I wish.
Connie’s affair with Mellors, as I see it, is a symbolic act of revolt against the patriarchal family and the class system, two social problems that are intermixed. The frank expression of sexuality, with its four-letter words, is connected with the advocacy of such a revolt, since, despite Lawrence’s denials, it’s a case of épater la bourgeoisie. The lovers’ bearing of a child that is not Clifford’s is a symbolic termination of the patriarchal family and the upper classes, all in one stroke.
Connie’s and Mellors’s union is that of the upper and lower classes, a symbolic blurring of class distinctions. Their leaving of Tevershall and Wragby is a turning of one’s back on the ugliness of industrial capitalism. I’d say the book’s censorship had even more to do with this political subversiveness than the dirty words…even if Lawrence had never intended it.
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New York, Bantam Classics, 1968
There
are those
who think our world today is normal in this state,
when
actually,
our world today should be seen from this perspective.
Many
on the
right think all our problems should be seen this way,
but
such a
vantage point just pushes things the other way.
The left is pushed so far aside, it isn’t even seen,
and
so, the
middle’s pushed rightwards, yet still seen as the centre.
Today’s
world’s
a game
which is
played
by fools,
teetering,
a tower
liable to
fall at any
time now.
The left
is
marginalized
as
usual.
Few, if any,
are
listening
to any of
their
dire
warnings.
The right
is
dominating
discourse
while
pretending
that
affairs
aren’t
enough
to
the
right.
The centre
pretends
to be
left,
while
inching
further
and
further
to
the
right.
Pieces
keep
being
pulled
out
without
any
regard
for
balance.
The edifice
will one day fall to the floor,
a heap of ruins we’ll have to clean up,
yet may not live to do so. There are far too
many holes in the stack as it is: let’s be careful.
Imagine a railroad track that ends where the bridge is out,
over a
steep
cliff
that
no one
would
ever
want to
fall off
to his
death.
People on a train
are going on that railroad track, right to the end of it.
They
don’t
seem
aware
of the
danger
that
they’re
heading
toward.
Marxists, liberals, and right-wingers
are all on that train, racing toward certain doom.
These
last
of the
three
are all
running
to the
front,
as if
wanting
to die.
The liberals are just sitting in their seats,
with a strange faith that the track will go
all
the
way
to
the
other
side
of
the
abyss.
Only the Marxists, the Leninists in particular,
are going to the back, running to jump off,
before
they
go
over
with
all of
those
fools
who
think
the
track
is safe.
We can sweat the small stuff, enduring those tiny drops
that don’t upset too much, being so small. Yet, them being
so cold, irregular, and incessant, the irritation slowly builds
’til
you
can
not
take it anymore.
It’s like Chinese water torture: sweat will drip off your chin
as the cold drops slowly fall, tapping on your scalp. Knowing
when they are coming, you’re prepared, and they’d be bearable,
but
you
do
not
know when they will hit, so the anticipation is crazy-making.
Gold was supposed to trickle down decades ago, but it
was pyrite. The decades went by, the trickling was icy cold,
& now we’re mad, getting cut off from reality more and more,
and
no
one
is
helping us, or organizing, or showing us a way out of this mess. Each drip
may just be one drop of water, but these all add up to a lake of fire over time.
Someone, please, turn off the tap, so we can all have peace.
Infinite Ocean 
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