Category: capitalism

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

I: Introduction

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

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

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

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

II: Politics and Lies–a Brief but Necessary Digression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Deathly Desires

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

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

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

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

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

IV: The Graveyard Scene

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

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

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

V: Franklin and the Hitchhiker

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

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

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

VI: Vegetarianism

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

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

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

VII: Abuse, Trauma, and Projection

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

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

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

VIII: A Brief Psychoanalytic Digression

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

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

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

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

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

IX: When Victimizers are Victims, Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

X: The First Killings

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

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

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

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

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

XI: Punching Down

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

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

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

XII: The Climax

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

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

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

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

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

XIII: An Abuser’s Mask of Sanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV: Mirroring Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV: Escape

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

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

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

XVI: Leatherface, the Ultimate Victim

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

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

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

Terraces

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Pulp Fiction’

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

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, bosses can be that scary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fair trade.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Danger of Counterrevolution

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

New World Order

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

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

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

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

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

The False Dichotomy of Conservative vs. Liberal

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

THIS IS NONSENSE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Normalizing War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Trickle-down

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,

Analysis of ‘Duel’

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.

Analysis of The Dark Knight Trilogy

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.