Category: film analysis

Analysis of ‘Orca’

Orca: The Killer Whale is a 1977 film directed by Michael Anderson and produced by Dino de Laurentis. It stars Richard Harris, Charlotte Rampling, and Will Sampson (whom you may recall as Chief Bromden in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). The film costars Bo Derek, Keenan Wynn (who had a small part in Dr. Strangelove), and Robert Carradine (who would later play Lewis Skolnick, the geek with the grating laugh, in the Revenge of the Nerds franchise).

Orca was a modest box office success, but it got mostly bad reviews from the critics who, as with audiences, felt it was too imitative of Jaws, which came out two years earlier. Certainly, de Laurentis wanted to capitalize on the success of Jaws, having called writer/producer Luciano Vincenzoni to tell him to “find a fish tougher and more terrible than the great white.”

Yet, as with Richard Harris, I must say that the claim that Orca merely imitates Jaws is unfair. Any similarities between the two films are only superficial. The differences between the two are far more apparent, if you’ve been paying attention while watching.

Jaws is essentially horror, while Orca is more of an adventure film. The shark is terrorizing people on a beach because it relentlessly wants to eat, but the orca wants revenge on the man who killed its mate and unborn calf. This second point leads us to the most important difference between the two films: while the shark in Jaws is a terrifying man-eating machine, the male orca is sympathetic.

In many ways, Orca is a kind of Moby-Dick in reverse, with a killer whale monomaniacally seeking revenge on the captain of a ship. Since orcas are monogamous and remarkably intelligent, the film could even be seen as a love story, with the male orca seeking his revenge out of love for his killed mate. All of these things make Orca much more than a mere ripoff of Jaws, and frankly, I’m surprised that moviegoers and critics at the time of the film’s release paid so little attention to these differences.

I’m not saying that Orca is an unsung masterpiece–it’s far from that; but it has deserved far better than to be so glibly dismissed as a lackluster copy of Jaws.

Why I decided to do an analysis of the film is because of the recent spate of news stories about orcas attacking yachts. Some of us on the left have joked, through the sharing of memes on Facebook, about orcas leading a kind of proletarian revolution against the ruling class!

Now, some reporters have claimed that the orcas ramming into yachts are just playing: I find this interpretation to be rather dubious, given the advanced intelligence of the animals, and the fact that I suspect that the ruling class, which owns the media, want to reassure themselves that there’s nothing to worry about. Other reporters have attributed the orcas’ attacks to some form of trauma. I suspect such an interpretation to be closer to the truth when we consider the awful pollution in the oceans and the hunting and killing of various marine animals like sharks.

Now, the intelligence of orcas is, as amazing as this might sound, comparable to that of fifteen- or sixteen-year-old humans! Their way of communicating seems almost to be a kind of language! When we accept these remarkable facts about orcas, we shouldn’t find it all that far outside the realm of possibility that their attacks on yachts could be a deliberate act of retaliation against the very wealthiest of people who enjoy the benefits of human domination and plunder of the oceans.

Orcas have the ability to communicate what they’ve learned (i.e., hunting skills) and pass it down from generation to generation. Though my speculation is far from proven, it isn’t inconceivable that they could have somehow linked fishermen’s boats, those who hunt and kill marine life, with those particularly beautiful yachts owned by the richest of us humans, and communicated this insight, or at least an inkling of this insight, to their young ones over time. “The ones in the yachts are the fish-killers’ leaders–attack them.”

Who knows? It’s an interesting thought to entertain, in any case.

As far as these ideas can be connected with the film, we learn that Nolan (Harris), Irish captain of his boat, the Bumpo, is in the waters around Newfoundland first hunting sharks, then orcas, to make enough money so he can go back to Ireland. As the captain of his crew, he’s the boss; as a killer of marine animals for money, he’s a petite bourgeois capitalist exploiting the sea for his personal gain, and his violence against the male orca’s mate and unborn calf thus drives the male to seek revenge by attacking Nolan’s boat in a manner comparable to the recent orca attacks on the yachts.

Here is a link to quotes from Orca, and here’s a link to the full movie, minus the opening and closing credits.

The film begins with the beautiful sight of two orcas–presumably the male and his pregnant mate–swimming about in the ocean, and on two occasions, we see them jumping up out of the water in graceful arcs with the setting (or rising?) sun in the background. The soft music we hear gives off an almost romantic atmosphere, of the monogamous pair as being deeply in love. This is far removed from the tense atmosphere of a young woman skinny dipping and being attacked and killed by a great white shark.

In the next scene, cetologist Rachel Bedford (Rampling) has tapes recording orcas’ communicating onshore while she is scuba diving and checking the recording equipment in the water. A great white shark appears, making Rachel try to hide from it. Nolan and his crew hope to catch the shark, while Ken (Carradine), a marine biologist and colleague of hers, is in a boat helping her record the whalesong.

The shark attacks Ken, but an orca intervenes just in time, smashing into the shark and killing it, saving Ken’s life (Is this our male orca protagonist?). Rachel, now on Nolan’s ship, points out that only an orca is powerful enough to kill a shark like that. The audience, apparently, is now supposed to think, Wow, move over, Jaws. Orcas are way more badass than great white sharks.

Still, this scene, with its brief tension, is nothing like any of the shark attacks in Jaws, with the E-F ostinato in the double-basses and bassoons to prepare us for the terror. The orca, as of this moment in the movie, isn’t the antagonist, as the shark in Jaws is: he’s a friend to man; and though he will want revenge on Nolan, since we have sympathy for the killer whale, it’s rather that Nolan is the antagonist, however remorseful he is over killing the orca’s mate and unborn calf.

In the next scene, Rachel does a lecture on the orca for a class of university students, with Ken operating slides. We learn of the orca’s power, speed, capacity for friendliness or vengeance–depending on how we treat it–but especially of its remarkable intelligence.

Rachel learns that Nolan has been attending her lectures; his learning about the orca is not for his personal enlightenment, of course–he wants to catch one and get a lot of money for it. She tries to warn him not to try, but of course, her words fall on deaf ears.

We note by this point in the film that Rachel is also the narrator of this story; her narration will have more significance in this reverse Moby-Dick in that, at the end of the film and with the outcome of the confrontation between Nolan and his crew on the one side, and the vengeful orca on the other, that she will be the only survivor left to tell the tale. Her expert knowledge of orcas parallels Ishmael‘s knowledge of whales. Call her Rachel.

Nolan’s wish to catch an orca for money is, of course, pure exploitation, the pain of which is especially keenly felt when we consider how the orca’s intelligence, ability to communicate, monogamy, and existence as a mammal makes it comparable to human beings, and therefore it’s an animal we should be able to empathize with. Still, Nolan smirks in contempt at the idea.

Notice that in this conversation between Rachel and Nolan, the fear isn’t of the marine animal killing people, as in Jaws, but vice versa. She knows he won’t succeed in catching a killer whale, but he might harm one or two in the attempt…which, of course, he soon will.

The next scene shows a group of orcas swimming about together. Soft music is playing in the background, reinforcing our sense of appreciation for the animals, since they look so peaceful together. It should arouse our empathy for them…more of a strong contrast with the fear and antagonism felt for the great white shark of Spielberg’s film.

As Nolan’s ship is sailing out to catch an orca, Annie (Derek) tells him that these animals are monogamous, and so catching and taking one away will separate it from its mate and family, a terrible thing to do. He, of course, has no interest in contemplating the consequences of his actions.

We see that group of killer whales again, and so does Novak (Wynn), who calls out to Nolan and the rest of the crew to get ready. All of this sympathy for the orcas has now built up to the point where, when Nolan attacks them, we really know that they are anything but the film’s antagonists, as the shark in Jaws is. These two films are clearly quite different from each other.

Nolan shoots a harpoon at the orcas, nicking the back of the upper fin of the male orca we’ll be seeing for the rest of the film. We’ll now be able to identify him by that injury, which is symbolic of the greater pain caused by Nolan that will drive the orca’s lust for revenge.

That greater pain comes when we see Nolan’s harpoon hit the orca’s pregnant mate. We hear her squeals of pain: even Nolan is disturbed by the expressiveness of her squeals. He notes that she sounds almost human.

The wounded female comes toward the ship, and Annie notes that the female, swimming into the ship’s propeller, is trying to kill herself. Her blood is mixing all over with the water. This, properly understood, is the true moment of horror in the film…though one must have sympathy for animals to understand.

Nolan tells Novak, “help me get this crazy fish onboard.” I’m reminded of when Ishmael insists that sperm whales like Moby Dick are fish, in spite of their status as mammals, like the orca.

More horror comes when, once the mother orca is taken onboard and raised up, she miscarries, and her unborn calf comes out. Nolan himself is disturbed by the sight, being reminded of a time when his pregnant wife was killed with their unborn child in a car accident involving a drunk driver.

As all of these horrors are happening, the male orca, of course, has been watching. He and his family are the victims of human rapaciousness motivated by the urge to make money, not humans victimized by a marine predator. The scene in Jaws, when the boy on the beach is eaten by the shark, we see the famous dolly zoom on Martin Brody (played by Roy Scheider) watching the killing in shock, and the boy’s mother searching for him and finding only his blood and mangled inflatable swimming float–this is the opposite of what we’ve just seen in Orca. This film is not imitating Jaws.

The male orca roars in grief at the sight of the calf falling from its mother onto the floor of the ship’s deck. This is too painful for Nolan to see, too, so he gets a hose and sprays the calf so it will fall off the ship and into the water. On the one hand, he’s sensitive enough to be horrified at the sight of the consequences of what he’s done, but he isn’t sensitive enough to dispose of the calf in a respectful way.

This is what happens when man treats animals with no respect. In what is now the US, when the Native Americans killed any bison, they were grateful to it for what it provided them with, wasting none of its body. In contrast, the white man recklessly killed almost all the bison before finally coming to his senses in the late 19th century. By the time Nolan realizes what he’s done, the male orca is already eyeing him with thoughts of revenge.

This callous killing of animals for commodities or for sport is the kind of thing that enrages animal rights activists, of course; but with our male orca here, wailing for vengeance against Nolan and having an intelligence comparable to that of humans, we can see this film as allegorical of the struggle of animal rights activists against capitalists like Nolan, however petite bourgeois they might be, who hunt and kill for money. With this allegory, we can see a connection between Orca and the recent killer whale attacks on yachts.

(And as a side note, it is interesting to see in this connection how Jaws, with a marine animal that is feared and must be killed, is the successful movie; but Orca, with a sympathetic marine animal that has been wronged by man, is the failed movie.)

As the Bumpo is sailing back to shore in the evening, the orca has been following it. He rams into the ship, causing Annie to fall, injure her leg, and need a cast. The orca continues attacking the ship, and Nolan gets a rifle, meaning to shoot it. Realizing the female is still alive (though only barely so), the crew decides to drop her and release her back into the sea.

Novak, up at the ship’s boom, cuts the female loose; but the male comes up out of the water, grabs Novak with his teeth, and drags the man off the ship and into the sea, killing him. The male orca and Nolan exchange antagonistic looks. The next morning, the male pushes the now-dead female ashore. Other orcas are with him. Sympathetic music reminds us of who the film’s hero is.

Nolan goes over to the shore where the female orca has been left. He’s feeling more and more remorseful over what he’s done. Though he’s a petite bourgeois capitalist killing marine animals for money, he has a sensitive side, just as many capitalists do, they who may try to make work more comfortable for their employees; but it isn’t their personal attitude that is or isn’t the problem–it’s the social relations of production that are the problem. So Nolan can have a heart and still be the principal wrongdoer of the film, because his wrongdoing stems from his livelihood.

Rachel, who is also at the shore by the dead orca, realizes that, since Nolan left his ship nearby, where the male pushed his dead mate, that the male followed him. A local aboriginal man named Jacob Umilak (Sampson) appears and agrees with Rachel. He tells Nolan of his people’s experiences with orcas, of the error of trying to kill them, and of how the orca will “always remember the human being who had tried to harm them.”

Nolan may be remorseful, but he still doesn’t want to face the consequences of his actions. Umilak advises him to stay away from this whole fishing area. Rachel insists that the male orca has seen him…and remembers him.

In his growing guilt, Nolan visits the local church, where after asking the reverend if it’s possible to sin against an animal, he’s told that one can sin against a blade of grass. The reverend’s answer is poignant, given how man has been sinning against the whole Earth, especially over the past four decades since the release of this film, all for the sake of maximizing profits and maintaining imperial power.

A particularly important point is made when the reverend says that one sins against oneself. Nolan’s killing of the orca’s mate and unborn calf, while reminding him of the drunk driver’s killing of his pregnant wife and unborn baby, is also the beginning of the chain of events that will lead to the death of his whole crew, the mutilation of Annie, the death of Umilak, and Nolan’s own death at the end of the film. And since Nolan is a petite bourgeois capitalist, his self-destruction from his misdeeds is also symbolic of how the capitalist will destroy himself in the end, the contradictions of his mode of production ultimately causing it to fall to pieces, through the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

After church, Nolan and crewman Paul (played by Peter Hooten) are walking along the pier, where they meet Al Swain (played by Scott Walker), a member of the fisherman’s union. Al is very unhappy about the presence of ‘Nolan’s’ orca haunting the local waters, scaring away the fish and jeopardizing the livelihoods of the fishermen there.

In this discussion, we hear again, in allegorical form, the contradictions between the capitalist and the unionized working class. Nolan’s initial pursuit of a killer whale for money, though he regrets it now, has still caused difficulties for the money-making of Al and his fellow fishermen. All the same, Nolan is reluctant to do anything about it.

Right after Al’s discussion with Nolan, we see, in the nearby water, the orca fin with the nick in the back. It’s a tense moment, with tense music, but it only superficially reminds us of Jaws. The orca doesn’t go after and eat anybody: it rams into another moored boat, causing it to sink. Nolan’s misadventure is, however indirectly, harming the fisherman all the more.

That night, fishermen bring a killed orca ashore, in the vain hope that they’ve killed the right one. Rachel drives up there, finds Nolan drinking a beer, and gives him a book about “whales and dolphins in science and mythology,” thus linking her more with Ishmael. (A passage in the book that Nolan reads aloud even makes a reference to Herman Melville.) She is trying to cure Nolan of his ignorance of orcas.

Al reappears to tell Nolan that they’ve fixed his boat, the Bumpo. It’s been repaired so Nolan can hurry up, sail out, and kill the orca, which he of course is still unwilling to do. Al knows the orca is still around, recognizable by the nick in his fin, so he hasn’t finished tormenting the village in his quest for revenge. The symbolic contradiction between petite bourgeois Nolan and proletarian Al continues.

Later that night, Nolan is walking alone by the water. He senses the presence of the orca out there in the dark; the orca brings his head up above the surface to confront Nolan, letting out a ‘screw you’ squeal. Again, the two exchange hostile looks. Nolan thinks of the unborn calf falling out of the mother’s body, immediately linking the memory with that of the car crash that killed his wife and unborn child. He can’t kill the orca because he knows he’s in the role of the drunk driver in this situation.

Al gathers up all the fishermen to tell them that no marine organization, nobody, and especially not Nolan, is going to help them, so they’ll have to kill the orca themselves. Workers have never been able to rely on the bourgeois or their organizations to help them; they have to help themselves. Umilak is at Nolan’s home, to tell him that the fishermen all think Nolan is a coward for not confronting the orca, though Umilak believes Nolan is sincere when he says he has special, personal reasons for not wanting to kill the orca.

That night, having set up a kind of scarecrow on the pier to attract the orca, Nolan is thinking of shooting the animal; but having also read in Rachel’s book a confirmation that orcas can communicate, he wishes he could tell the orca that the killing of his mate and calf was an accident, and that he is sorry. He’s full of conflict.

The orca, however, is still single-minded in his wish for revenge. He rams into some pipes and knocks over a lantern, causing a huge fire in the area. Then he attacks Nolan’s house on the side of the water, causing much of it to fall into the water. Annie, still in a cast, is staying in his house, and she falls with the sinking house, her legs dangling in the water. The orca surfaces and bites her injured leg off.

This mutilation, reminding us of how Captain Ahab lost his leg to the white whale and drove him to his monomaniacal lust for revenge, now puts Nolan into a similar rage, calling the whale a “revengeful sonofabitch.” He finally has his motivation to sail the Bumpo out to sea and give the orca the fight he’s been provoking Nolan into.

In a phone conversation Nolan has with Rachel that night, just before the attack on his house, she tells him that, whatever the whale wants, if he’s anything like a human being, what he wants “isn’t necessarily what he should have.” In other words, the orca’s desire for revenge is as mad as Ahab’s is against Moby Dick. I’d have to disagree: losing one’s mate and unborn offspring to a whale hunter seeking money is a lot worse than a whale hunter seeking money losing his leg to the whale he tried to kill.

Rachel’s implying of moral equivalency between Nolan and the orca, between Nolan’s wrongs against the orca vs the orca’s wrongs against him and his crew, is typical of Hollywood liberalism. While Annie, having clearly shown empathy towards the suffering of the orca and his slain family, didn’t deserve to have her leg bitten off, she, as one of Nolan’s crew, still was involved in the orca hunt that led to all of this suffering. Nolan can’t expect to get away with what he’s done unscathed…be the scathing that of his own person or of someone associated with him.

Since I see the orca as representative of the proletariat fighting back against the bourgeoisie–be they the super-wealthy in their yachts, or petite bourgeois like Captain Nolan–their wrath and the destruction it causes is justified, even when it gets messy and spills over into areas outside the immediate perpetrators of the original outrages. It’s virtually impossible to mete out punishments in exact proportion to the extent of the original crime. Life is not so clear-cut when it comes to karma.

Though Nolan, Paul, Umilak, Ken, and Rachel go out in the Bumpo to confront the orca, the captain still has mixed feelings about killing the animal. His remorse over what he’s done to the orca’s family still tempers his rage against the orca’s destruction of his home and maiming of Annie. So he hasn’t the single-minded vindictiveness of Ahab or the orca; and while in Jaws, Brody, Quint, and Matt Hooper, sailing on the Orca [!], are determined to kill the shark, Nolan is still not so sure of his purpose: kill the orca, or let the animal kill him?

Again I must say: Jaws and Orca are quite different from each other.

With Umilak, an aboriginal, among the crew on their quest to get the orca, we see another, if slight, parallel with the multicultural crew of the Pequod–recall Tashtego, the Native American on Ahab’s ship.

Nolan has the ship sail to the exact same place where he maimed the orca’s mate, but the orca makes the crew follow him north to an area with icebergs. One is reminded of the confrontation between Victor Frankenstein and his monster up in the Arctic. Indeed, in wronging the orca, Nolan has created a monster of his own, which he too must confront in the icy cold.

Leading up to this final confrontation, Ken, leaning over to the side of the ship, is grabbed by the orca’s jaws, pulled over into the water, and killed. When the crew reaches the icy area, Paul, having gotten into a lifeboat, is knocked out of it by the orca, and he drowns. Umilak, having sent out an SOS so a helicopter can come and rescue any survivors, is crushed in an avalanche of ice.

Nolan manages to hit the orca with his harpoon, but the orca outsmarts him, having sunk the ship and isolated him on a large piece of floating ice. The orca tips the ice, making Nolan fall into the water. Delighting in the final achievement of his revenge, the orca swims a perimeter around Nolan, who is struggling to keep his head above water. Rachel can only helplessly watch from another iceberg.

The whale uses its tail to throw Nolan in the air, making him smack into an iceberg and killing him. Note how he not only doesn’t kill the orca, the way Brody kills the shark, nor does Nolan explode, as the shark does. We aren’t exultant over the death; we’re saddened by it, as we are by Ahab’s tragic self-destruction.

A helicopter soon arrives to rescue Rachel…and she only is escaped alone to tell thee.

Seriously, though Orca is no Moby-Dick–the film has no grand theme, and its black-and-white whale doesn’t symbolize something as awe-inspiring as the white whale does–Orca isn’t a poor man’s Jaws, either. To get poor Jaws imitations, check out the awful Jaws sequels, instead.

Meanwhile, the recent orca attacks on yachts should revive an interest in this film…and, I hope, a reevaluation of it.

ORCAS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

Analysis of ‘The Sacrifice’

The Sacrifice (Offret) is a 1986 Swedish film written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It stars Erland Josephson, with Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Sven Wollter, and Valérie Mairesse. Many of the crew had worked in Ingmar Bergman films.

The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film, and his third film as an expatriate from the Soviet Union, after Nostalghia and the documentary, Voyage in Time. He died of cancer shortly after filming it; in fact, he was too ill to attend its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. It won the Grand Prix there, as 1972’s Solaris had.

The film also won Tarkovsky his third FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, and his third Palme D’Or nomination. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. It was considered as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 59th Academy Awards, but it didn’t get the nomination.

As was a problem with Stalker, the shooting of The Sacrifice included a failed attempt to capture something important on film: this time, the climactic burning down of the house of Alexander (Josephson), because the only camera used to film the burning jammed, thus ruining the footage. The house had to be reconstructed at great expense in two weeks, and the burning was more prudently re-filmed with two cameras.

Here is a link to quotes, in English translation, from the film; and here is a link to the complete film, with English subtitles.

The film begins with a shot of a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished painting, Adoration of the Magi. The detail from the painting shows the baby Jesus receiving a gift from one of the Magi. As we look at this detail, we see the credits and hear the aria “Erbarme mich, mein Gott” (“Have mercy, my God”), from JS Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.

When the credits have all been shown, the camera shot slowly moves upwards, so we see the palm tree in the top centre of the painting. From this, we go to a distant shot of a tree that Alexander is planting near the shore at Närsholmen, on the island of Gotland. The tree is Alexander’s gift to the land there, just as Jesus received gifts with a tree in the background, one associated with the Virgin Mary (partly from the verse, “You are stately as a palm tree,” from the Song of Songs—7:7). A movie called The Sacrifice fittingly has gift-giving as a major theme.

Just as we see a celebration of Christ’s birth in the painting, with a tree in the background, so is it Alexander’s birthday, with him planting a tree, and he’s soon to receive gifts. Also, just as Christianity is a fusion of Biblical and pagan elements (as I argued here), so is The Sacrifice a combination of Christian and pagan elements, as we’ll soon see.

Trees have been sacred in both paganism and Christianity, and Leonardo’s painting, with its ruin of a pagan building in the background (not that we’ll see this part during the credits), shows the supplanting of paganism by Christianity.

Alexander asks “Little Man” (a boy played by Tommy Kjellqvist), his son, to help with the tree. Alexander speaks of an orthodox monk planting a barren tree on a mountainside. The tree was to be watered every day until it came to life; after three years of this constant work, the tree was finally covered with blossoms! In this story, we learn the value of systemic work.

This notion of constantly doing something would be contrasted with constantly talking, something Alexander has a problem with, and even admits to himself. A former actor turned journalist, critic, and lecturer of aesthetics, he will later quote Hamlet: “Words, words, words,” sharing the Dane’s opinion that words are useless, and action is needed (while also doing plenty of the former and not enough of the latter).

In this connection, we should remember that, for the great majority of the film, Little Man doesn’t say a word, because of a throat operation he’s recently undergone. Only at the very end of the film does he say anything, which is, “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?” As a mute for almost all of the film, this innocent child is almost as Christ-like as the baby in Leonardo’s painting, who also would have been without a word to say.

Action without speech would thus seem to be the moral ideal of the film…and yet Jesus–committing the ultimate salvific act, his self-sacrifice on the Cross–is called “the Word” at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Jesus had many important words to say in all four Gospels, too, of course, including his parables. Tarkovsky in fact called this last film of his a “parable,” according to his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1985).

On the other side of the coin, one may question the moral validity of Alexander’s actions to save the world from a nuclear holocaust. Salvation by adultery? Salvation by arson? Do such actions really appease an angry god, be he Christian or pagan?

As a result of such considerations of works vs. words, one can see a dialectical relationship between these in terms of their worth. Both words and actions have their share of validity vs. worthlessness.

A similar dialectical relationship can be seen in theism vs. atheism in the film, as I also noted in my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Otto (Edwall) arrives on his bike as a postman to give Alexander a telegram wishing him a happy birthday, with jocular allusions to Richard III and The Idiot (Alexander has played both King Richard III and Prince Myshkin on the stage, back in his acting days.)

Otto asks Alexander about his relationship with God, to which the latter answers, “nonexistent.” This attitude is soon to change, though, when he learns from the news of the threat of WWIII. There are no atheists in fallout shelters, apparently.

Otto discusses his interest in Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it is famously declared, “God is dead!” Yet later, Otto will discuss his belief in witches, angels, and the bizarre idea that Alexander can prevent nuclear war through having a sexual union with Maria (played by Guðrún Gísladóttir), one of his house servants, who is also, according to Otto, a witch “in the best possible sense.”

We can see a dialectical relationship even between that English king and Russian prince whom Alexander once played on the stage: the former is clever, but as ugly morally as he is physically deformed; the latter is simple and naïve, yet has a good heart. Such ambiguities and equivocations can be found throughout The Sacrifice, for spirituality here is at one moment portrayed as the highest good, and the next moment, the highest foolishness.

Speaking of foolishness, while he has Little Man sitting on his lap among trees further away from the shore and closer to his house, Alexander tells the little boy about what a difficult thing the fear of death is. It sometimes makes us do things we ought not to do…and yet it is this very fear of death, in a nuclear holocaust, that drives Alexander not only to sleep with Maria, but also to burn his house down, in some superstitious hope that these acts will save humanity from destruction.

At home, Alexander has received a gift from Victor (Wollter), the family doctor who did Little Man’s throat operation, as well as a close friend of Alexander’s family. The gift is a book of pre-Renaissance art depicting Christian saints; Alexander is most pleased with it, since though his relationship with God is “non-existent,” he has aspirations to bring it into existence. There’s a sense he’s been waiting for a catalyst to make this happen–it’s coming soon.

His English wife, Adelaide (Fleetwood), also an actress and fluent in Swedish, appears in the house with her daughter, Marta (played by Filippa Franzén). House servants Maria and Julia (Mairesse) are preparing the birthday dinner, and Otto will soon arrive with his own gift for Alexander, a huge, framed, old map of Europe.

“Every gift involves a sacrifice,” Otto says.

Is adultery with one’s maid a gift to God? Otto seems to think so, in spite of Exodus 20:14.

Is burning down one’s house a gift to God? Alexander seems to think so, as we’ll see.

There’s a sense of coolness not only between Otto, the postman, and bourgeois Victor, but also between Maria and bourgeois Adelaide, who finds the odd Icelandic servant frightening; bourgeois Alexander also finds her a bit “odd.” Otto, Maria’s neighbour, is more acquainted with her, and thus thinks better of her. It shouldn’t be surprising to find fellow proletarians warmer with each other, but alienated among the bourgeoisie.

Studying the map, Alexander imagines it to depict a much happier Europe than that of the modern world, just as he was idealizing in his mind the book’s pictures of ancient saints. He prefers the world of the past to that of the disillusioning present.

He discusses his having given up on acting due to a feeling that his identity dissolves in his roles. He came to be ashamed of impersonating other people. Adelaide preferred him as an actor, fell in love with him then; but she has grown disenchanted with him as a mere bookish, loquacious intellectual now.

Her disenchantment with him seems to have led to alienation in the family, an aloofness between him on the one side, and her and Marta on the other, while he is trying hard to be close with his son, to compensate for that alienation.

These issues lead to a suspicion that Adelaide has been having an affair with Victor. In fact, given that pretty Marta is barely of the age of consent, and that we see Victor touching her in a creepy way later on, I suspect that our good doctor has been in bed with both mother and daughter! Could this be why he wants to take a job in Australia, to escape the guilt of his tangled sexual indiscretions? I’ll discuss these issues in more detail later on.

After discussing his hobby of collecting evidence of the paranormal, Otto suddenly collapses on the living room floor. When the other guests check on him, he insists that he is alright; apparently, an evil angel has passed by and touched him.

Almost immediately after that, the guests hear jet fighters flying low, just above the house, and causing such a shaking that a large jar of milk falls off a shelf and breaks on the floor. All of the guests are disturbed by the jets except Otto, who remains still on the chair he’s gone to after his fall. It’s as if he knew the jets were coming, and he is equating them with the angel that touched him.

Alexander has been outside, looking at a miniature model of his house, something Little Man and Otto have made for him as a birthday gift. Upon beholding the model, Alexander quotes Macbeth in the original English: “Which of you have done this?”, which originally was the Scottish King’s frightened response to seeing the ghost of Banquo, whom he’s just had murdered. It’s as though Alexander, seeing himself in the future and seeing the ‘ghost’ of the house he is to burn, is feeling a similar guilt and looking for someone else to blame it on, to project it onto.

He goes back into the house to find all the guests listening to a news report about what seems to be the beginning of WWIII and a possible nuclear holocaust. Everyone is in a state of shock, but Adelaide reacts in the most extreme way, having a complete mental breakdown and needing a sedative from Victor.

A few interesting things should be noted about Adelaide in connection with what used to be called ‘female hysteria.’ Her hairstyle and dress remind one of the fashions of the 19th century, the last in which diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ in women were common. She calls out to the men to “do something,” to come to the rescue of the Victorian-minded woman. A prominent symptom of ‘hysteria’ was hypersexuality; now, while Adelaide is flipping out, and Victor is embracing her from behind in an effort to restrain her (holding her almost like a lover), her legs are spread out on the floor, revealing sensuous hosiery and high heels.

I’m not at all trying to revive bizarre, antiquated, and indeed sexist theories of mental illness in women (Freud himself, not exactly one to be called a feminist, was one of the first people to acknowledge symptoms associated with ‘hysteria’ in men, thus contributing to the decline in the diagnosis of this spurious medical condition.). I’m merely making links here between Adelaide’s mental state, her sexuality, and foolish old world thinking. After all, Alexander is about to engage in some hysteria of his own.

The needle that Victor sticks into Adelaide’s arm, to sedate her, can be seen as a phallic symbol. Some in the 19th century believed that genital stimulation could treat women’s ‘hysteria,’ including the use of the first electric vibrators [!]. My point in bringing all of this up is to show how it’s hinted, in symbolic and literal form, that Victor and Adelaide are lovers.

As Victor is embracing her, Alexander is further off, looking out a window: shouldn’t her husband be holding her? In this we can see the family dysfunction hiding behind a birthday party.

Victor asks Julia if she wants a phallic shot of sedation, she who’s shown no signs of mental breakdown, but who is as pretty as Adelaide. The maid walks away without a word, as if disgusted by the doctor’s apparent lechery. Then he goes over to pretty Marta to give her a shot. She says she doesn’t need the shot, but he insists, with a lecherous smirk and that creepy touching of her face that I mentioned above, that “it’s absolutely necessary.” That shot is symbolic Rohypnol…isn’t it?

Alexander would rather have drinks than the doctor’s offered shot. Otto doesn’t want a shot, either. (Perhaps by sedating the two men, Victor would have a chance to get at Mother and daughter, with Julia being discreet enough not to say anything.) Marta offers to go upstairs with Victor, while Julia watches over Mama [!]. A little later, we’ll see Marta get naked in her bedroom, knowing that Victor is still around, and Otto has left.

The phones are dead, and the electricity is out. Julia refuses to wake Little Man and have him traumatized with knowledge of humanity’s impending doom.

Alone in a room near sleeping Little Man, the Leonardo painting hanging on the wall, Alexander takes a look at it, then says the Lord’s Prayer. Teary-eyed, he is now entering his own version of ‘hysteria,’ behaving foolishly in a state of fear. Terrified of nuclear war, he has come to what he has been waiting for all of his life: to bring back into existence his relationship with God.

Note how contradictory his prayer is. After finishing his recital of the Lord’s Prayer, he on the one hand offers all he has to God, including his son (as mad as Abraham must have been), then he begs God to restore everything to what it was before the news report. In this prolix prayer, he offers to be mute for the rest of his life. His ‘brevity’ is like that of Polonius–the soul of folly.

His prayer thus demonstrates a paradoxical attitude towards faith and spirituality in this film: it’s illuminating and comforting, yet foolish. The terror of nuclear war urgently needs an escape, yet the opium of the people is no more than that–an escape. Fittingly, after his prayer, Alexander gets on a couch and sleeps to escape his fears.

Before we see his dream, though, we see an example of one of the family problems that he must at least be suspicious of: that scene I mentioned above, of Marta getting naked in her bedroom, happens now. She calls for Victor, saying she needs him [!]. Alexander hopes to save the world, and he can’t even set his own family issues right!

Alexander’s dream, in black and white, begins with melancholy Japanese flute music and dripping water for a soundtrack. It depicts him looking out of a window from a dark room to see snow on the grass. Since he has fears of WWIII, this snow could be seen as symbolic of a nuclear winter. Outside now, he’s stepping in the mud and puddles of melted snow, symbolic of a return to formless, primordial Chaos after the destruction of the world.

He bends down and moves some leaves and trash aside to reveal a number of coins. So much of the motive behind Cold War hostilities, leading to the danger of nuclear war, is money: either the greedy love of it, or the urge to transform society so that it can be shared by all or be eliminated altogether.

He walks in the snow, looking around. More of those coins are seen in the snow, among the puddles, mud, and trash. He sees the bare feet of Little Man in the snow, so vulnerable in the danger of WWIII, and he speaks fearfully for the boy, who then runs away. We hear the sound of approaching fighter jets, which blow aside everything on the ground as they fly by.

He wakes from his dream with a jolt.

Otto returns, to tell Alexander what, apparently, he needs to do to save the world from nuclear war. He must make love with Maria, one of his house servants! Since Otto, as we know, has an interest in the paranormal, and Maria is “the best” kind of witch, such rationalizing is all we need, it seems, to be convinced of this “last hope” as a viable solution.

Alexander sneaks out of his house while Adelaide and Victor are sitting together at a table outside [!], and he uses Otto’s bicycle to ride over to Maria’s home. All of this subterfuge just reinforces the sense of alienation in Alexander’s marriage.

When he arrives at Maria’s home, then begins what must be the most bizarre seduction in human history. Seriously: how does a man convince a woman (his employee) to have sex with him, saying that their tumble in bed is the only way nuclear armageddon can be prevented?

He starts by discussing a time when he was a boy and his mother was ill, and he wanted to tidy up an unweeded garden, so it would be more pleasing to her eyes. After doing so with the utmost diligence, he regrets his gardening efforts, preferring the unruly beauty of the original garden. The story seems to be teaching us not to tamper with nature, not to change anything from its original state, for it may have beauty despite its messy imperfections.

Il ne faut pas cultiver notre jardin.

When he’s come to the point of asking to lie with Maria, he points to his temple a pistol he’s taken from home, implying he’ll kill himself if she doesn’t consent to the sex. One is reminded of when Richard Gloucester, a role Alexander has played, remember, threatens to stab himself if Lady Anne won’t accept the evil hunchback’s hand in marriage. So Maria gives herself to Alexander. Indeed,…

Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?

The fact that, when the lovemaking happens, we don’t see it done the usual way, but rather Tarkovsky has us see the two lovers floating, turning together in a circle over her bed, emphasizes that it isn’t the sex act per se that matters, but what their physical union symbolizes.

And when we see the sex in a symbolic sense, we can see how it finally makes sense. Consider who Alexander and Maria are in relation to each other. He is her employer. He is an affluent bourgeois, she is a worker. Their sexual union symbolizes the removal of class differences. Their lovemaking represents the sublation of the material contradiction between the upper and lower classes, which is vital in ending nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the USSR, as I’ll explain in more detail later.

Now, many will object to my interpretation on the grounds that the oh, so spiritual Tarkovsky wasn’t exactly a card-carrying Marxist-Leninist. There was friction between him and his mystic visions, on the one hand, and the atheistic Soviet authorities, on the other hand. After all, he left the Soviet Union to make his last movies, like The Sacrifice, for the sake of pursuing artistic freedom, did he not?

That friction between him and the Soviet government was there, but it’s been exaggerated by bourgeois, imperialist propagandists (as one can see in liberal Wikipedia). The fact is that Soviet censorship had been softening little by little over the years, ever since the death of Stalin in 1953, three years before Tarkovsky’s first student film and nine years before Ivan’s Childhood, his first feature film. Though the Soviet censors would have been sensitive to anything even remotely, subtly critical of communism, they would have also recognized Tarkovsky’s obvious genius, and would have known that promoting that genius would have been good for the USSR’s global reputation; so a balance between censorship and indulgence was sought.

Recall, also, that Tarkovsky’s son insisted that his father was no political dissident. While Tarkovsky was surely no doctrinaire supporter of the Soviet system, being someone born, raised, and educated in the USSR, he would have at least unconsciously absorbed some basic socialist values, like closing up the gap between the rich and the poor, something this sex scene can be seen to symbolize.

There is a dream sequence seen while Alexander and Maria are making love, in which we see her in the hairstyle and clothing of Adelaide; this shot suggests a wish-fulfillment of Maria being his true soulmate. This vision, along with one–immediately after another brief shot of Leonardo’s painting–of naked Marta chasing after chickens (representing cowardly Victor, who’s running off to Australia after his sexual misconduct?), reinforces our understanding of the failure of Alexander’s married life, his own unconscious acknowledging of that failure.

As they make love, we can hear Maria’s voice, comforting Alexander, trying to soothe his pain and ease his fears. It’s easy to see how he’d prefer her to his emotionally volatile wife, whom, indeed, we see lurking in the darkness immediately after we see naked Marta.

He wakes up on his sofa, back at home. The power and telephones are back. His beloved Japanese flute music is playing on his stereo. He later puts on a Japanese robe, as if about to perform some kind of Shinto ritual.

The electricity having come back, right after the supposedly salvific lovemaking, implies that all is back to normal, that God, satisfied with Alexander’s ‘gift,’ has prevented nuclear war. Still, Alexander is not assured of the world’s safety, of this Nietzschean eternal recurrence (i.e., from the end of the world to its new beginning) that Otto had promised, so Alexander–in his ongoing religious hysteria–feels he must make the ultimate sacrifice: burn his house to the ground.

Further evidence of his family’s dysfunction is seen when, as he’s sneaking around behind them in his frenzy, Adelaide and Marta are upset to have heard of Victor’s plan to leave them and go to Australia. The women complain of Alexander losing his ‘friend,’ but they’re really just jealously upset about losing a lover. Victor, of course, just wants to run away from facing the responsibilities of his own sexual misconduct.

Alexander must be aware that he’s been made a cuckold: he’d be overhearing their conversation as he’s sneaking around, and he must have seen and heard previous hints of their fooling around behind his back. Part of his reason for burning down the house, rendering Adelaide and Marta homeless, must be out of spite; yet with no consideration for Little Man, whom he deeply loves, Alexander is still being irrational.

And again, I must ask, especially if the lovemaking with Maria (also Alexander’s unconscious revenge against his adulteress wife) is enough to save the world: why would burning down his house appease God? Didn’t He prefer His Son’s crucifixion?

My answer to this, as with the lovemaking with Maria, is that its meaning is symbolic. Alexander’s house, where his maids work, is his property. Private property, which we socialists wish to abolish, is places: farmland, factories, office buildings, apartment buildings–the means of production.

The acquisition and accumulation of capital (which must ever expand), along with the ruthless and jealous wish to protect ownership of it, have led to the export of capital into other countries, as well as competition over who will exploit the most of those countries. This has resulted in two imperialist world wars, and with the American invention of the atomic bomb, fears of nuclear war.

So, to avert nuclear war, Alexander’s burning down of his house can be seen to symbolize a bourgeois sacrifice of private property. (This message is especially relevant to us today, in our current Cold War with Russia and China–hence my urgent recommendation of this film.) Class war is the inevitable result of rich landowners leaving very little for the poor to live with. Bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, being so intolerable for the poor, necessitates class antagonisms and socialist revolution.

In the modern world, imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism makes war inevitable, as a competition for land and resources. The Manhattan Project brought in the nuclear age, resulting in the necessity of the USSR, China, and the DPRK to develop their own nuclear weapons programs, to prevent the US from bombing them as Japan had been bombed. To prevent nuclear war, then, the class antagonisms of capitalism and imperialism must be ended–hence, the abolition of private property, as Alexander’s arson symbolizes.

It’s fitting in this connection that, as the house is burning down to the ground and his family, Julia, and Victor return from their walk to watch the fire in horror, Maria arrives on her bicycle and Alexander runs up to her, falls to his knees, and kisses her hands. This is symbolic of the bourgeois ceding power to the worker, as linked with the burning down of the house as representing the abolishing of private property.

Bourgeois Adelaide and Victor take him away from Maria, he runs back to her, and they take him away again, Adelaide growling at Maria, “Don’t touch him!” This symbolizes capitalist attempts at counterrevolution. As a bourgeois himself, Alexander can thus be seen as like Engels.

Now, the above is my allegoric interpretation of Tarkovsky’s “parable.” On the literal level, however, it’s obvious that Alexander, driven to hysteria by the fear of nuclear annihilation, has simply gone mad in his religious ecstasy. Just as Tarkovsky was, as I speculate, ambivalent about socialism, so was he ambivalent about spirituality and religion, seeing both the good and bad sides in it. Spirituality can give comfort, and it can cause one to go mad. Tarkovsky’s genius allowed him to have just as nuanced an attitude towards religion as he had towards socialism.

It’s safe to assume that the paramedics, presumably answering a call from a neighbour about the arson, will drive Alexander to a mental hospital. His family has fallen apart just as he has mentally. There is no spiritual edification to be found in this scene, except for the allegory I provided.

With the end of this family’s world achieved in his arson, the eternal recurrence brings us back to the beginning with Little Man tending the tree. Finally, he can speak, and he quotes the opening of the Gospel of John as mentioned above. His question, “Why is that, Papa?”, seems to be another example of Tarkovsky’s ambivalence towards religion. The quote from John affirms it, while the boy’s question challenges its validity.

The lesson that the parable of The Sacrifice seems to be teaching us is that spirituality has its good and bad sides, and that we must be forever mindful of both. It’s a wavelike dialectic, going up and down and up and down.

Analysis of ‘Blow Out’

Blow Out is a 1981 thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. It stars John Travolta and Nancy Allen, with John Lithgow and Dennis Franz.

Though the film pays homage to Hitchcock and a number of slasher films, it is directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni‘s Blowup, replacing the medium of photography with that of audio recording. In this way, Blow Out is also influenced by The Conversation, by Francis Ford Coppola.

Though Blow Out was largely praised on release–in particular, Travolta’s and Allen’s performances, De Palma’s direction, and the film’s visual style–it didn’t do well at the box office. Over the years, however, it has developed into a cult film. Quentin Tarantino has called Blow Out one of his favourite films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Since Blow Out is based on Blowup, it’s useful to compare and contrast the themes in both films. I discuss the themes of Blowup in my analysis of that film, so you can look there, Dear Reader, for a more thorough discussion of that; whereas here I’ll only briefly refer to them as I compare and contrast them with those of Blow Out.

In Blowup, there is an exploration of how one’s perception of reality is deceptive: something caught and frozen in mid-action in a photograph may not be what it seems, since reality is fluid, in endless motion, and so what is caught in the photo may be wildly out of context. Similarly, sounds can go by in time so fast that our ears can miss them…unless one happens to have the sensitive, attentive ears of a sound effects technician like Jack Terry (Travolta).

There are crucial contrasts between these films, though, in their exploration of perception and reality. Thomas, the photographer in Blowup, overanalyzes photos he’s taken, and he ends up imagining a murder having taken place that, in my interpretation at least, probably never happened. His analysis has led to an illusion, projected from himself onto the scene based on his own guilt feelings. Jack’s analysis of sounds he’s recorded, on the other hand, lead to the truth, as well as proof of that truth…though his attempts to publicize that truth are thwarted.

Thomas’s conflict between his faulty perceptions and reality are of a more philosophical nature. Jack’s difficulties proving the truth of what he’s perceived–the sound of a gunshot blowing out the tire of a politician’s car, causing it to fall into a lake, killing him–are the stuff of a political conspiracy, which in the end Jack cannot prove, because the evidence is destroyed.

So both films explore how reality is manipulated in some sense: in Blowup, it’s manipulated in Thomas’s mind in an effort to deflect personal guilt; in Blow Out, a Chappaquiddick-style killing is manipulated to look like an accident, with all the evidence of the blown-out tire removed.

Another point of comparison between the two films is how they deal with sexism. Thomas is routinely disrespectful to his models, generally female, until an assertive woman in the park where he took the photos, which included her and her lover, confronts him about them, demanding him to give her the negatives. In Blow Out, pretty much every woman (apart from extras and a TV anchorwoman) is young, beautiful, sexualized, and–I hate to say it–ditzy. Rather than being a promotion of sexism, though, I’d say that De Palma’s film, like Antonioni’s in its own way, is a comment on sexism.

By presenting almost all the women in Blow Out as hot-looking bimbos, we’re seeing a commentary not on how women actually are, but rather how they’re perceived in society, especially in the media. Remember that a theme common to both films is the contrast between perception and reality, and how perception is manipulated through such instruments of the media as photography and sound effects.

Feminists have written book after book about the evil of presenting women as sex objects, and of how such presentations of women give men power over them. The film’s portrayal of women as stupid and talentless reinforces that sense of female powerlessness under men. It’s easy to see the link, therefore, between on the one hand, female beauty (so attractive to sexual predators) and a woman’s perceived lack of intelligence or talent (i.e., those awful, fake screams for the slasher film that Jack is doing the sound for), and on the other hand, women’s vulnerability to male serial killers. One is reminded of that old Chinese misogynist saying, “女子無才便是德” (“If a woman has no talents, that is virtue for her.”)

Blow Out is known as a film concerned with the mechanics of movie-making, how visuals and sound are put together to make an effective illusion (e.g., Jack’s synching up of the recorded sounds of the blow out and car crash with a set of photos of the incident, run together to make a crude, short film), a story for an audience to get lost in watching. The element of political conspiracy in the film, and the cover-up of the assassination of the politician in the car, presenting it in the media as a mere accident, shows how this film’s preoccupations with the mechanics of visuals and sound can be expanded on into a general critique of the media as a tool used by the powerful to thwart the powerless.

The film begins as what looks like a third-rate slasher film. We see things from the POV of the killer, who is approaching a sorority house at night; we’re reminded of the opening of Black Christmas. That many of the sorority girls are engaging in various forms of naughtiness (dancing in see-through nighties by a window, where a security man is enjoying the show; a woman having sex with a man by her window, where the killer watches them; a woman masturbating in her room) before the killing spree starts suggests a parody of Friday the 13th, released the year before Blow Out.

That POV camera also suggests Hitchcock’s voyeuristic camera, and the killer’s first victim being a girl in a shower is an obvious allusion to Psycho. The actress’s terribly unrealistic scream at seeing the killer’s knife destroys the illusion, and we soon realize that we’ve been watching Coed Frenzy, a slasher film that Jack and producer Sam (played by Peter Boyden) are doing post-production on.

This shift from thinking the slasher film is the real story to knowing it’s a film within a film is comparable to many moments in Blowup when we’re led to believe, for example, that at the beginning Thomas is one of the destitute men until he gets in his nice car and drives away. As in Blowup, a major theme in Blow Out is the tension between appearance and reality.

And just after we’ve been briefly tricked into thinking that Coed Frenzy is the real story, we soon come to realize that much of what’s going on in Coed Frenzy is paralleled in what’s going on in Jack’s story. The theme of maniacal men terrorizing the powerless is seen not only in the killer in the slasher film; he has his double in Burke (Lithgow), a psychopath working for the rival candidate of McRyan, the presidential hopeful killed in the car crash.

Sam likes neither the showering girl’s fake-sounding scream nor the wind that Jack has chosen for the beginning of Coed Frenzy (i.e., with the killer outside the house at night), so Sam wants Jack to help him find a better female screamer as well as to record new wind effects. This altering of sounds to get a more ‘realistic’ effect ironically makes the film all the more fake (i.e., getting the sounds from sources far removed from the originals), and it reinforces the theme of how the media, a tool of the powerful, is used to deceive the powerless.

Jack goes to a park by a lake to record wind that night. As he’s recording the blowing of the wind, we see an example of De Palma’s use of the split screen (i.e., Jack recording in one half, and a closeup of an owl in the other…to get that ominous effect). This splitting-up of the screen causes a kind of Brechtian alienation effect, destroying the movie goers’ illusion that what they see is an actual world, and reminding them that they’re seeing a show. Again, the use of split screen is part of the theme of media as an illusion used to manipulate the emotions of the common people.

Wind, air, breath–these make up a recurring motif in the film, symbolic of life and of communication. If Jack hadn’t been out there this night recording wind, Sally (Allen) would be dead in McRyan’s car at the bottom of the lake–drowned, her air supply cut off. Burke typically kills his victims by strangling them with piano wire, by cutting off their air supply.

The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, which literally means ‘breath.’ Recall Genesis 2:7. There’s also the Spirit of God, the ruach, which literally means ‘wind,’ or ‘breath.‘ So wind and breath are symbols of life in the film.

Another point is that sound travels through air. Jack’s preoccupation with sounds, the sound of the blow-out of the tire (from Burke’s shooting of it) in particular, letting air out of the tire, further reinforces the motif of air throughout the film.

Only Jack, with his sensitive, attentive ear for sounds, is up to rescuing Sally…and at the end of the film, not even he can save her. He represents that male ideal so many modern women have wanted: a man who listens.

He is the kind of man Sally so desperately needs, because all of the other men in her life exploit her. Manny Karp (Franz) is more or less her pimp, giving her jobs to get in bed with powerful, wealthy men so he can take photos of them together, blackmail the men, and pay her far less that she’s worth. McRyan was supposed to have been thus blackmailed, him being the one challenging the president in the upcoming election, but Burke wanted to blow out the tire of his car as well.

Powerful men like McRyan exploit Sally for sex; sleazebags like Karp exploit her for money and sex (indeed, he even tries to rape her at one point), and psychopaths like Burke want to kill her to clear up loose ends, for political purposes. That Sally is pretty and speaks in a high-pitched, ‘ditzy’ voice, reinforces her sense of naïve vulnerability, her everywoman powerlessness in a male-dominated society.

She is exploited and abused in all of these ways, and she is also made invisible, in how the politicians allied with McRyan don’t want the public to know that she was in the car with him. Keeping her involvement out of the media’s awareness, to prevent a scandal that would taint his memory and hurt his family even worse, is nonetheless another example of disguising the truth with the media, by way of omission. Hence, Jack is made to sneak Sally out of the hospital so the media won’t know about her.

The theme of disguising the truth comes in other forms, including Sally’s own choices. In the hospital, she’s embarrassed to be seen by Jack without her makeup on, though he insists, being the nice, sensitive guy he is, that she looks fine without it. Later, she talks to him about her skill as a makeup artist to make women’s faces look better…that is, to disguise reality in a mask of cosmetics.

Other disguises of reality include Burke’s replacing of the shot-out tire with a new one, so the news will report McRyan’s death as a mere accident, and when Jack insists it was a deliberate murder and a cover-up, everyone will think he’s a crackpot conspiracy theorist. Certainly, Detective Mackey (played by John Aquino), who has done the investigation on McRyan’s death and doesn’t even like Jack (for having used his sound-man skills to put away a number of corrupt cops), thinks the death was an accident and treats Jack’s suspicions with contempt.

It’s significant that Burke, hired by and therefore associated with American politicians, is a murdering psychopath. Hollywood movies typically portray psychopaths as violent killers, as in the slasher films that Coed Frenzy parodies. In fact, this Hollywood portrayal is a wildly exaggerated stereotypification, for usually these people, though lacking in empathy, enjoying exploiting and hurting others remorselessly, and needing excitement, often enough get their kicks within the limits of the law. Burke thus is another distortion of reality in Blow Out.

Still, as an employee of the American government, Burke is aptly presented as a serial killer, as a symbolic critique of the imperialist US government. Consider all of the violent deaths caused by American interference in the politics of other countries. In this connection, it is grimly fitting that this serial killer is referred to as the “Liberty Bell Strangler,” given that the killings occur around “Liberty Day,” the time of celebrations and a parade commemorating the Liberty Bell.

Indeed, the murder of Sally happens right on the night of the commemoration; we see her screaming for Jack to save her while she’s standing against a huge backdrop of the American flag. This land of ‘liberty’ has a killer hired by American politicians going after some of the most vulnerable people of the world–women in particular.

The false presentation of reality–the celebration–is what is seen on the TV. The identity of the serial killer, he being an employee of the US government, is conveniently kept secret, since the news reporters claim that who he is remains unknown…which seems odd when the police, after finding his body, would presumably find some kind of ID on him. The government plot is covered up, and the people continue to believe in the ‘freedom and democracy‘ of the US.

Now, the liberal producers of Blow Out would have us believe that Burke represents an aberration of the system, since the politician in on the plot to blackmail McRyan–during a telephone conversation with Burke, and disgusted with his excesses–tries to distance himself from the psychopath. This is a common liberal tactic: the system, apparently, is OK; we just have to get rid of the ‘bad apples’ in it. Again, this is how it appears to us in the media–not so in reality.

All of Jack’s attempts to present proof of the plot to kill McRyan are erased or destroyed by Burke. Stills from video filmed by Karl are sold to a tabloid, presenting the false story of a car accident instead of a killing. But at least Jack has been able to provide better wind and “a good scream” (Sally’s) from his recordings. It’s painfully ironic that the only way the producers of Coed Frenzy can get a convincing scream is from one of a girl really being murdered.

The weakest and most vulnerable in society are looked down on, demeaned, over-sexualized, and ultimately killed. Only sensitive Jack has seen the human being behind Sally’s pretty face; as a result, he’s fallen in love with her, and he mourns her death, obsessively listening to recordings of her last words before Burke gets to her. He cares for her through listening to her, not leering at her.

Just as his attempts to root out police corruption, through wiretapping someone to record evidence, result in an undercover cop’s getting killed, so do his attempts to expose a government conspiracy, again through wiretapping Sally, get her killed. Jack’s attempts at achieving justice fail; his sensitive listening just falls on deaf…and dead…ears.

Analysis of ‘Un Homme Qui Dort’

Un homme qui dort (“The Man Who Sleeps,” or “A Man Asleep”) is a 1974 French film directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, based on Perec’s story of the same name. It stars Jacques Spiesser.

The film’s script is taken completely from the text of Perec’s prose, though in a condensed form. The text is in the second person singular, as though the narrator (recited by Ludmila Mikaël in the original French, and by Shelley Duvall in English translation) were speaking to Spiesser’s character.

The black-and-white film was almost lost, but it was restored on DVD in 2007. It received some critical acclaim, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, here is a link to an English translation of Perec’s story (or is it the script for the film?), and here is a link to the film with English subtitles. Here is a link to the English language version.

A twenty-five-year-old Parisian university student (Spiesser), whose name is not given (thus making him a kind of everyman), lives in a one-room chambre de bonne. His feelings of alienation have risen to such a pitch that he no longer wishes to participate in social life. “…you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that you don’t know how to live and that you never will know.”

The notion that he is “a man asleep” is metaphorical. Actually, he wanders the streets of Paris instead of going to school and hanging out with friends. He’s living the life of an automaton, devoid of human interaction; it’s an attempt at indifference as a way of alleviating suffering. Self-isolation, he hopes, is a way to nirvana.

He’s as passive as can practically be achieved: “…it’s not action at all, but an absence of action…”

He imagines that someone else, his twin, his double, will get out of bed, wash, shave, dress, go out, and attend school for him. This idea of a double is significant, for it is expressed in other forms: the narrator, addressing him as “you,” is the rambling of his own thoughts in a kind of unwritten diary; also, there’s his cracked, Lacanian mirror, the specular image of which he is alienated from, too.

Finally, there’s the reproduction of René Magritte‘s 1937 surrealist painting, La reproduction interdite, showing a man standing in front of a mirror, his back to us and facing it; but instead of seeing the man’s face reflected back to us, we see the back of his head just as we do of the actual man in front of the mirror. About fifteen minutes into the film, when the student has gone into a theatre to see a movie, we see a surreal variation of this picture, but it’s the student, and the images show him repeatedly facing away from his ‘reflection.’ More self-alienation.

All of these doublings of himself indicate his having left the social and cultural world of the Symbolic Order in order to regress into the narcissistic, dyadic world of the Imaginary. In time, the horrors of the Real will jolt him out of his isolation, and force him to reintegrate into the Symbolic.

It’s also significant that the movie is in black-and-white, when colour film was easily available, and when, by the early 70s, virtually all movies were in colour. I see the choice of black-and-white to be symbolic of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting, part of the cause of this young man’s psychological problems.

According to Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position causes us to split people into being perceived as all-good or all-bad, the bad ones being projected outward and split off from us. This is what the student is doing, though he seems to feel that virtually all elements of society are bad, so he splits them off, including his internal objects of them, and projects them outward, imagining himself to be safe without them.

But of course, he won’t be safe without them, because the internal objects are a part of himself; hence, towards the end of the film, when the tension is raised and he realizes he can’t just cut himself off from the world, we see the black-and-white film in negative images.

Still, for the time being, anyway, he feels a sense of peace and bliss from no longer engaging with the world. Wouldn’t we all love to break away like this?! To give up on all responsibilities, to let Freud‘s death drive kick in, and be at rest, no longer suffering with the rest of the world.

Pleasure, for Freud, consists in the relaxation of tension, which in the form of death, is the ultimate relaxation of it; hence, the death drive as being merely the other side of the same coin as that of the libido, part of Eros. We sense that the young student is aiming for just such a relaxation of tension, though, like Hamlet, he’s too chicken to go through with suicide.

So life as a passive, indifferent automaton seems a reasonable compromise. Indifference, in this regard, is like that of the Buddhist avoiding gratification of desire, or attachment to the world…but without the Buddhist’s hard discipline, of course. The non-existence of nirvana, no-thing-ness, the escape from existence as pain, dukkha, is the death-paradise the student seeks.

We’re reminded of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“…to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” (III, i)

It is in this sense that we should understand the young student to be “the man who sleeps.”

Recall that the narrator, his anima mirror-double, says, “You have no desire to carry on […] the fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more, to see no more, to remain silent and motionless. Crazy dreams of solitude.”

At one point, in the middle of this solitude, he imagines he has reached this point of nirvana, for the narrator says the following to him:

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything.
You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you.
You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, an almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions.
You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing.
You are invisible, limpid, transparent.
You no longer exist…”

His friends have stopped over to say hello, but he ignores the knocking on his door and the paper messages slipped under it. He wants no contact with others, for he has come to understand that hell is other people; he doesn’t want to bear their judgemental gaze…yet the narrator, his internalized Other, addressing him with a judgemental “you,” ensures that he will never escape the hell of judgemental others. Therefore, there is no exit for him, not even in indifferent solitude.

(We hear, almost an hour into the film, “Il n’y a pas d’issue,” that is, “There is no way out,” or “There is no exit”; now, Sartre‘s play is named Huis clos–“Closed Door”–in the original French, but English translations of the play with titles like No Way Out and No Exit would have been well known by the time Perec began writing his story. Besides, the student, when in his chambre de bonne, typically has his door closed, anyway.)

When we see him wandering the streets of Paris, we usually see few if any other people there. This can be seen in the middle of the day, when the streets presumably would be far busier: could he be dreaming during these moments, experiencing wish-fulfillment?

Alone, in his chambre, he smokes, drinks Nescafé, looks up at the cracks on his ceiling (easily associated with the cracks in his mirror, all symbols of his fragmented self), and plays a game of cards similar to solitaire. This escape from the social world, into one of solitary play and contemplation, is not too far removed from the maladaptive daydreaming of traumatized people, or the self-isolation of sufferers of stress from Adverse Childhood Experiences.

His room–small, hot, claustrophobic, and with those cracks in the ceiling and on the mirror–is nonetheless “the centre of the world” for him. The room thus in many ways represents himself: fragmented, narcissistic, a place to hide himself in sleep, and a place to escape from when he can no longer stand himself. He’s as passive as that dripping tap, or those six socks soaking in the pink plastic bowl–sharks as indolent as he is.

With his loss of interest in social life comes also his loss of interest in time, whose passing he barely notices. Similarly, when during his wandering of the Parisian streets, two twin boys in identical clothes are running past him from behind while rattling a ruler against the palings of a fence he’s walking beside, he isn’t at all irritated by the noise. The boys’ duality parallels his duality as against his alienated self, his image in the mirror, the man twice seen in the Magritte picture with his back to us, his imaginary double replacing him in going about his normal daily routine, and his anima narrator…except that the boys are, in their energetic, enthusiastic participation in life, his dialectical opposite–what he still could be if he weren’t so alienated from everything and everyone.

In the Luxembourg Garden, he watches the pensioners playing cards, comparable to his own playing of his solitaire-esque game in his room. Such a comparison suggests a unity of self and other vis-à-vis him and the pensioners…also a dialectical unity between the elderly and his young self.

In a development of this theme of self and other, young vs. old, we see him watching an old man sitting on a bench staring into space “for hours on end,” as if mummified, “gazing into emptiness.” The young man, admiring the elder, would like to know his secrets, for the latter seems to have attained the ideal of detached indifference for which the former has been striving. (One is reminded of Prince Siddhartha seeing a holy man, and thus being inspired to find enlightenment himself.) He looks at the old man as if staring into a mirror, gazing at his ideal-I…so much better than his reflection in his cracked mirror in his room.

At one point, while reading the business news in Le Monde, he imagines himself to be some important businessman or politician smoking a cigar and getting out of a car. Ending the narcissistic fantasy of him identifying himself with important men, he is seen as his ordinary self, playing pinball.

When playing his solitaire-like card game, he removes the aces, so he has no ‘ace in the hole,’ or ‘ace up his sleeve.’ Accordingly, he rarely succeeds at the game, yet winning doesn’t matter to him, for what would winning mean to him, anyway? The card game, after all, is like life: if he’s indifferent to life, why would he care any more about winning at some card game? He goes through the motions like an automaton, all meaninglessly, just as he does through life.

We’ve noticed, by now, that he’s been biting his nails.

As I mentioned above, he reaches a point when his ‘mastery,’ as it were, of the indifferent life has allowed him to attain a kind of bliss. He seems as indifferent as the dripping tap, as the six socks soaking in the plastic pink bowl, as a fly, as a tree, as a rat.

He speaks no more than is absolutely necessary: in this disengagement with language, and therefore with society, he is leaving the Symbolic. “Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs.” Though he’d seem to be blissfully regressing to the narcissism of the Imaginary, before long, he’ll experience the trauma of the undifferentiated Real.

In this sense of non-differentiation, he finds himself with a series of choices of ‘you do, or you don’t do.’ These include:

You walk or you do not walk.
You sleep or you do not sleep.
You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it.
You eat or you do not eat.

A little later, the narrator says, “You play pinball or you don’t.” All of these ‘do or not do’ expressions remind us of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Just as Hamlet suffered from an inability to act, whether in killing his uncle Claudius or in killing himself, so does the young Parisian student feel incapable of acting, hence his automaton-like passivity and indifference. Still, in the end, like Hamlet, he must act.

Tense music can be heard playing in the background, suggesting that he is reaching the limit of how long he can continue to live the ‘indifferent’ life. Though I mentioned above the black-and-white film as representing his black-and-white psychological splitting, there’s also the preponderance of grey, for he is “a grey man with no connotation of dullness.” Indeed, his life has grown so dull that he’s forgotten what excitement is.

In his narcissism, in his imagined mastery of the indifferent life, he fancies himself “the nameless master of the world.” Buddha-like, he has seen that motionless old man the way Prince Siddhartha saw the impressive holy man (after having seen the old, sick, and dead men, as you’ll recall from his legendary life story), and now he imagines he has attained enlightenment. “All you are is all you know.” Total, narcissistic solipsism…nirvana? I think not.

So in his ‘mastery’ of the indifferent, he’s “inaccessible, like a tree, like a shop window, like a rat.” We again see a shot of him watching the motionless old man, as if he were looking in a mirror at his ideal-I, or like the Buddha seeing the holy man. We see a shot of that indifferent dripping tap, too, as well as shots of a walkway with trees, benches, and fences on either side, yet devoid of any people…the misanthropic young man’s ideal world.

But he soon comes to realize all of the ways that he is not at all like the ‘enlightened’ and ‘indifferent’ rat; for rats don’t have sleepless nights, they don’t bite their fingernails, they don’t wake up bathed in sweat, they don’t dream, against which the young man has no protection.

We come back to Hamlet: “to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Just as Hamlet couldn’t use the “sleep of death” as an escape from his problems, for he’d then have the nightmare of hell to deal with after having committed the sin of suicide, so can’t this young student use the sleep of indifference as an escape from his alienating world, for his nightmares are the return of repressed pain that he’ll never be able to project onto the world and be rid of.

Such an understanding “makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of”.

To get back to the biting of his fingernails, we learn that he bites them so violently that they bleed and are in unbearable pain. This violent biting is an example of his excessive attempts at splitting off and projecting those ‘black’ parts of himself that he doesn’t accept. The biting represents his alienation from himself, his refusal to integrate his Shadow.

Rats don’t play pinball, either, and when he plays, for hours on end, he’s in a rage…hardly indifferent. No, he isn’t much of a Buddha. But like Hamlet, he “can play or not play.” He can’t start up a conversation with the pinball machine, though, and this incidentally would seem to be his reason for preferring pinball to people. At the same time, a pinball machine cannot give him the human response, the love, that he so obviously needs.

It is in this very retreat from human company, replacing it with things that will never satisfy, that we can all relate to the young man; for don’t we all, in our own way, attempt a sleep of indifference to the world?

The narrator says repeatedly that he drifts around the streets, an odd behaviour for someone who has supposedly ‘found the answer’ to his problems. He goes back to his room and tries to go to sleep, but he can’t; instead, he would “calmly measure the sticky extent of [his] unhappiness,” and he goes out again and wanders the streets at night.

It is around this point that we start noticing a switch to negative film, back and forth between this and regular black-and-white film. We also hear the first of a series of references to “monstrous” things, or to “monsters”–in this case, “the monstrous factory gates.” We also hear of “impatient crowds,” which I believe are the “monsters” he’s been trying so hard to rid himself of.

Now, unhappiness hasn’t come to him all of a sudden: it’s gradually appeared to him, as if without his knowing until it was fully formed. Unhappiness has been in the cracks on his ceiling, and on his mirror, in the dripping tap, in those things in which he saw blissful indifference. All of his wandering has been meaningless.

As we see him biting his fingernails again, there’s a rapping, percussive sound in the background, reinforcing the sense of his agitation. He keeps playing his absurd card game, having removed the aces, but it offers no way out of his malaise…the same as with his wandering.

By now, an hour into the film, the narrator is speaking faster, with more urgency in her voice. We see negative film again, with crowds of people on the street. That rapping noise is still being heard. “The monsters have come into your life,” the narrator says, “the rats, your fellow creatures, your brothers. The monsters in their tens, their hundreds, their thousands.” These crowds of people are the ones he’s been trying to get away from…but can’t. This is also one of the first references to “rats” that is negative…interesting that this is happening now.

As we see more of the negative film, we hear the narrator say, “You follow their shadows [i.e., those of the “monsters,” the crowds of people], you are their shadow [i.e., you are the very thing you see in them that you won’t accept].” As the rapping sound continues, we also hear the narrator speaking faster, and we hear a dissonant chord played on a keyboard.

We see more shots of crowds of people walking on the streets, we hear more rapping, and the dissonant keyboard chord. Images of condemned, torn-down buildings, too. More references to “monsters,” all those people he hates. The juxtaposition of all these jarring images, sounds, and words is, of course, deliberate. The narrator’s voice is getting more and more agitated. The film alternates between normal black and white and negative film during this climactic moment.

The narrator mentions “…all the others who are even worse, the smug, the smart-Alecs, the self-satisfied…” These people seem suspiciously like projections of himself as the would-be indifferent Buddha. Again, he’s trying to split off and throw away what it is inside himself that he doesn’t like–the Shadow he needs to integrate.

After more repetitions of “monster,” the wanderer in his ongoing bitter meditation starts tossing around the word “sad” through his narrator mouthpiece: “sad city, sad lights in the sad streets, sad clowns in sad music-halls, sad queues outside the sad cinemas, sad furniture in the sad stores.”

His heavenly bliss of indifference has become the hell of a most non-gay Paris.

He feels like a prisoner in his cell, like a rat trying to escape its maze. Again, how odd it is that only now is a rat being used as a simile for something negative. He’s starting to realize that his retreat from the world has never been anything good.

The narrator has finally calmed down. Among the shots of rubble, we see a surrealist image of a sink standing alone; instead of containing water, though, we see a flame on it. Should we interpret this rubble of torn-down buildings, and his flaming sink, as representative of his chambre de bonne, in turn representative of himself, torn apart, fragmented, burning, in a psychotic break with reality, in the traumatic agony of Lacan’s Real Order?

“You are afraid,” the narrator says as he looks at all of the rubble, the home he meant to return to. We see a shot of his cracked mirror again, in between the shots of him looking at the rubble. He runs away, another attempt to run away from himself and his problems. We see the burning sink collapse.

Next is a shot of him calmly walking down a street between parked cars. He is calm, and it seems that he has come to accept the necessity of returning to a life in the real world. We hear an eerie tune played on an organ: a repetition of D to G on the right hand (and variations thereof), a descent in the bass from G to F, then to E-flat and to D-flat. A female voice accompanies the organ by singing a high G.

The young man is no wiser from his detachment from the world. “Indifference has not made you any different.” The nirvana of indifference has led back to the samsara of involvement with the world. Still, he won’t be judged for his failed experiment, for he has done nothing wrong. “No, [he is] not the nameless master of the world.” He’s no Buddha. He is afraid, waiting for the rain to stop…as we all are.

The film ends with the same shot of the buildings of the city that we saw at the beginning. The film has come full circle; he’s back where he began. He’s woken up from his metaphorical sleep, ready to go back into the world with the rest of us. We must all wake from our sleep of death, of indifference, and be involved in life again.

Analysis of ‘Burn!’

Burn!, or Queimada, is a 1969 historical film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. It stars Marlon Brando, with Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. It was written by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio, who based the fictional story partly on the activities of William Walker, an American filibuster involved in the 1855 invasion of Nicaragua, and whose name was used for Brando’s character. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, with the beautiful, anthemic “Abolisson” (“abolição,” or “abolition”–i.e., abolition of slavery, or abolition of private property) playing during the film’s opening credits.

Burn! has been critically acclaimed in the US and abroad. Edward Said praised it and Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers, saying they “…stand unmatched and unexcelled since they were made in the 60s. Both films together constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equaled.” The film gives a raw and uncompromising depiction of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. Of these three evils, David N. Meyer said in The Brooklyn Rail that “…few other films ever address them at all,” something Michael Parenti has also observed. Indeed, anti-imperialist cinema like Burn! typically gets minimal distribution in theaters…for reasons that should be obvious.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie, partly in English and partly in Italian with English subtitles.

Sir William Walker is an agent provocateur, sent to the island of Queimada in 1844 by the British Admiralty, for the purpose of stirring up a slave revolt among the blacks on the island to remove the Portuguese regime, so the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can take over and economically exploit the place. In the Lesser Antilles, Queimada literally means “burnt,” because the Portuguese once had to burn the entire island down to put down the resistance of the indigenous people, after whose deaths blacks were brought to the island to work the cane fields.

The flames of Queimada are the hellfire of imperialism.

It’s interesting how in this film we have an American actor playing a British character based on an American, a casting that suggests the intersection of American and British imperialism. The notion of burning the entire island down, in a film made in 1969, when the Vietnam War was still going on, also invites comparison between the destructiveness of the imperialism of the past with modern imperialism, with its napalm fire and bombings of all those people today who try to defy the US/NATO empire.

Empire rules by a cunning combination of the carrot and the stick. We usually note the stick, but don’t pay enough attention to the carrot. Burn! brings our focus to the carrot in how we see Walker entice José Dolores (Márquez) into leading a slave rebellion to help the British oust the Portuguese.

In all of Walker’s machinations we also see an example of inter-imperialist conflict. As competitors in the production and sale of sugar, the British and Portuguese naturally dislike each other, as we see in the altercations between Walker and Portuguese soldiers at the beginning of the film.

We should wince when we see the stark contrast between the wealthy whites, in their fine clothing, getting off the boat with Walker, on the one hand, and the appalling poverty of the blacks, the children of whom are typically half- or fully naked. José appears, offering to carry Walker’s bags: this offer of service will be a motif repeated in the middle of the film and at the end, with strongly ironic overtones…of the sort of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

Walker’s original intention on coming to Queimada has been to meet with a black rebel named Santiago, but the rebel has been caught, and he is to be executed. Walker is informed of the bad news by Teddy Sanchez (Salvatori, in dark makeup), a man of mixed African and European background with revolutionary ideals for the island, but ultimately an ineffectual leader. José is standing by as Walker hears the news, a kind of foreshadowing that he will soon replace Santiago, for Walker’s purposes.

Walker later provokes a Portuguese soldier to get himself arrested, so he can watch Santiago’s brutal execution, which includes the use of the garrote and decapitation, from the window of his prison cell. Being white and wealthy, though, Walker can get a lawyer and be freed promptly.

He follows the widow and children of Santiago as they carry his headless corpse from the prison back up a hill to their home. He gives them a hand in carrying the cart part of the way up the hill; in this act of his, knowing how two-faced he really is, we can see in Walker a personification of the liberal who pretends to care for the downtrodden, but who is really just using these people for his own ends.

We see a similar thing going on today when our movie stars are all simping for Ukraine (Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, Mark Hamill, etc.), pretending they care about the suffering of Ukrainians, when it’s really about promoting the interests of the US/NATO empire, even to the point of defending neo-Nazis (however much the celebrities in question are unaware of, or in denial of, that ugly reality). In this way, it is fitting that a Hollywood actor is playing Walker, a bad guy pretending to be a good guy (though, in Brando‘s defence, he did reject his Godfather Oscar as a protest against Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans; also, Brando considered his performance in Burn! to have been the best of his career).

Alberto Grimaldi, producer of Burn!, wanted Sidney Poitier to play José, but Pontecorvo wanted Márquez for the role. I agree with the director’s choice, not out of disrespect for Poitier, of course, but because an unknown actor is more fitting to play the underdog José.

Since Santiago is dead, Walker needs someone to replace him, someone brave, who takes initiative, someone with nothing to lose. He spots these qualities in José, and tests the black man by abusing him with strikes to the face, calling him a “black ape” who stole his bags when he was arrested, slandering his dead mother, and asking if everything a white man says is correct. At first, José is submissive, suggesting he won’t make a good revolutionary leader…then José tries attacking Walker with a machete.

José is Walker’s man, after all.

What’s ironic in Walker’s provocations of José is that his white supremacism is, of course, genuine, rather than merely posturing as a test to awaken José’s rage. The reality of that white supremacism will be clear to José in good time.

Such dialectical juxtapositions of contraries as these are a theme running throughout the movie. Walker as both “friend” and foe of the blacks, the carrot and stick of imperialism, wealthy whites in their finery among half-naked blacks, and half-white, half-black Sanchez, who lives among the privileged but, sympathetic to the blacks, is ultimately powerless and useless to their cause. Even the band of blacks whom José gathers to commit a bank robbery, meet in a church…and the bank–house of the wealth of the privileged Portuguese–is the Banco Espírito Santo.

The Portuguese soldiers will be distracted by drunk, reveling blacks at night, making the robbery much easier. After informing the Portuguese of where José and his men are, Walker supplies his revolutionaries with weapons and teaches them how to use them. His playing of one side against the other reminds us of how two-faced Walker is.

Since Walker has lied to the Portuguese about a supposedly small number of black thieves, they overconfidently send too few soldiers to retrieve the stolen money, and they are killed by José’s men, an encouragement to his people. Soon they’ll have to fight more Portuguese, of course, and in the process, Walker’s robbery grows into a full-blown revolution.

In making José into a revolutionary leader, Walker has made him into both a blessing and a thorn in the side of the British, as we’ll soon see…another example of the theme of juxtaposed opposites in the film.

While José’s revolution is carrying on, Walker of course has his own, British agenda. In a meeting with a group of wealthy white men, Walker discusses how paid workers will be economically preferable to slaves.

In making his case, he uses a shrewd, if “impertinent,” metaphor: men’s use of wives vs. their use of prostitutes. The wife, in the context of the patriarchal family, is analogous to the slave; she’s her husband’s chattel, but all of her expenses are paid by him, even her burial, if he should survive her. The prostitute, on the other hand, is analogous to the modern-day wage labourer; in belonging to no man (her pimp notwithstanding!), she is “freer,” but her client pays only for her services, and she has to pay for her expenses all out of her own pocket.

This analogy is another example of the film’s dialectical juxtapositions of opposites. The British Empire ended slavery not so much out of humanitarian reasons (though these, as well as slave revolts, were significant factors) as out of the economic reasons Walker has laid out in his women-as-property analogy. Slaves are freed, a good thing; but now they’re wage slaves who are no longer provided for, a bad thing.

So, freeing the black slaves isn’t really freeing them, any more than a prostitute is freed…not if the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can help it. This means that Walker et al cannot allow José Dolores to become another Toussaint L’Ouverture.

For a time, the blacks are happy, celebrating, dancing, and making music. What’s left of the Portuguese regime is allowing them a day of freedoms, the “Dia de Reis,” a kind of Saturnalia. The increasingly demoralized Portuguese soldiers can only stand around in disgust at the sight of the costumed revelers.

Now, just as Walker is using the blacks for his purposes, so is he using Sanchez, whose blackness he sees more than his whiteness. At the same time, presumably because of that whiteness, Walker is more direct with Sanchez about how he is using him–to assassinate the Portuguese governor so Sanchez can head the new provisional government, freeing Britain to exploit the sugar cane industry.

José and his men are to lay down their arms and be workers for the Antilles Royal Sugar Company in exchange for the abolition of slavery in Queimada. We hear Morricone’s “Abolisson” again at this point in the film.

José, wearing the uniform of one of the Portuguese soldiers, doesn’t yet know of Walker’s double-dealing, and he still imagines that “Inglês” is his friend. José still thinks that Queimada belongs to him and his people.

José will soon learn the disillusioning truth, though. He’s already uncomfortable having to negotiate a new Queimada constitution with a provisional government made up of white men. He is cool even when meeting Sanchez, seeing his white skin more than his black; this is all in spite of how Sanchez warmly greets him and sincerely hopes for the best for José’s people. He warns Sanchez to be plain with him during the negotiations.

Over the course of a month of discussions with the whites over how to establish the new constitution, it becomes clear to José that they have no intention of relinquishing control of Queimada. To their obviously self-serving suggestions, he can only say “No.” In frustration, he leaves the room, calling them all “Bastards.”

They rationalize their control over the sugar cane industry by insisting it will be good for the blacks economically, but José can see through these white exploiters. All that matters to them is maintaining a maximization of profit, while he cares about his people. He orders his men to remove all the whites from the building.

Walker carries on with the rationalizing, telling José that his politically inexperienced blacks cannot modernize Queimada without the help of the whites. Walker speaks of who, other than the whites, will handle commerce, teach in Queimada’s schools, and cure the sick among the blacks; but as anyone familiar with colonialism will tell you, those whites will handle commerce, teach in schools, and cure the sick only for the benefit of other wealthy whites. The poor blacks won’t enjoy any of those benefits.

José knows that it’s better, for Queimada to go forward, if the whites go away. The blacks, in their inexperience of modern forms of government, commerce, education, and medicine, will surely stumble many times, but they’ll also learn from their mistakes, and in doing so, they’ll move much farther forward, in due time, than they will as exploited wage slaves, forever mired in poverty, because their white slave masters have never had any intention of giving up their power.

José goes outside at night to reunite with his people. He’s saddened by his disappointments with the whites, but to see his people again, those he loves and who love him, brings a smile back on his face.

Walker finds José in a tent, and with a revolver he is prepared to shoot the revolutionary he’s created; but José finally agrees to his men’s laying down of their arms and returning to the plantations. He can see the pragmatism of going along with the British, to prevent extreme poverty and starvation from engulfing the island; but he warns Walker of who has the machetes, which can cut off heads as well as the cane.

In his warning to the British, who in their selling of the cane that he and his people cut, in their dependence on their black workers, the British are reminded of the slave/master dialectic. This observation should be seen in connection with the following scene the next day, when José offers again to carry Walker’s bags, “for a friend,” as the agent provocateur is going to his ship to leave Queimada. This offer to carry Walker’s bags should be remembered at the end of the film, again in symbolic connection with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

Walker is going to Indochina, to do more of his imperialist cajoling there. He shares a pleasant drink with José, the two of them exchanging friendly smiles, before he boards his ship. His fake friendship with José perfectly exemplifies the two-faced nature of liberals towards those oppressed by imperialism, something the oppressed should be ever wary of.

Ten years later, Walker is sought out so he can go back to Queimada and quell an uprising of José’s in response to the British takeover of the island. What must be emphasized here is how imperialism is in the service of wealthy capitalists. It isn’t just governments who are bullying the blacks of Queimada.

A scene at the London Stock Exchange demonstrates clearly how the financial success of the sugar businesses has given them great political power over their plantations. Men from the Antilles Royal Sugar Company look for Walker, so he can do something about José. He is found in a pub, in the middle of a fistfight that he wins; this detail adds to our understanding of Walker’s brutishness, for we even see him hit the two men seeking him out.

When Walker returns to Queimada, we find not only José rebelling against British exploitation, but also Teddy Sanchez is growing to be uncooperative. Paid for by the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, Walker will act as a military advisor to help put down José’s rebellion. In this we can see clearly how imperialism and colonialism are working in the interests of capitalism; this point would normally be so obvious that it wouldn’t need to be said, except that right-wing libertarians generally refuse to admit that their precious “free market” is ever guilty of any wrongdoing. Government acts alone in these forms of wickedness, in their opinion.

Sanchez hopes Walker will be able to negotiate with José as he had before–to offer the blacks equal civil rights, higher wages, and a general amnesty. The other men in power are hoping Walker will simply get rid of him, and Walker is leaning towards their way of solving the problem.

Another example of the carrot/stick tactic of imperialism is having many black men on the island work as soldiers for the British. We see some of them round up a group of insurgents, line them against the side of a building, and shoot them. One can imagine how the other, powerless blacks must look on these uniformed men as traitors to their own people.

Walker saves one of the men to be shot, needing him to mediate between Walker and José. Though he saves the man’s life for this purpose, because the man tries to run away, Walker shoots him in the leg. In this act, we see, in a symbolic sense, how even when Walker does something good in itself, bad always accompanies the good–more juxtaposing of opposites.

In his conversation with Walker, the man repeats what he’s heard José say, which is the reason for this revolt: the plantation workers, toiling away for the most paltry of wages, are still slaves because they have only machetes, but no ownership of the sugar cane business. We Marxists have always understood how the same basic contradiction has existed throughout history, regardless of if it’s in the form of master vs. slave, feudal lord vs. peasant, or bourgeoisie vs. proletariat: those who own the land and means of production have the power, and they will always be at war with their powerless labourers.

Walker tells the man, just before he is to ride off on a horse to tell José of Walker’s intentions, that he will be pleased to see him. Walker even has the man give José an alcoholic drink as a gift. Such acts are yet more examples of the two-faced liberal pretending to be the friend of the man he’s oppressing.

Walker asks a black soldier working for the imperialists why he isn’t fighting on José’s side. The man doesn’t answer, having a look of shame on his face, but the answer is obvious: his work is safer and better paid…hence, Walker’s smile.

Walker’s container of alcohol is returned from José, with a message on it, saying that he doesn’t drink anymore. José is wise to Walker’s lies now. The message has been sent to him on a cart with dead imperialist soldiers tied to it. It’s obvious that José is done with negotiating. This is war.

In preparing for this war, Walker as the military adviser notes how, in spite of how the imperialists have far more men, weapons, money, etc. than José’s men have, the imperialists haven’t been able to defeat José for these six years; apart from the guerrillas’ inaccessible location, the reason for this frustration is that the imperialists fight for their pay and because they have to, whereas the guerrillas fight for an idea, because they have nothing to lose but their lives. They fight for their love of freedom, and this love motivates them in a way that nothing comparable can for the imperialists. Revolutionaries must never forget this edge they have over the powerful, and must use this edge to steel their courage.

The black collaborators manage to find where the guerrillas and the people they’re protecting are, and they round up the people; then, carrying torches, they burn down the forests where the guerrillas have been hiding. As with the Portuguese, the imperialists’ method of victory is total, indiscriminate destruction, with no respect for plant life, just like the “innocents raped with napalm fire” during the Vietnam War.

A dying black collaborator tells his comrades that the guerrillas emerged from the fire, themselves burning, and killed him and his fellow collaborators there at a fort. The dying man describes the guerrillas as inhuman devils, an obvious projection of how inhuman and devilish the torchers of the forest are.

The imperialists find other villages where the rebels’ people are living, and the black collaborators round them up, too, and burn down their homes. Dogs chase a guerrilla through the fields until he comes to a clearing, then he is shot.

Sanchez, ever torn between his wish to help the blacks and his being forced to help the whites (perfectly symbolized in his half-white, half-black skin), tells all the rounded-up people that the war is José’s fault, it will end soon, and they will all go back to work. The frown on his face shows how reluctant he is in telling them this.

Bread is offered on a cart to the hungry people, and while they are expected to sit and wait patiently for it to be distributed, they rush for the cart, and the collaborators have to fire their rifles to bring about order. Sanchez, in his growing frustration, makes an attempt to take control of the government for the sake of the blacks. His unwillingness to cooperate with the Antilles Royal Sugar Company will be his undoing. In his downfall, we see how the government is controlled by the capitalists, not vice versa.

British redcoats arrive on the island to help defeat José. Sanchez is arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason, and he is executed by firing squad. His arrest is “in the name of the people of Queimada,”…but we all know which people are being referred to here.

The redcoats start fighting the guerrillas, and we see them rounding up the blacks, including women and children. We see the trauma in the eyes of a naked black boy when he has rifles pointed at him. Cannon and rifle fire have left a fog of smoke and a sea of flame all over the plantations…Queimada, indeed. Guerrillas are getting shot left, right, and centre, including the one who mediated between Walker and José.

Shelton (played by Norman Hill) complains of the destruction of the sugar cane plants that has resulted from the battle. After explaining that the plants can be grown again for future exploitation by the Antilles Company, Walker tells Shelton why the island is named Queimada, and that the danger of revolutionary fervour passing from here to other exploited islands greatly outweighs any momentary loss of profits.

José is spotted in Walker’s telescope; he is climbing a mountain with his fellow guerrillas. Here he is shot and captured. Just so we have no doubts about Walker’s duplicitous nature, he describes José as “a fine specimen” who started as a water and bag carrier, made into a revolutionary leader for England’s purposes, and then when he is no longer useful, he is eliminated, “a small masterpiece”; Walker says all of this while smiling.

Just as Walker has spoken of new sugar cane crops growing after a burning, so does José speak of a rebirth of revolutionary feeling after the imperialist fire has defeated him. José says this among the black collaborationists, as if to plant the seed in their minds, to move them to redeem themselves. José knows that others with replace him after he’s executed, hence he doesn’t fear death.

Walker comes over to greet José and shake his hand, but the latter of course won’t shake the hand of the man who’s stabbed him in the back so many times. Walker offers José drink, but he remains cool. Walker has a soldier give José his horse; this gift doesn’t make Walker any more his friend by the weight of an atom.

A naked black boy is found in one of the desolate villages; Walker orders a black collaborator to grab the boy and take him with them. We hear the cries and screams of the boy as he’s carried off. As this is happening, Walker rides over to José and angrily blames the victim, calling José a “black ape” again, and accusing him of starting the bloodshed, in true imperialist fashion. José spits in Walker’s face.

When José is to be hanged, Walker hopes to free him, not out of any sense of camaraderie or remorse (as the Wikipedia article spuriously claims), but because Walker fears making a martyr out of him, inspiring future revolutionaries. If Walker can make it seem to the blacks that José has betrayed them, or has fled death like a coward, then the spirit of revolution may die with him…or at least be weakened.

This attitude is what we should see in Walker when he enters José’s tent and tries to cut him loose. He feels no remorse whatsoever for having betrayed José. In offering him a chance to save his life, Walker is making no act of atonement. Earlier, we even see Walker tie the noose to hang José with.

José chooses to be hanged rather than run free, since he knows that staying alive would be convenient to the British. His martyrdom will indeed inspire future revolutionaries among the blacks; a spark of such inspiration is to be seen in the final scene, as Walker approaches the ship to take him off the island.

The frown we see on Walker’s face as he goes there is, as I said above, not a frown of remorse, despite what the liberal editors of Wikipedia would have you believe. His is a frown from having not done the best he could have done at his job, something he earlier said he prides himself on. He’s frowning at José’s martyrdom, a danger to the empire, and a sign that Walker has ultimately failed in his imperial project.

His failure is to be openly displayed when he hears a black man offer to carry his bags again. Hearing the voice from behind, Walker has a brief hope it’s the voice of José. He frowns in disappointment to see it’s a different man, who then sticks a knife in Walker’s gut.

As he lies dead on the ground, we see black workers looking from all around at him, frowning because of all the pain, suffering, and death that his machinations have caused them, but they’re also content to have finally got their revenge. After the burning, the spirit of revolution will be reborn.

This act of service, offering to take his bags, then stabbing him, is once again a symbolic manifestation of the master/slave dialectic. Capitalists will hang themselves on the very rope they make, just as they made José hang, since he so willingly allowed it. We don’t need the capitalists; they need us, the proletariat. It’s their very dependance on our work that will be their undoing, and this is what the taking of Walker’s bags, then the taking of his life, at this final moment of the film, symbolize.

We in today’s world can use Burn! to teach us to beware the carrot as well as the stick of imperialism. When they offer us freedom in manufacturing our consent for their wars, they’re really scheming to cause us to suffer more servitude to the depredations of empire, that juxtaposition of contraries that I mentioned above.

It’s obscene to call the Ukrainian war against Russia a struggle for Ukrainian freedom and democracy (as the European bootlickers of the US assert), when the very Ukrainian authorities being given all the Western money and aid include neo-Nazis who have banned eleven opposition parties and corruptly used much of the money for their own personal use. Indeed, a substantial portion of military hardware sent to Ukraine has ended up sold on the black market.

The war planned against China, using the Taiwanese no less as cannon fodder as the Ukrainians are being used, will also be spuriously presented in the media as a fight for democracy. The real plan is to weaken China and Russia, and to bring about regime change in the two countries, and therefore to ensure a lasting US hegemony. In Burn!, we see the same basic idea: use the blacks as cannon fodder to remove the Portuguese and ensure British hegemony on the island.

We mustn’t allow the Walkers of the world to have their way. We mustn’t be the José Dolores who goes along with such schemes, only to be stabbed in the back, dolorous in the end. Instead, we must be the José who takes up the real fight, and who spits in the face of the Walkers of the world.

If we carry his bags, we must carry a knife, too.

Analysis of ‘Stalker’

Stalker (Russian: Сталкер) is a 1979 Soviet science fiction film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and written by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, based loosely on their 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic. The film stars Alexander Kaidanovsky (in the title role), Anatoly Solonitsyn, and Nikolai Grinko, with Alisa Freindlich and Natasha Abramova.

The premise of the novel is that after an alien “Visitation,” various items of the aliens were left behind in “Zones” in six places around the world. These alien artifacts have properties not understood by humanity, as are all the strange and dangerous phenomena experienced in the Zones. Still, some people, known as “stalkers,” illegally sneak into the Zones, risking apprehension by the police who guard the dangerous areas, and hoping to take some of the items out and sell them.

In the novel, Dr. Valentine Pilman compares this leaving-behind of alien artifacts to garbage left behind after a picnic on the side of the road, hence the name of the novel. According to Pilman’s analogy, the aliens are the picnickers, we humans are like the animals living where the picnic took place, exploring all the items left behind, not understanding what they are, things that may even be dangerous to the animals.

The novel is divided into four sections (preceded by an introduction involving an interview with Pilman) of which the last is the basis of Tarkovsky’s film, and even this section of the novel is radically reworked. An alien “Visitation” is considered a possible reason for the existence of the “Zone” in the film, though it may have been caused by a meteorite hitting the Earth. Redrick “Red” Schuhart of the novel is simply known as the “Stalker.” Instead of going into the Zone with young Arthur Burbridge, who dies in the “meatgrinder” of the novel, the Stalker goes in with two middle-aged men, known as the “Writer” (Solonitsyn) and the “Professor” (Grinko), neither of whom dies in the meatgrinder. In the novel, they seek the wish-granting “Golden Sphere” (or Golden Ball, depending on the translation); in the film, the three men seek a room that grants one’s deepest desires.

The making of the film was fraught with difficulties. It was originally filmed with film stock that was unusable, so Tarkovsky had to reshoot it almost entirely with the help of new cinematographer Alexander Knyazhinsky. Stalker initially got mixed reviews, but it has since been regarded as a classic of world cinema. The British Film Institute ranked it #29 on its list of the “100 Greatest Films of All Time.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation. Here’s a link to the full movie with English subtitles. And here is a link to Antonina W. Bouis‘s English translation of Roadside Picnic.

During the credits of the film, we see a black-and-white shot of a bar (which, in the novel, is called “the Borscht”). Next, we get a shot, still in bleak black and white, of the Stalker’s home, through half-way open doors leading into his bedroom. He, his wife (Freindlich–Guta in the novel), and their daughter, “Monkey” (deformed because of the Stalker’s exposure to the Zone, and played by Abramova in the film) are all lying in the same bed.

As they’re sleeping, we hear a train going by outside, shaking up the room. The Stalker is already awake, ready to get up and sneak out, to meet with the Writer and Professor, to take them into the Zone and find the desire-granting Room. His wife wakes up soon after, noticing he’s taken her watch; she begs him not to go and risk being put in jail again.

She fears his going back to jail, this time for ten years instead of five, as he did last time (in the novel, Redrick is incarcerated for a time for having been in the Zone); but the Stalker insists that he’s “imprisoned everywhere.” This ‘imprisonment’ is what the black-and-white filming is supposed to represent: the bleakness of their everyday existence, from which the Room in the Zone is supposed to be an escape.

He won’t be dissuaded from going, and he leaves her. She falls to the floor, weeping after having cursed at him for ruining her life. What we notice here is the close relationship between the nirvana of the Room and the suffering caused by desire for that Room, the heaven of the Room and the hell that surrounds it.

As we’ll learn soon enough, heaven and hell, nirvana and samsara, are even closer together than that.

He meets with the Writer near some train tracks (indeed, as his wife was weeping, we heard another train going by their home). The Writer has been drinking and chatting with a pretty young woman about how “boring” life is (i.e., black and white), and therefore there are no flying saucers, ghosts, or God to make it interesting. There isn’t even a Bermuda Triangle, according to the Writer…yet, there’s a wish-granting Room in the Zone that he’s risking going in to find?

The two men meet with the Professor in the bar. It’s fitting that they’d all meet here, with the Writer drinking in particular; for alcohol is as much an escape from pain for him as the Zone, and the Room, are an escape from pain for the Stalker, as we’ll see.

The Professor is in the sciences, physics in particular, though he alludes enigmatically to an interest in chemistry as part of his reason for seeking the Room, a reason he’d not have the other two know about until they find the place. The Writer claims he’s going there to regain his lost inspiration.

The Stalker tells them that their train has arrived, so they must go. He tells Luger, the bartender (named Ernest in the novel), to call on his wife if he doesn’t come back. Those trains we keep hearing and seeing represent that wish to go out there to find happiness…as opposed to being content with the happiness we have here, but don’t appreciate; and this is precisely what Stalker is all about.

(Though “stalker” in the novel and film has no relation to our notion of a disturbed fan or rejected lover following around a celebrity or other object of desire, one can in a way see a connection between the two uses of the word…someone obsessively chasing a desire or form of happiness that isn’t his to have.)

They drive to the entry to the Zone, dodging and hiding from the police who patrol the area on their motorbikes. Since the Zone is, for the Stalker in particular, a kind of Eden away from his miserable world, those police are like the cherubim and the flaming sword that forbid re-entry into paradise, to get at the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24).

Now, how should one think of the ‘happiness’ as promised by the Room in the Zone? Since Stalker is a Soviet film (i.e., one approved by the Soviet government), one might think that one’s deepest desire is for the establishment of full communism: a classless society with such an abundance of commodities as pure use-values that one can obtain without need of money, and therefore no state is needed, either, to protect the interests of one class against those of the other. Police preventing entry into the Zone can thus represent capitalist encirclement–imperialism.

Now, while Tarkovsky, as his son would later insist, was no political dissident with regards to the ideology of the USSR (i.e., he didn’t leave the USSR during his last years for political reasons; and it should be noted in this regard how George Lucas once said that one had greater artistic freedom as a filmmaker there than in Hollywood, as long as one didn’t criticize the government), it would be too simplistic to reduce the meaning of wish-fulfillment and ultimate happiness to the socialist goals of the Soviet Union. No: Tarkovsky was far too spiritual for dialectical materialism.

The point is that happiness, having what one wants most deeply in one’s soul, in the true, spiritual sense, is elusive, and there is much pain that one must go through to find that deeper happiness, not just having one’s wishes granted.

And in the end, one often finds that what one truly wants is not what one thought one wanted. The Writer admits, early on, that he isn’t really seeking inspiration from the Room, and that one often doesn’t know what one does or doesn’t want. He acknowledges this unknowing before even entering the Zone.

Still, the three men risk apprehension by the police at the entry to the Zone, then risk all the booby traps in the Zone that surround the Room…all to attain a most enigmatic happiness. Such is the seductive allure of nirvana, the desire to end the desire that causes suffering.

The Stalker drives their car on a train track among the patrol guards, who shoot at them. When one has seen the filthy urban sprawl that they live in, blanketed in pollution, one can begin to understand the lengths they’ll go to in their quest for a better life.

Having gotten past the cops, the three find a railcar to go on to get into the Zone. We see in this transport the connection between the trains and the going out there to find happiness. We hear the clanking of the railcar against the tracks as the three men go forward into the Zone, thus reinforcing the thematic connection between the sound of trains and the search for happiness…out there.

The police won’t follow the three into the Zone because they’re scared to death of what’s inside, as the Stalker explains to the Writer, who asks him what it is that’s inside. The Stalker says nothing to answer the Writer’s question, because nothing is precisely the answer to the question–a nothingness of nirvana, Wilfred Bion‘s O, Lacan‘s Real Order, a paradox of heaven and hell, Rudolph Otto‘s notion of the numinous, a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

As the three men are going along the track, we hear the clanking of the railcar and other twanging noises as a fitting soundtrack to the sights of industrial clutter all over the land, a reminder of the bleakness of their world. And finally, the black and white of that bleakness changes to colour, and the railcar stops.

We see mostly the green beauty of nature, with trees, bushes, and grass…but still some urban clutter to remind us that the world isn’t as perfect as it may seem. The Stalker nonetheless joyfully says that they’re “home at last,” for in spite of the dangers of the Zone, the three have arrived at his conception of happiness, hence, the change to colour. He loves how still and quiet the place is, a stillness and quiet of peace, without the hell of other people…apart from the three of them, though, of course.

To navigate the Zone and avoid its booby-traps, the Stalker will use a kind of slingshot, throwing metal nuts here and there, rather like David’s way of defeating the danger of the Philistines (this flinging of nuts from a slingshot is also done by Redrick in the novel).

They have to proceed through the Zone in a very roundabout way, to avoid the dangers therein. In the novel, there’s even a reference to minesweepers that were used by stalkers in the Zone, and how two stalkers were “killed by underground explosions.” This is the sort of thing that I mean when I refer to booby-traps in the Zone. Indeed, in keeping with the socialist interpretation of the heavenly aspect of the Zone and the Room, one might associate these mines and other booby-traps with the mines and other bombs that the imperialists left in places like Laos during the Vietnam War.

On a deeper level, we can see in the heaven/hell paradox of the Zone a symbolic association between the meteorite/aliens and humans, on the one hand, and the sons of God mating with the daughters of men, on the other (Genesis 6:1-4). The offspring from the Biblical mating were the Nephilim; in the case of the Zone, the offspring of stalkers, who have been exposed to the alien presence, are children like the deformed “Monkey”–unable to walk, but possessing telekinetic powers, as we discover at the end of the film.

The point is that, in the Zone, there is, symbolically speaking, a taboo mixture of the human and divine worlds, giving rise to the heaven/hell paradox of the place. Wishes may come true, it’s divinely beautiful in its greenery, but people die here. I discussed, in my analysis of the primeval history in Genesis, how any mixture of the human and divine worlds resulted in evil (i.e., man trying to be like God in having knowledge–expulsion from Eden; man trying to be like God in deciding when another will die–Cain’s punishment; and the mating of the sons of God with the daughters of men–the sinful world leading to the Flood).

The Stalker describes the Zone as a complex maze of death traps where “everything begins to move” when people are there. The Zone is an alien land, altered by divine, celestial beings, as it were, and when man enters it, we have that mix of divine and human that brings with it the danger of a deluge of evil.

This is why, though the three men have quickly found the building where the Room is, they cannot risk death by directly walking into it. They must follow the deliberately circuitous path directed by the Stalker. “Former traps disappear; new ones appear,” he says. Safe paths become dangerous, and vice versa: a dialectical shift between the opposites of good and evil, shifting up and down like the waves of an ocean…or a flood.

The Stalker speaks of the Zone in almost religious language, as though it’s a God-like presence that will punish you with death if you don’t behave properly. Still, he thinks that it isn’t the good or evil who either make it to the Room or perish. It’s the wretched, those who’ve lost all hope, who go thus from the lowest low up to the highest heaven. Yet even the wretched may perish if they misbehave here.

So, instead of going into the building, they will get there indirectly by first going into a dark wood where the Stalker has tossed one of his slingshot nuts. Thus we come to Part Two of the film. “Long is the way/And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” (Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Two, lines 432-433)

The Stalker hopes, again in that quasi-religious attitude of his, that the other two men will believe (i.e., in the truth of the Zone), believe in themselves, and “become as helpless as children.” (Mark 10:14-15)

Another paradox in the film is the Stalker’s belief that it is in softness that there is life, and in death we find hardness. Strength and hardness kill, in his view; in softness and flexibility are life, rather like the notion that the meek are blessed, for they shall inherit the earth (Matthew 5:5).

The Professor, not realizing that the Stalker has been continuously guiding him and the Writer to the Room, however circuitously, but incorrectly thinking he has just been showing them something, has left his backpack and wants to go back to retrieve it. The Stalker insists that he mustn’t, for fear of the death traps, but the Professor won’t be dissuaded, because he has something in that backpack that he needs when reaching the Room.

The Stalker and Writer come to a place of rushing water that the former calls “the dry tunnel,” as a joke. Since the Professor is no longer with them, they assume correctly that he’s gone back for his backpack, and that they must go on without him. They go through the soaking wet of the “dry tunnel,” and after we see a close-up shot of rippling, shallow water with such various forms of leftover trash as used needles and pieces of paper, the two men are surprised to find the Professor on the other side, with his backpack and calmly eating and drinking from his thermos.

They’ve managed to get through an area the Stalker deemed dangerous, a watery area the Professor has navigated with no help (and the Writer has alluded to Peter almost drowning, a reference to Matthew 14:22-32); here, we see the Stalker, the most ‘religious’ of the three, being the one “of little faith,” while the Professor hasn’t needed any faith.

The three men lie down and have a rest.

Since this place is, on the one hand, a wish-fulfilling paradise, and paradoxically on the other hand, a place of death, a heavenly Hades, if you will, the appearance of a dog–whose howling we heard when the three men arrived on the railcar–is fitting. This dog is symbolic of Cerberus, guarding, as it were, the underworld of ultimate fulfillment.

We see a brief black-and-white shot of the water, close up, leading to the Stalker, who is lying prone on the ground by that water, his head on his hand in an attitude of exasperation. Meanwhile, the other two have been chatting about whatever wishes they may hope will be granted them. Inspiration for the Writer? A Nobel Prize for the Professor? The latter taunts the former about his talentless, vain writing, but the Writer, spitting on humanity, is interested only in himself. The Stalker’s exasperation must come from his secret knowledge that the granting of one’s wishes is a truly empty pursuit.

Still, taking people into the Zone is extremely important to him, as a kind of act of religious faith, as we’ll see towards the end of the film.

“Truth is born in arguments,” we hear. Indeed: dialectical thinking is the basis of all the paradoxes of Stalker.

We return to colour, with the Stalker now lying supine on the grass. He seems more at ease now. He brings as many people as he can into the Zone, wishing to bring in more…to find happiness. He agrees that one has never found a single happy person in the world, a reminder of the first of the Buddha‘s Four Noble Truths…yet the Stalker still wants to bring people here.

One seeks happiness like a dog chasing its tail, never catching it. Still, one chases after it.

When asked if he’s ever used the Room, the Stalker says that he’s happy as he is…with no smile on his face.

…and we briefly return to black and white, with the dog running up to him. His whole world is just as bleak in the Zone as it is outside. Deep down, the Stalker knows that the Room’s promises of happiness are empty, so he only brings other people here to give them that hope. He is, in essence, a kind of religious charlatan, selling bliss, and he knows it.

He’s lying on a tiny island, as it were, of land, just big enough to include his body, and he’s surrounded by shallow water. Sometimes Brahman is compared to an ocean (as I have done), with Atman compared to a drop in this ocean. But here, this water is shallow, like the shallow hope of happiness the Stalker is selling. Sometimes, nirvana is compared to an island, but his ‘island’ is so small as to be insignificant.

The Writer acknowledges the emptiness of his desire to gain inspiration from the Room. After all, the whole point of being a writer, for him at least, is to prove his worth, as such to himself and to others. This need to prove himself is fueled by his own self-doubt. If the Room grants him his wish of genius, he has no more need to prove himself; then, what need has he anymore to write?

What we can see here, therefore, is a kind of ouroboros of wish-fulfillment. I’ve discussed, in many other articles, my use of the serpent biting its tail as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between opposites. The ouroboros, coiled in a circle. represents for me a circular continuum; extreme opposites meet and phase into each other where the head bites the tail, and every point in between has its correspondence on every intermediate point on the serpent’s coiled body.

So, for the Writer to achieve his wish of inspiration is to lose his whole motivation and meaning for writing. The talent of writing kills the writer. The Stalker knows, deep down, that the granting of wishes, the giving of happiness, kills it; therefore, he’ll never use the Room. The Professor knows of the potential danger of misuse of the wish-granting of the heaven-hell Room, so he has special plans for it, which necessitate his bringing along of his backpack.

One can conceive of an ouroboros of the Zone, too. When the three men arrive, having come from the black-and-white bleakness of their ordinary world and the danger of being shot by the patrol guards, we come upon a colourful world of beautiful trees, grass, and bushes. What’s more, the Room has been discovered to be quite close.

They can’t go in directly, so they’ve had to travel from the heavenly biting head, as it were, of the ouroboros of the Zone, down the coiled length of its body in the direction of its bitten tail, where the deadly meatgrinder is, just before the Room. As can be expected, this move along the coiled length of the serpent’s body, so to speak, has meant an experience of less and less bliss, more and more pain. The Stalker has to guide them through the increasing intensity of danger. Hence, these black-and-white moments, indicating a decrease in heavenly bliss; hence also the increasing lack of civility in the men’s discussions.

We see a shot of what looks like a stretch of muddy land, yet it moves in waves…at once like that Brahman-ocean metaphor I discussed above, yet also like a field of diarrhea. Such is the heaven/hell paradox of the Zone.

We hear a voiceover recitation of Revelation 6:12-17 begin as the Stalker, still lying on his little island, stares in front of himself in a wide-eyed daze. The film switches to black and white again, with a slowly moving close-up shot of the shallow water with random pieces of trash in it: a needle, coins, a picture of a saint, a gun, etc., and muddy tiles on the bottom. The shot ends with the Stalker’s hand.

With what is heard and seen, we again have juxtapositions of the holy and the horrifying: a description of the terror of Armageddon from the Bible, and the oceanic Brahman of water, but shallow water with things that hurt (the needle and gun); a holy man’s picture, but that which, if we love it too much, is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).

We return to colour, with a shot of the dog. The Stalker rises from his resting place, and he contemplates the two disciples going to Emmaus and seeing the risen Christ (Luke 24:13-18). This narrative, of course, brings us from the despair of the disciples, over Christ‘s crucifixion, to the joyful realization of His resurrection…only the Stalker stops his recitation just before that moment of realization. Instead, as the Stalker discusses music, we see a shot of a beautiful lake, surrounded by trees. Renewed hope and joy can come in surprising forms.

Recall the presence of the dog…for the next scene shows the entrance to a tunnel leading ultimately to the Room. This is the place of death, a kind of Hades, that one has to go through before reaching the heaven of the Zone. This is the bitten tail of the ouroboros that I mentioned above. It’s a harrowing of hell, the meatgrinder one must risk death going through if one is to reach the nirvana known as the Room, the serpent’s biting head.

In the novel, Redrick simply plans, from the beginning, to sacrifice Arthur to the meatgrinder, so the former can gain access to the Golden Ball. In the film, the Stalker has all three men draw straws to see who will go first into the meatgrinder and risk death. The Writer is the unlucky one.

Like Arthur, the Writer is the Christ figure who must suffer so the others get the benefits of the Room. Unlike Arthur, though, the Writer won’t die; he’ll just have to endure the stress of thinking he could die. He’ll have to go through this dark, filthy, polluted tunnel that curves like the inside of the coiled ouroboros. The Writer, before drawing straws, says he doesn’t think he should go in first, rather like Jesus, praying in Gethsemane, hoping God would let this cup pass from him (Matthew 26:39).

The Writer goes through the tunnel, the Stalker and Professor following from far behind. The Writer reaches a door, through which he must go. Before opening the door, though, he takes a pistol out of his coat pocket; the Stalker forbids him to use it, for it would seal their doom. Christ, during His Passion, of which the Writer’s current ordeal is the representation, never used a weapon–neither must the Writer.

He opens the door, goes into a passageway flooded with water, and must descend stairs to get chest deep in it to reach the other side. Of course, the other two must follow. The gun must be left in the water.

The Writer has gone ahead into an area with wavy hills of sand on the floor, reminding us of that stretch of muddy land outside that undulated. The Stalker warns the Writer to go no further. Those waves of sand again remind us of the oceanic nature of the Absolute, which is both heaven and hell. The Writer is lying on his side in a puddle, in exasperation, as the Stalker was before.

The Writer gets up, then speaks of this place as someone’s “idiotic invention.” The Zone, like religion, is just an invention to him. He’s furious with the Stalker, believing he cheated him into taking the wrong straw.

The Stalker is amazed at the Writer’s good luck in having survived, since so many have died in the meatgrinder. The Writer’s survival, allowing the other two to get through alive, is thus symbolic of Christ’s redemptive sacrifice and resurrection. Later, we will even see the Writer put on his head a wreath of branches like the crown of thorns.

Finally, they’re in the Room. What’s fascinating about the shot Tarkovsky takes of the Room is that we see it from outside, from the entranceway, just like his opening shot of the Stalker’s home, with the doorway leading into the bedroom. A similar shot has been given of the way in the bar. The implication is that these similarities show that the way to true happiness is not somewhere out there, a place we have to find, but right here at home, if only we had the eyes to see it. The problems is that we are, so to speak, colourblind–hence, the black-and-white shots.

A telephone rings in the Room. The call is from a clinic, the Professor’s place of work, and he phones back to talk to the caller, a colleague he has contempt for. The Professor proudly admits to what the caller knows that he intends to do to the Room. In a sense, the Professor is having his deepest, secret wish come true right here, for he has found the courage to tell the caller that he is defying the wishes of the institution of his employment, from which he expects to be fired.

…and what does the Professor want to do, and why does he need that backpack so badly? In it, he’s been carrying a bomb he’s meant to use to destroy the Room, so no one can misuse it to grant wishes of power, or to do other forms of evil.

The Stalker struggles with the Professor to take the bomb away and to prevent him from destroying the Room, but the Writer stops the Stalker, still mad at him for cheating him into making him go first into the meatgrinder. In any case, the Professor will change his mind, take his bomb apart, and toss the pieces into a large puddle. What we truly want is often a surprise to us, for we don’t really know what it is.

The three men look out at a large opening where a wall would have been, as if this were the entrance to the Room. We never see what’s on the other side, as if to preserve the mystery of the Room; but I don’t think that this opening leads there, however much it is implied that it does. The light coming out from it suggests that it’s the way back outside, rather than the way into the Room. (When we saw the building earlier from the outside, when the three men had just arrived and the Writer was approaching it, we saw a huge hole in it, a wall removed, and a door to a small room to the right; what we see now corresponds perfectly to this earlier sight.)

I believe the little room with the telephone and a glowing ball of a ceiling light (corresponding to the novel’s Golden Sphere?) is the actual Room, though Tarkovsky may have been teasing us with ambiguity as to which area was the real Room (i.e., which way is the real way to heaven?). The men have just stepped out of the Room for a moment, having not yet decided on what their wishes will be; then they’ll go back in.

The little room has a telephone, electricity, even sleeping pills…all odd things to find in one of so many abandoned buildings of junk and filth, if this isn’t the wish-granting Room. Still, what we want is so often not what we really want, hence the ambiguity as to which place is the real Room.

And in spite of how ambiguous this Room is in terms of its wish-fulfilling properties, and its paradoxical heaven/hell status, the Stalker still wants his Room to continue existing, not just so he can continue making money taking people here, but because he sees in it the importance of maintaining a sense of hope in life, a faith in some kind of religious feeling. He is, as the Writer observes, “one of God’s fools.”

When the Stalker talks about making one’s wish, now that the time has finally come, he is nervous and dripping with sweat, as though getting one’s wish is a terrifying thing. Heaven is hell.

So what the men end up doing is sitting outside between the Room and the open space, in quiet contemplation, instead of making wishes. All this effort…for nothing.

Yet, the Stalker mentions again, as he did when they’d first arrived in the Zone, how still the place is.

They return to the bar, and we return to black and white. The Stalker’s wife is there, with Monkey. We see the two of them outside, through the window of a door, in a shot reminding us of those of the Room, of the way in the bar, and of the way into the Stalker’s home’s bedroom. The place of our wishes is here with us, with family and friends, all in its dull black and white, with all of its troubles and miseries.

The dog has come with them, further demonstrating the unity of the Zone and what’s outside it. When the Stalker goes home with his family and the dog, we return to colour, with the Stalker carrying Monkey on his shoulders.

Back in his home, the Stalker, not feeling well, is complaining of the lack of respect and appreciation the Writer and Professor have for the Zone and Room, like a religious person complaining of atheists. Fittingly, we see black and white again, to reflect his own lack of appreciation for all that he has, in his own home. He ends up back in bed, as he was at the beginning of the film, which has thus come full circle.

His wife, in a monologue that breaks the fourth wall, speaks of never once regretting marrying him, in contrast to her cursing of him at the film’s beginning. She, too, calls him “one of God’s fools.”

She concludes that, in spite of all the sorrows she’s had with the Stalker, she has no regrets because, as the film has pointed out so many times with all of its symbolism, without pain, there’s no happiness or hope, either.

…and who is her hope, and his hope? Monkey, of course!

And this is how the film ends, in colour, with Monkey seen reading a book. A golden shawl is wrapped around her head and draped on her shoulders, presumably to hide her deformities. She is mute throughout the film. We hear the Stalker’s wife, in voiceover, reciting a poem as the child, having put the book down, sits there staring into space.

The film ends with her using telekinesis to move two glasses across a table, making one of them fall off of it. Here we see the true meaning of wish-fulfillment: using one’s mind to make happen what one wishes to happen. As a deformed child of the Stalker, and therefore of the Zone, Monkey is clearly his wish-fulfillment personified, even if he doesn’t realize it. As the offspring resulting from the symbolic mating of one of the sons of God and the daughters of men, she isn’t literally one of the Nephilim, but she is a giant hope for her parents.

The fulfillment of wishes, the finding of happiness, isn’t supposed to be selfish–it’s to be shared with others. This is why we see colour now in the Stalker’s home: his happiness is here because his wife and daughter are here. They are his happiness. Happiness is a collective one, not an individual one…which is actually the goal of socialism, incidentally.

A similar conclusion is made in the novel when Redrick shouts out, in imitation of Arthur, who has first shouted it before being killed by the meatgrinder: “HAPPINESS FOR EVERYBODY, FREE, AND NO ONE WILL GO AWAY UNSATISFIED!”

Nonetheless, we hear the rattling of that train again, the wish to find happiness out there. The temptation to go astray is ever present. As the camera does a closeup on Monkey, though, with her head lying on its side on the table, her like a reclining Buddha, we hear a chorus singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

How fitting.

Analysis of ‘Simon of the Desert’

Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto) is a 1965 Mexican short surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel, the screenplay cowritten by Julio Alejandro. It stars Claudio Brook and Silvia Pinal, both of whom were also in The Exterminating Angel, and the latter also in Viridiana.

The film is loosely based on the life of Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Syrian saint and ascetic who lived for thirty-nine years on top of a pillar, hence, the stylites who emulated him. My poem, “Towers,” alludes to him.

Two contradictory reasons are given as to why the film is only forty-five minutes. Buñuel said he ran out of money, while Pinal claimed that his was supposed to be one of three stories, all done by different directors. The other directors originally meant to be part of the production backed out later, leaving only Buñuel’s third filmed.

Simon of the Desert was highly acclaimed from its original release. It has a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from seventeen critics.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to a YouTube video of it, with English subtitles.

The film begins with a crowd of monks and peasants walking in the desert toward the ten-foot-tall pillar on which Simon (Brook) is standing. As they approach him, they’re singing holy music…this will contrast sharply with the ‘music of the Devil’ that we’ll hear at the end of the film.

After standing on top of this pillar for six years, six weeks, and six days (O, portentous number!), Simon is being offered a new, much taller pillar to stand on, a gift from a wealthy man (played by Ángel Merino) for having cured him “of an unspeakable disease.” What an odd gift of thanks! To be set much higher off the ground, tempting greater acrophobia, to practice an even more intense asceticism, rather than giving him comfort!

Such a gift from a wealthy man to a saint represents how the ruling class has always used religion and its grueling disciplines for the sake of social control, ostensibly ‘to edify’ the masses, when the rich could use their wealth to improve the material conditions of the poor instead.

Simon gets down from the first pillar, and as he is led to the new one, peasants are crowding around him, hoping for blessings and miraculous forms of aid from the holy man. One peasant even rips off a small piece of the material from Simon’s filthy old robe, in the superstitious belief that it holds divine properties. Such is the desperation of the poor, who have only the opium of religion to give them comfort.

As they all continue towards the taller pillar, Simon is presented with his aging mother (played by Hortensia Santoveña), who wishes to be with him, by the foot of the pillar, to contemplate him in his asceticism, and to be near him until her death. This devotion is comparable to that of Mary, the mater dolorosa who was at the foot of Christ’s Cross. When Simon meets her there, he calls her “woman,” as Christ called Mary at the Wedding at Cana.

If she can be compared to Mary, then Simon, of course, can be compared to Jesus. Indeed, as Simon is standing on the new pillar, (his “Calvary,” as a priest calls it), his arms are typically stretched out, as in a “Jesus Christ pose.” As a saint, Simon is certainly an imitator of Christ. We wonder, though: is this ascetic acting out of genuine piety, or is he motivated by pride? His eventual succumbing to the temptations of the Devil (Pinal) suggest the latter motivation.

When a priest (the same who refers to Simon’s new pillar as his ‘Calvary,’ played by Antonio Bravo) wishes to bestow holy orders on the ascetic just before his ascent up the ladder to the new pillar, he refuses them, insisting that he, a lowly sinner, is unworthy of them. Buñuel’s atheistic disdain for religion, however, suggests that this show of humility is just that–a show. The only thing worse than immodesty is false modesty

At the top of his new pillar, Simon leads the group in a prayer of Pater Noster, just as Jesus taught his followers (Matthew 6:9). A poor peasant family interrupts the prayer, complaining of the father’s having lost his hands; they were chopped off as punishment for stealing. He insists he is repentant, though, and the family begs Simon to work a miracle and give him back his hands.

Everyone prays in silence for a moment, led by Simon, and the peasant gets his hands back. Instead of thanking Simon or praising God, though, the peasant family leaves immediately, knowing they have urgent work to do at home. When one of the man’s daughters asks if his hands are the same as his old ones, he shoves her and tells her to be quiet. Some repentance! Some newly-found religious piety!

We see in this moment the real motive most people have for religiosity: not a genuine wish to be close to God for its own sake, but as a crutch to be used to improve one’s material conditions whenever the need arises; when the need is no longer there, one’s religiosity quickly becomes scanted.

Of course, it is never even contemplated in the film that cutting off a man’s hands might be too cruel a punishment for theft. Wouldn’t imprisonment for several years suffice? Neither is it considered that a redistribution of wealth, lifting the peasants out of their poverty, just might reduce the need for theft to a small minimum.

Everyone leaves Simon alone, except for his mother and four of the monks, who wish to accompany him in prayer. As they are kneeling in prayer, a beautiful young woman passes them by carrying a jug. (Actually, she’s the Devil.) Testing the monks, Simon asks them who she is, deliberately claiming she has only one eye, when of course she is normal.

When one of the monks corrects Simon about the woman’s eyes, and says he knows because he looked at her face, Simon knows the monk has sinned by allowing himself to be distracted by her, and thus tempted by the Devil when he was supposed to be concentrating on his prayer. Simon admonishes him for his sin, reminding him of the kind of warning Jesus gave his male followers in Matthew 5:28. The monks leave Simon and his mother.

In the next scene, a young, short-haired, and clean-shaven monk named Matias (played by Enrique Álvarez Félix) comes to the desert to give Simon some food; but first he briefly chats with a dwarf goat-herder (played by Jesús Fernández). The dwarf praises the udders of one of his she-goats, in a way that strongly suggests he has lewd feelings for the animal. Matias softly chides him for having such thoughts, then leaves to see Simon.

It’s significant that Matias warns the dwarf of the Devil’s presence in the desert, just after Simon has warned the monk against letting his praying be distracted by a beautiful woman passing by, and when Simon himself is soon to be tempted, not only with thoughts of coming down from his pillar to enjoy closeness to his mother, but also with the Devil in the seductive form of a pretty, yet naughty girl.

Simon’s temptation thus is not only like that of Jesus in the wilderness, but also–since Simon’s pillar can be seen as symbolic of Christ’s Cross–like the Jesus of Nikos Kazantzakis‘ novel. In mid-prayer, Simon finds himself distracted, forgetting the end of the prayer. Without even a beautiful woman at the time to tempt him, he is showing himself clearly to be not much more spiritually elevated than that monk.

After receiving the food and water from Matias, who then skips away like a merry child, Simon bad-mouths him as “an idiot, the conceited ass,” and a “wretch”–an odd attitude for a holy man to have. In his continued fasting, he wants to be worthy of God…yet isn’t the whole point of the Christian faith that one can never be worthy of God by one’s own good works, hence the need for Christ’s crucifixion?

Next comes Simon’s temptation to go down to the ground and be with his mother, a temptation curiously juxtaposed with one of the Devil in the form of a beautiful young girl. Normally, Satan is male. As a surrealist, Buñuel used disturbingly incongruous images to give expression to the urges of the unconscious mind, urges that include–according to psychoanalysis–the Oedipus complex.

Seeing a fantasy of Simon playing on the ground with his mother, as if he were a child, then immediately after that, the female Devil is showing off her legs and breasts, strongly implies a link between both urges, a sexual link. Properly understood, the Oedipus complex is a universal, narcissistic trauma, a wish to hog Mommy all to oneself, to be the sole object of her love, a desire that, of course, can never be fulfilled–hence, the trauma. Such narcissism is also linked, by displacement, to the grandiose wish to be honoured as a great holy man, Simon’s secret motive as he stands up high on that pillar.

Buñuel’s point is that all religious aspiration is ultimately as narcissistic as Oedipal urges. One wants God the Father all to oneself just as one wants Mother all to oneself…and for the same reason.

The Devil appears to him as a girl in modern clothes (a school uniform), anticipating the end of the film, when she has Simon in the modern world, having succumbed to his temptation. Though she has Pinal’s curvaceous, womanly figure, she behaves like a little girl, all sweet and innocent (prior to her exhibitionism, of course).

This juxtaposition of Simon being tempted to “feel Mother Earth under [his] feet,” then to put his head on his mother’s lap (like Hamlet‘s “country matters” with Ophelia), and finally to see the Devil-girl’s garters and breasts (like the mother’s breasts he once sucked on as a baby), all suggests that his pedophile temptation to have the Devil-girl is a reaction formation against his unconscious Oedipal feelings. (I made a similar speculation about Humbert Humbert’s unconscious motives for wanting nymphets in my Lolita analysis, i.e., replacing a son-to-mother desire with a father-to-daughter one). Recall also, in this connection, all that largely unpunished sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

So the Devil, as a female, is the doppelgänger of Simon’s mother. Both are at the foot of his pillar, tempting him with worldly pleasures, though in different ways. These two females are dialectical opposites: different, yet identical. And since Simon, a double of Jesus, has a mother who is a double of Mary, Buñuel here is having another moment of atheistic irreverence in equating Mary with the Devil. Woman as angel and whore are one in his film.

There are other dialectical opposites played around with here. The she-devil would have Simon “cease from [his] folly” in her childlike song, as if giving him edifying spiritual advice; indeed, one must be as a child to enter the Kingdom of God [!]. He would brush his teeth clean “with Syria’s urine,” more paradoxes of filth and cleanliness juxtaposed (also, those ancient Romans who crucified Christ used urine to clean their teeth with).

Simon asks where she’s come from, and where she’s going. Her answers, “over there,” while pointing in opposing directions, suggest Satan’s answer to God in Job 2:2.

He resists all of her sensual temptations, from the showing off of her legs and breasts, and her tongue tickling his beard, even to her pricking him in the back. The Devil leaves angrily, nude, but in an aged, ugly, and almost androgynous form. “Neither is everyone what they seem,” as she has sung while showing off her “innocent” legs and garters. This observation is most true, as we’ll soon see.

Immediately after the Devil leaves, we see Simon’s mother again, reinforcing the dialectical link between the two. What seems saintly can be evil, and vice versa.

In my analysis of The Exterminating Angel (link above), one of the three Buñuel films that Pinal appears in, I compared the morality of her role in that film with her roles in this one and in Viridiana. I described her as good in Viridiana, evil in Simon of the Desert, and a mix of good and evil in The Exterminating Angel. My observation there was essentially true, but I need to qualify it here.

The nun Viridiana is essentially good, but narcissistic in her drive to be as pure as the Virgin Mary (as Simon is narcissistic in his drive to be as pure as Jesus). As I argued in my analysis of the film (link above), her moments of unconsciousness, leaving her vulnerable to being taken advantage of by lustful men, symbolically suggest a repressed, unconscious wish to be sexual. This wish to be sexual is implied even more at the end of the film, when she joins a man and a woman in a card game, implying the beginning of a three-way sexual relationship between them. Thus, these moral imperfections of hers are the black yin dot in her yang.

Similarly, Pinal’s Devil is largely evil in her tempting of Simon away from his asceticism; but this tempting of him is also his potential liberation from a religiosity Buñuel deems useless, and therefore foolish. As she sings to him in that girly voice, “Cease from thy folly.” These words are sound advice, the white yang dot in her yin.

Simon continues his praying and devotion through the night, as observed by his mother (a double of Satan?). We see hm eating some lettuce from the bag of food provided by Matias; we also hear military drumming, as has been heard earlier, suggesting the onward marching of Christian soldiers as they continue fighting against temptation. For him, eating the food and drinking the water, as necessary as they are, are also concessions to the flesh that feel dangerously close to sinning. We see his mother have a drink of water, too. What evil indulgence!

The next day, Simon leads the visiting monks in prayer and a discussion of how properly to practice austerities. He speaks in a manner reminiscent of Christ (Luke 14:26). Brother Trifon (played by Luis Aceves Castañeda), however, accuses Simon of accepting delicious cheese, bread, and wine–foods not to be indulged in by a saint! His mother hands some of the food to a monk.

We learn soon enough, though, that Trifon is the one who put the food in Simon’s bag to slander him, and harm and undermine the faith of his followers. Trifon has done this because, as we find out, he, cursing the hypostatic union, is possessed of the Devil! He will be taken away to be exorcised. In the monk’s act of wickedness, we see Buñuel once again placing piety side by side with impiety, thus blurring the distinction that the Church tries so hard to put between them.

As the monks pray for guidance to determine if Simon is guilty of indulgence in tasty food, or if Trifon is guilty of slandering Simon, we see his mother observing ants crawling in the sand; she brushes her hand over them. One might be reminded of the ants crawling out of the wound of a man’s hand in Un chien andalou. As I observed in my analysis of that film, these ants are symbolic of the death drive, Freud‘s “myrmidons of death” (page 312), like the drive the Devil uses to destroy Trifon’s piety, and later, Simon’s.

Before the monks leave Simon, he tells them that Matias, being clean-shaven, must be kept apart from the other monks until he has grown a beard; only then may he rejoin them, as beardless youths “live near the temptations of the Devil.” One is reminded of how strict Muslim fundamentalists require all men to be bearded. Apparently, clean-shaven youths may remind us of the pretty cheeks of women, and may thus provoke homosexual feelings in other men. [!]

It is the excess of this kind of religious strictness that Buñuel is satirizing in this film. Ascetic self-denial, the refusal of tasty food, chastity and celibacy (even when Paul himself said that one may have a wife if one couldn’t help oneself), refusal of cleanliness in body or clothing, no dancing to rock ‘n’ roll (at the end of the film), and the insistence on bearded monks! These are all such absurdly high standards of moral perfection, so needless and offering so little, if any, good to the world, that they are deserving of critique. If one truly wants to be good, why not just work towards feeding, clothing, and housing the poor? Besides, excesses of repression can lead to an explosion of indulgence one day.

Another day goes by, and we hear those marching drums again. Onward, Christian soldiers, it would seem. Simon’s mother walks by with some wood, looking up at him with his arms out in that “Jesus Christ pose.” He is praying, but he acknowledges that his thoughts are straying from Christ. Fittingly, the Devil appears…with a group of lambs.

Recall that Jesus is the Lamb of God. The otherwise feminine Devil also has a beard now, as Simon has required of Matias. This Christ-like appearance of Satan is thus confusing to Simon. Just as a beardless man apparently looks like a woman, and thus there’s the fear of him arousing lust, so is a bearded woman, holding the animal symbolic of Christ, one to be confused with a holy man, and thus there’s the fear of her leading Simon astray with false religiosity.

And so, this bearded Belial tries to tempt Simon to come down from his pillar and enjoy the pleasures of the world. We’re reminded of those who abused Christ on the Cross, who said if He’s the Son of God, He should come down from the Cross (Matthew 27:40). But here, it would seem that God is telling Simon to come down, that his asceticism is excessive and unnecessary. Could it be?

Her dropping and kicking of the lamb she held has made it clear to Simon that her bearded appearance is yet another of Satan’s tricks. In his frowning at the Devil, Simon reminds her of how she was once Lucifer, one of the greatest of all angels. When she asks if, through repentance, she could ever return to her former glory, Simon denies the possibility. (Now, this may be the Devil, but I thought that God’s love and mercy were boundless.)

What’s interesting here is how it was Lucifer’s very pride that brought about his downfall. Simon is showing a similar pride, and he is soon to fall, too.

Still, Simon tries to cloak his pride in a show of humble penitence for having allowed himself to be fooled by a “wolf” in the guise of a “lamb.” So he imagines that even more rigorous austerities, now in the form of standing on one foot (his legs are already covered in scars and scratches), will make him worthy of God. Again, salvations is sought by good works, instead of passive, humble faith; man isn’t supposed to be glorified through his efforts, yet Simon is still using this proud method.

A false show of modesty is still replacing real modesty.

That monk who was distracted from his prayers, by beautiful Satan carrying her jug, has returned to the pillar to talk to Simon, who has been praying for the poor (when the wealthy giving to them would be far more effective).

In his pondering out loud of a wish to give blessings, Simon finds himself not understanding what he’s been saying. Next, the dwarf appears and after Simon has spoken loquaciously about such things as his being sufficiently supplied with food, and that he’s “so withered up,” the dwarf replies that, of all of Simon’s long speech, he’s understood only the last two words.

Indeed, the dwarf imagines that Simon is “not quite right in the head,” a result of “stuffing [him]self with air.” This inability to understand one’s words, from someone so high up in the air, suggests yet another association to be made with Simon’s pillar: the Tower of Babel, whose attempt to reach heaven angered God, prompting Him to confuse the speech of its builders, creating all the languages of the world. Again, Buñuel, through symbol, uses religion to undermine itself.

The monk ascends the ladder to speak with Simon face to face, apologizing for having gazed upon that woman. He also wants to warn Simon about “the hordes of the Antichrist…advancing on Rome.” Man will be in a perpetual state of “fratricidal conflict,” based on a jealous competition over what’s “‘yours’ and ‘mine’.” I am reminded of what I said in my analysis of The Omen: material contradictions of the rich vs. the poor as symbolized in that movie.

Simon, in his abiding self-denial, can’t seem to grasp the idea of selfish hoarding that plagues the world; and as the monk observes, Simon’s penitence and self-denial are “of little use to man.” It is the wealthy who must deny themselves their wealth; the poor aren’t the ones who should be denying themselves anything. What can poor men like Simon give to the poor? On his Tower of Babel, Simon tells the monk that they “speak in different languages.”

He is in a desert, a symbol of want and lack. He stands on a phallic pillar in that desert of want, proudly elevating himself above the earth and engaging in false modesty. I’ve described his unconsciously Oedipal relationship to his mother, a double for the seductive female Satan. The manque à avoir of the desert, and the manque à être of the phallic pillar by which his mother stands, these represent Lacan‘s lack, which give rise to desire, not to spiritual edification. Again, Buñuel turns religion on its head.

The narcissistic trauma of the Oedipus complex is thus transformed into a narcissistic aspiration to piety. The female Devil, for whom he has temptations to lust, is thus a transference of Simon’s feelings for his mother, and she can take advantage of his narcissism, and thus succeed in making him give in to his temptation.

After the monk descends the ladder and leaves, she reappears…in a coffin sliding on the dirt and approaching the pillar. As we recall, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), so her coming in a coffin is apt. The ants in the sand that his mother caressed, those “myrmidons of death” that are the death drive as well as the “guardians of life” (Freud, p. 312–i.e., the life instinct that includes libido, the sex drive, and therefore desire and sin), these are linked to the Devil in the coffin.

Unlike last time, Simon knows this is Satan, who comes out with frizzled, wavy hair sticking up like hellish flames, and with her right breast exposed, how like a mother’s breast about to be used to feed a baby. He seems to be showing his most determined resistance to her, but it’s just a show. She’ll succeed this time, taking him into the future of that Antichrist the monk spoke of.

We learn that, just as good works (austerities, etc.) won’t save Simon, neither will faith. The Devil, too, believes in the one living God: one is reminded here of that passage in the Epistle of James, which says, “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” (James 2:19). If Simon and the Devil–of whom Simon himself has said will never return to his/her former angelic glory–are very much alike, then Simon is as doomed as Satan is.

An airplane is seen in the sky, and Simon is taken into the modern world, that of the mid-1960s, in a dance club in the city, where youth are seen dancing to the music of a rock ‘n’ roll band–Satan’s music, as many preachers have called it, right from its beginnings.

The first of the dancers that we see, significantly, is a young man with a beard; so much for bearded saintliness, I suppose. Pinal’s daughter, incidentally, is among all these young dancers. After seeing all of them living it up so wickedly, we see Simon and the Devil at a table, with drinks and cigarettes. He has his hair cut short and his beard trimmed…like Samson, he’s lost his strength in God from a haircut; devilish Delilah, naturally, is loving the music. Recall, in connection with her enjoyment of the music, the end of Viridiana, with the rhythm and blues song heard when Pinal’s character, the nun, gives into temptation and joins the man and woman in the beginning of an implied menage à trois.

The closest Simon can come to a pious resistance to all this sinful fun is to be bored with it. The closest he can come to being interested in it is to ask what the dance is that all the dancers are doing, them shaking so frantically. The Devil calls it “Radioactive Flesh,” and it’s the latest dance…and the last dance, eerily suggesting how close we all have been to a nuclear end of the world, as real a danger of that Cold War as it is in our current one.

Yet so many today, like these kids on the dance floor, would rather party than heed and avert the danger.

A young man asks the Devil to dance, which she accepts. Simon would rather go home, but she tells him he can’t. “Another tenant’s moved in,” she says. It seems that modern-day capitalism’s accumulation of private property has taken away Simon’s real estate, his pillar, and has rented it to a new pretender of piety.

What was given to him by a wealthy man of the ancient world has been taken from him by one of today’s bourgeoisie. The landlord giveth, the landlord taketh away.

Still, Simon shouldn’t complain. The Devil just did him a big favour in liberating him from his pointless austerity and planting him in an infernal party where he must abandon all hope of its ever ending. As I said above, Pinal’s Viridiana isn’t all good, and her Devil isn’t all bad.

Buñuel knew it as well as AC/DC did.

Hell ain’t a bad place to be.

Analysis of ‘Pin’

Pin, stylized as PIN, and fully titled as Pin: a Plastic Nightmare, is a 1988 Canadian psychological horror film written and directed by Sandor Stern, shot in Montreal, and based on the novel of the same name by Andrew Neiderman. The film stars David Hewlett, Cynthia Preston, and Terry O’Quinn, with Bronwen Mantel, John Pyper-Ferguson, and Jonathan Banks, who did the voice of Pin.

Janet Maslin of The New York Times called it “a cool, bloodless, well-made thriller with a taste for the quietly bizarre.” Andrew Marshall of Starburst rated it 9/10 stars and wrote, “A low-key psychological horror produced at a time when the genre was swamped with interminable sagas of invincible otherworldly serial killers, Pin is subtle, disturbing, and brilliant.” Charles Tatum from eFilmCritic.com awarded the film a very positive 5 out of 5 stars, praising the film’s creepy music score, and direction, as well as Hewlett and Preston’s performances. Pin was featured in Fangoria magazine’s 101 Best Horror Movies You’ve Never Seen. It has since become a cult film, and a remake, to be directed by Stern, was announced in 2011.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to YouTube videos of the full movie (I linked them all in case any of them get removed after my publication of this article.).

The film begins with a group of boys looking up at a window on the second floor of an upper middle class family’s house, where a seated, motionless man is looking out, rather like Mrs. Bates in Psycho. Is this a man, or a dummy? And like Mrs. Bates, is this person dead, or alive?

This second question, something the boys are wondering about, introduces one of the important themes of the film, that of the blurred border between life and death, between being an inanimate object, or an animate one. Pin is a medical dummy named after Pinocchio, the animated, sentient puppet whose nose grows whenever he lies.

Pinocchio, incidentally, is possibly derived from the Italian pino (“pine”) and occhio (“eye”). In Pin, we have only the pine, and not the eye. Since the eyes are the windows to the soul, Pin’s lack of eyes (that is, real eyes for seeing) means “he” lacks a soul, he’s inanimate…not that the increasingly unstable Leon Linden (the adult version of whom is played by Hewlett) is willing to acknowledge this. Pin’s nose never grows because he never lies…which is because he never lives, of course.

Just try to get delusional Leon to face the facts, though.

Pin thus represents that border where life and death meet.

After the boys’ attempt to determine who or what the man in the window is, we go back fifteen years to find out how all of this started. Little Leon and Ursula (the adult version of whom is played by Preston) must demonstrate their knowledge of numbers before being sent to bed for the night. Their father, Dr. Frank Linden (O’Quinn) gives the younger sister the easier task, counting from one to ten, which she does correctly. Leon, however, must count backwards from one hundred by sevens. He does so correctly, until he says sixty-six instead of sixty-five.

As the little boy lies in bed, he does the backward count again. We hear him say the correct numbers again, but just when he’s about to say (presumably) sixty-five and thus correct his mistake, we go to the next scene and never know if he does it correctly this time. The point is that, in practicing the counting instead of just going to sleep, little Leon is showing us how preoccupied he is with pleasing Daddy by getting it right.

I defend the notion of the universality of the Oedipus complex, that one wants the love and exclusive attention of one parent, while feeling hostility towards the other, who is seen as a rival for the love of the first parent. The Oedipally-desired parent needn’t be the opposite sex one, though, and the love felt needn’t be sexual. Leon wants his father’s love; in point of fact, he hates his mother (Mantel), with her neurotic obsession with spotless cleanliness throughout the house, even to the point of having plastic covers on the furniture. Frank, on the other hand, though gentle, is nonetheless demanding with his bourgeois high standards, and thus he frustrates the boy’s wish to be worthy of Daddy’s love.

…and here is where Pin comes in.

Leon’s father has a voice that’s gentle enough, but still commanding of respect. Yet when Dr. Linden uses ventriloquism to do Pin’s voice in his office, while little Leon and Ursula are watching him treat a child patient, Pin’s voice sounds so much gentler, not at all intimidating, like a friend.

In a child’s imagination, the medical dummy is alive. Little Ursula will outgrow this soon enough. Why can’t Leon outgrow it? Though his father can be as stern with his commands as his mother is, Leon has much more respect for his father’s authority than that of his mother, because of his Oedipal feelings for Frank.

When Frank throws his voice so that Leon hears Pin ‘saying’ his father’s words, though Leon unconsciously understands that ventriloquism is being used (after all, by the time Leon grows up, he has learned how to throw his own voice to speak for Pin, while consciously in denial about his use of ventriloquism), he consciously imagines that Pin is speaking for himself. Dr. Linden’s ventriloquism is actually a projection of himself onto Pin, which appeals to Leon, for now the boy can have an approachable version of his Oedipally-desired father, a version that is his equal, a friend.

His Oedipal feelings for his father have thus been transferred onto Pin. This is why, when his parents die in the car crash, young adult Leon doesn’t shed any tears for his father, but is instead happy to rescue Pin from the wreck of the car. What’s even better is that he can now finally have Pin stay in the house with him and Ursula.

Before his parents’ death, though, other traumatic events occur in Leon’s childhood to cause him to loosen his grip on reality. He doesn’t keep any friends at school, since his tyrannical mother hates it when these friends dirty her house. While in his father’s office one day in the hopes of getting Pin to talk to him (Frank has ‘told’ Pin never to talk to anyone when he isn’t there), a nurse sneaks into the office to use the dummy’s…Pinis…to satisfy her, and hiding Leon is horrified to see her ‘raping’ his one and only friend. Since Leon has transferred his Oedipal feelings onto Pin, watching the nurse fuck the dummy is, for him, rather like the primal scene.

Because of traumas like these, Leon doesn’t like any outsiders to intrude on his tiny little world. Women generally repel him, so he is sexually repressed. He, as a young adult, doesn’t want to leave his little town to get his university education elsewhere, so when his father insists on it (right before the car crash), there’s great tension between Leon’s wish to stay near Pin, yet also be obedient to his father.

Leon may be sexually repressed, but pre-teen Ursula is already fascinated with the human anatomy, especially men’s. After she and Leon have been discovered with a pornographic magazine by her disgusted mother, their father decides it’s time to use Pin to teach them about sexuality and “the need” (Frank’s euphemism for sexual desire). He tells Leon to remove the towel from otherwise naked Pin to reveal the member that the boy saw the nurse defile, but he can’t do it; Ursula, on the other hand, is delighted to expose the Pinis.

As I said, Leon wants to restrict the people in his world to a minimum, but Ursula, by now a teen, wants a maximum of people in hers…men in particular. She quickly develops a reputation for promiscuity, which scandalizes him, and he beats one of her lovers. His anger goes beyond just him not wanting his sister to be seen as “a tramp”: he’s jealous of anyone outside contaminating the purity of his small world.

I think it’s helpful to understand Leon’s mind in terms of Heinz Kohut‘s conception of the bipolar self, one pole being based on idealizing a parental role model, and the other pole being based on someone who can act as a mirror of one’s grandiosity. For Leon, his father was the idealized parental imago, while Ursula is there to mirror his narcissism back to him. Without these two poles to give him a stable sense of psychological structure, Leon will fall apart and suffer fragmentation, a psychotic break with reality.

Since his father’s ideals are too lofty for him to attain, Leon transfers the object of his libidinal cravings from the doctor to Pin. Since Ursula must be a mirror to Leon’s narcissism, she cannot have any lovers, including her new love interest, Stan Fraker (Pyper-Ferguson), a handsome, charming athlete.

Of course, Leon’s grip on reality grows more and more fragile whenever Ursula, on the one hand, rejects Pin’s presence in their house, especially at the dinner table, dressed in their father’s clothes (a further identification of Pin with Frank), and with added fake skin and a wig–as when Norman Bates used taxidermy on his mother’s corpse–challenging his delusion that the dummy is alive; and on the other hand, seeing other men, which inflames Leon’s jealousy (It’s implied that he has repressed incestuous feelings for his beautiful younger sister.).

Since she rejects Pin and Leon’s established triangular relationship of her, it, and him, this means that he has two one-on-one relationships–one with Pin, and one with her. Both of them are meant to mirror his narcissism back to him; both are ideals that mustn’t traumatically disappoint him, which would lead to his fragmentation.

Leon is thus stuck in a doubly dyadic state of the Imaginary, for in transferring his cathexis from his father to Pin, and in despising his obsessively clean mother, Leon has foreclosed on the three-way relationship (i.e., Leon/mother/father) that leads to inclusion in society, which is of the mentally healthy Symbolic Order. This foreclosure leads to his psychosis. His parents’ death in the car accident only further cements his break with reality.

No one can intrude on Leon’s doubly dyadic world: not his Aunt Dorothy, who moves in with them and wants to put the plastic covers back on the furniture, thus bringing back his mother’s tyrannical rule by proxy; Leon takes advantage of his aunt’s weak heart by using Pin one night to scare her to death. Nor can Leon’s world be intruded on by Stan, who he fears is planning to put him in a mental institution so he can take away the house and family property with Ursula.

One night, when she is on a date with Stan, Leon, out of jealousy, arranges a date with Marsha, an attractive young woman because, apparently, he has “the need.” Actually, all of her attempts to arouse him fail, out of no fault of her own, though: he’s just that sexually repressed. He’s imagined that by dating and sleeping with her, he’s getting back at Ursula for being ‘unfaithful’ to him. Instead of sleeping with Marsha, though, he uses Pin to frighten her, for no one may come into his private world of himself, Pin, and his sister.

His only outlet for his repressed sexuality is in his perverse poetry, which narrates the many sexual conquests of its protagonist, the creepily-named “Testes.” His writing of this sexually potent character is thus a reaction formation against the presumed virginity that Leon must be privately embarrassed about, due to his revulsion from women. That “Testes” is thinking of raping his sister is something that both Stan and Ursula should be worried about.

Such a verbal expression of Leon’s repressed desires is hardly therapeutic, nor can it be legitimately called sublimation. It merely reinforces his fixations by an obsessive ruminating on them.

No, Leon’s use of language in his poetry in no way brings him into the healthy world of culture and society as understood in the Symbolic. He is trapped in the dyadic world of the Imaginary, and he is soon to be even more rigidly confined in the traumatizing, undifferentiated world of the Real.

Hints of his becoming one and the same as Pin have already appeared: in his growing catatonia, which is associated with schizophrenia (recall Ursula’s amateur diagnosis of him as “a paranoid schizophrenic”). When Marsha is nuzzling on his neck during their date, he’s as stiff as a board (as opposed to being ‘stiff’ the way a man normally is in such a situation), looking away from her in a fixed stare. Elsewhere, he sometimes sits across from Pin in imitation of the dummy’s exact posture–motionless, arms and legs wide apart. Leon is becoming a mirror of Pin, rather than vice versa.

Just as Norman Bates was “dangerously disturbed…ever since his father died,” leaving him in a dyadic relationship with his mother, then even more so after he killed her, used taxidermy on her corpse, dressed up like her, and spoke in her voice to sustain the illusion of her still being alive, so does Leon–after Ursula hacks Pin to pieces with an axe upon learning that Leon’s tried to kill Stan–give over his whole life to Pin.

Just as Norman was never all Norman, but often all Mother, so has Leon never been all Leon, but often all Pin…especially at the end of the movie, as with Norman in Psycho. This lack of differentiation between self and (imagined) other between Leon and Pin, is the traumatizing, undifferentiated world of the Real…and all Ursula can do now is humour the human dummy, in his catatonic, living death.

At least she is now able to escape from a dyadic world with Stan…Leon can’t even live in a dyadic world anymore. He is forever trapped at that cusp where life and death, animation and non-animation, meet.

Analysis of ‘The Exterminating Angel’

The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador) is a 1962 Mexican surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel. It stars Silvia Pinal, who also starred in Buñuel’s Viridiana; other actors in the cast include Augusto Benedico, Claudio Brook, Lucy Gallardo, Xavier Loyá, and Enrique Rambal.

The Exterminating Angel was on The New York Times 2004 list of “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.” It was also made into an opera in 2016. The film received the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. At the 1963 Bodil Awards, it won the award for Best Non-European Film.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here is a link to the film with English subtitles.

Since this story is about a group of wealthy bourgeois who, after a night at the opera, go to the lavish home of Edmundo (Rambal) and Lucia Nóbile (Gallardo) for a dinner party, only to find themselves inexplicably unable to leave–it reminds me of the predicament in Sartre‘s 1944 play, No Exit, in which three characters are also unable to leave a room…which is literally Hell. It’s so obvious a comparison to make that I can’t avoid mentioning it, too.

Accordingly, all the bourgeois in The Exterminating Angel will experience their own version of “Hell is other people,” to be condemned to be seen and judged from the perspective of all the others, for as long as they’re trapped in that Hell of a house.

Ironically, the Hell of the Nóbiles’ home is on “Providence Street” (Calle de la Providencia), which is the first of several paradoxes in the film. The last of these, incidentally, is a Catholic Church in which all the clergy and churchgoers (including those bourgeois who have only just been freed from the Nóbiles’ house) are again not allowed to leave…the House of the Lord has been made a Hell.

The very title of the film–inspired from something in the Bible, but also, according to Buñuel, from a Spanish cult, the apostolics of 1828, and a group of Mormons–is a paradox on the heaven/hell theme.

Yet another paradox is what is confining the people inside. Not only is the barrier invisible, nor is it felt. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a barrier in the physical sense at all–it seems to be purely psychological; the guests simply won’t allow themselves to leave. Nothing is stopping them, but that nothing is everything.

This inability to leave is not universal, though: in fact, it’s the servants of the Nóbiles who not only leave at the beginning of the film, but leave urgently, as if they have some kind of clairvoyance about the impending trap that their employers are to be caught in. The only employee to stay, trapped with his bosses and their guests, is Julio (Brook), the majordomo; he is clearly a case of the exception who proves the rule, for he shows a near-bootlicking loyalty to his employers, not only by staying, but also by expressing his condemnation for the staff who leave.

The staff’s suddenly leaving the house, right when their employers are receiving a large number of guests for a dinner party, can be seen as symbolic of a revolutionary act, for in doing so, the insubordinate workers are demonstrating a truth that we leftists have known for a long time: the bourgeois need us; we don’t need them. Revolution is a dinner party, after all…as long as the workers are absent.

Julio thinks his coworkers are being traitors to their bosses, but it is Julio who is being the traitor…to his fellow workers. This currying favor with the bourgeoisie, far too common among pro-capitalist workers, is what thwarts our revolutionary potential.

Some odd repetitions occur during the film, especially towards the beginning. When Lucas (played by Pancho Córdova), the doorman and first to leave the house, isn’t available to take the guests’ coats, Edmundo tells them to go upstairs, where someone will take them. With their entrance, this going upstairs happens twice.

Another repetition occurs in the toast Edmundo makes to Silvia (played by Rosa Elena Durgel), an opera singer who performed that night just before the dinner party in his home. We see him give this toast twice; after the second toast, however, he frowns because no one is listening to him. They prefer to chat with each other.

Yet another repetition is in the greeting of Cristián Ugalde (played by Luis Beristáin) and Leandro Gomez (played by José Baviera). This one occurs three times: first, they meet as strangers, second, they greet each other with the warmest of friendliness; and the third time, they acknowledge each other coldly.

Finally, at the climax of the film, Leticia (Pinal) offers, as a solution to their inability to heave the house, the idea of everyone repeating what he or she did shortly before the realization that no one could leave, soon after the end of the playing of the Paradisi piano sonata by Blanca (played by Patricia de Morelos). The guests’ point-for-point repetition of what they did frees them.

Now, what do these repetitions mean? I believe they can be symbolically associated with Freud‘s notion of “the compulsion to repeat” traumatizing experiences, an illogical act that goes “beyond the pleasure principle,” and which in turn is associated with the death drive, which involves acts of aggression against the self and others as seen among the guests throughout the middle of the film, as they’re all going mad with despair at their inability to leave, and taking their frustrations out on each other.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly traumatizing about not having a doorman to take your guests’ coats in the Nóbiles’ foyer. Nor is giving a toast no one’s listening to a traumatic experience, or even two men addressing each other with icy hostility. But perhaps the point should be made in relation to Buñuel’s wish to satirize the bourgeoisie.

Edmundo loses face among his guests without a doorman to take their coats, and without any listeners to his second toast. What is a minor problem for most people is a kind of narcissistic injury to the proud capitalist, with whom Buñuel would not want us to sympathize. The same goes for Cristián’s and Leandro’s third and abrasive meeting, for the bourgeois can be as antagonistic to each other as they are to the proletariat, in their incessant attempts to outdo each other.

Leticia’s suggestion to have everyone repeat his or her actions to free them all from their confinement is a perfect example of repetition compulsion as an attempt to master and therefore overcome the traumatizing experience. The earlier repetitions, in establishing this idea as a theme in the film, are thus symbolic of repetition compulsion by their association with this climactic moment.

Leticia herself is a fascinating character, and not just for her beauty. She’s nicknamed “the Valkyrie” for her perceived savageness, and yet also for her virginity. Early in the film, we see an example of this savageness when she throws a glass at a window, shattering it. Yet her idea to free everyone through the repetitions make her the guests’ saviour.

This means that Leticia is both good and bad in the film. Consider Pinal’s characters in two other Buñuel films, the title role of Viridiana (1961), the nun who is so protective of her ever-endangered chastity; and her role as the breast-baring Devil in his 1965 short film, Simon of the Desert (which also had Brook playing the film’s title role). In the first film, Pinal plays the saintly thesis; in the third, she plays the sluttish negation; and in this second film, she’s the sublation of the two opposing roles.

Speaking of Hegelian dialectical opposites, yet another heaven/hell paradox can be found in Blanca’s performance mentioned above of the piano sonata by Pietro Domenico Paradies, or “Paradisi,” as he’s called in the film. This ‘paradise’ performance happens shortly before the guests’ realization of their ‘infernal’ entrapment in the house.

The idea that they can’t leave is only subtly introduced. It seems at first that the guests simply aren’t inclined to leave yet, for one reason or another. Blanca, for example, though too tired to keep playing the piano and wishing to go home, won’t go out of the room because she’s been sidetracked by a conversation and has forgotten to get her shawl. This kind of subtlety is part of what reinforces the idea that nothing is really detaining the guests but themselves.

Of course, it won’t be long before they find themselves getting more and more uncomfortable with having to stay. A few, including Lucia! are hoping to have illicit sexual encounters with their lovers, but finding the crowd of guests all around them to be a nuisance. Others are getting uncomfortable in their suits, taking off their coats and ties, which looks scandalous to Lucia.

They all have to sleep on the floor in the salon together, rather than enjoy the luxury of beds. The next morning, Julio has no food to serve breakfast to the guests, because the suppliers haven’t delivered any; so Lucia has him serve leftovers.

Such inconveniences as these are meant to help the pampered bourgeoisie to understand what it’s like to endure the way the working class must. A similar deprivation was experienced in Buñuel’s film of ten years later, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when the wealthy protagonists’ many attempts to eat dinner together are interrupted, leaving them all hungrier and hungrier.

By the next evening, everyone is beginning to lose his or her patience over this unending captivity. With no more clean water, they start using a closet for a toilet. Here we see the irony of staying in a luxurious home, yet living no better than those in the Third World. Bourgeois heaven has become hell…with all those other people.

Everyone is on edge, one’s normal sense of social graciousness degenerating into bluntness and aggression. Raúl (played by Tito Junco) starts blaming Edmundo for having invited everyone to his home, only to be trapped in it. Indeed, as I observed in my analysis of Wozzeck, it is the stresses of being poor and unable to pull oneself out of the mire, rather than some supposed social ‘inferiority,’ that is what makes one behave improperly, and we can see the proof of this observation in how these bourgeois are increasingly losing their sense of composure because of their ongoing plight.

In fact, one of their older guests, Sergio Russell (played by Antonio Bravo), has died. He earlier expressed a disliking for jokes and pranks when one of the staff serving food at the dinner table fell and dropped his tray all over the floor, getting laughs from everyone else. Lucia thus decided not to present a surprise involving a bear and three sheep out of a wish not to annoy him.

What’s the significance of these animals in the movie? Buñuel insisted that there was no intended symbolic meaning attached to them, saying instead that he got the idea from a party in New York he’d attended, in which the hostess brought in a bear and two sheep. He insisted that the use of the bear and sheep was arbitrary, just to include “some sort of disturbing image.”

Now, this may all be true, and it probably is. After all, surrealism is all about producing illogical, disturbing images as an expression of the non-rational workings of the unconscious mind. But we should emphasize this surrealist notion of expressing unconscious meaning. Buñuel’s conscious reasons for including the bear and sheep, as well as Pinal’s blindfolding of one of the sheep, may just be arbitrary ones, but his unconscious, surrealist reasons are freely open to interpretation. Buñuel may have dismissed many critics’ interpretations–i.e., the bear representing the USSR creeping in on the capitalist nations, and the sheep representing Christianity–as nonsense; psychoanalysts, however, may dismiss his dismissing as mere examples of denial and resistance.

Since Buñuel wanted to leave his film open to interpretation, his reasons for denying the validity of such critics’ interpretations as the examples given above can be seen also as a wish not to allow those interpretations to ossify and be deemed ‘the correct’ ones. I would agree that they shouldn’t be seen as the only interpretations to make, yet I wouldn’t say they’re wrong or invalid, either.

That the bear could, though of course not necessarily, represent Soviet Russia is so easy to see that it needs no further comment. Since the number of sheep (lambs, actually) are specifically three, and they are killed and eaten by the guests in a kind of crude Communion, it is again easy to associate them with Christianity; and the blindfolding of one of them can represent blind faith in that religion, something easily seen in many among the bourgeoisie. These, of course, don’t have to be the ‘correct’ interpretations, but they’re perfectly legitimate ones, in spite of Buñuel’s objections to them.

The guests cannot go outside; nor can anyone outside come in the house. The invisible barrier between the two groups of people can represent that of social class and therefore the impossibility of social mobility. There’s also Roger Ebert‘s interpretation that the barrier symbolizes the rigidity of the society of Francoist Spain. The symbolism of this rigidity is especially apparent at the end of the film, when the people are trapped in the church, while outside, soldiers are firing their rifles at the outside crowd of people, keeping anyone from entering the church. This is rather like the cherubim with their flaming sword to stop Adam and Eve from re-entering the Garden of Eden to get to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24)…only this Eden, like the Nóbiles’ house, is another hellish heaven, a church of Satan, if you will, from which there’s no exit, where hope is to be abandoned.

The barrier can also represent other aspects of Francoist Spain. There were all the leftists who lost in the Spanish Civil War and were kept in concentration camps. Buñuel turning the tables on the bourgeois dinner guests, them representing the Spanish ruling class, and trapping them in the Nóbiles’ house, is thus a kind of wish-fulfillment. Finally, Buñuel, being inimical to the Spanish fascists, had been living in exile from his home country for many years, like those people outside who can’t enter Edmundo’s and Lucia’s house.

Some of the guests are getting ill, physically and mentally, and Dr. Carlos Conde (Benedico) has no medicine to give them. How symbolic this is of the lack of adequate health care in Third World countries (Cuba excepted). Edmundo, however, has a stash of opiates, which he normally reserves for the naughty pleasures of himself and certain friends of his, but now he’s offering them to his guests to mitigate their suffering. How representative this is of how the poor often have to resort to drug use as a quick and easy way to soothe their pain!

…and here, we see the bourgeoisie reduced to having to resort to such extremes.

One night, Ana Maynar (played by Nadia Haro Oliva) dreams of a disembodied hand crawling about the room. Sweating from a fever and terrified at the sight, she tries to stab it with a knife after it tries to strangle her. This is one moment in the film that has caused some critics to call The Exterminating Angel a horror film. Later, other guests will have bad dreams.

Buñuel had used the image of a severed hand before. He wanted to use it in an aborted film project called The Beast with Five Fingers, a film that ended up being done in 1946 by Robert Florey. He originally used the image in a scene in Un Chien Andalou, in which a mannishly-dressed woman is using a phallic cane to poke at a severed hand (as Ana does with the knife to stab the hand)–symbolic of castration, as I mentioned in my analysis of that short film.

In the scene in The Exterminating Angel, Ana, the woman dreaming about the hand, has earlier mentioned her experience of having been on a train that suffered a derailment. That hand moves across the room in a manner that may remind her of the moving train. The length and hardness of the train could also be seen as symbolically phallic, just as the severed hand, symbolic of castration, can have phallic associations.

The derailment of the train, ‘cutting it off,’ as it were, from the tracks, and thus making it impotent and of no use, can also be sen as a symbolic castration, which in turn strengthens the train’s association with the severed hand. The hand choking her is threatening her life, just as the derailment was life-threatening.

Note that castration is symbolic of Lacan‘s notion of lack, which gives rise to desire, the desire of the Other, a desire to be what the Other desires, and to be given recognition by the Other. Such feelings bring us back to what I said at the beginning of this analysis, of how this film is comparable to No Exit, and how “Hell is other people,” because we can’t escape the judgement of those others whom we want to want us, and whom we want to give us recognition.

The lack that gives rise to desire is also the lack that the bourgeois guests are experiencing, a lack normally reserved for the poor: no food, no water, no escape from their trap. Because of this manque à avoir, the guests are coming apart emotionally, and lashing out at each other. During their sleep, an elderly man (Alberto Roc?, played by Enrique García Alvarez) even tries to take advantage of a sleeping woman or two. When the bourgeoisie lack what the proletariat have always lacked, the former prove themselves no better, no more refined, than the latter.

The guests reach such a bestial point that Raúl, always blaming their predicament on Edmundo, says that their only way out of it is to kill their host. Edmundo, always reacting to Raúl’s verbal abuse with a gracious, patient turning of the other cheek, is thus being made out as a Christ figure: his death will save them, it seems. Edmundo even agrees to shoot himself with a pistol.

This is when Leticia brings up her suggestion to have everyone repeat what he or she said or did just after the piano performance. The success of her idea, as over Edmundo’s redemptive death, thus demonstrates in symbolic form Buñuel’s rejection of the soteriology of Christ’s crucifixion.

Finally, the guests can leave. Similarly, those outside can go in. In fact, the staff by now have returned, too.

Now that their ordeal is over, most of the guests come together again to attend a Te Deum service at a church. But as I already mentioned, they will soon find themselves unable to leave. Once again, religion won’t help them any more than it could symbolically back in the Nóbiles’ house (i.e., when eating the three sheep, or killing Christ-like Edmundo). In fact, the film ends with a flock of sheep ominously entering the church.

How fitting it is to see an animal often used to symbolize passive, mindless obedience enter a place where people are trapped behind an imaginary, invisible barrier of their own making.

Analysis of ‘Videodrome’

Videodrome is a 1983 science fiction/body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg (who just two years earlier wrote and directed Scanners). It stars James Woods, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and Sonja Smits; it costars Peter Dvorsky, Les Carlson (who also played a man tracing telephone calls from the killer in Black Christmas), and Jack Creley (whom we may recall as the teacher from that old Glosettes TV ad from two years before this film).

Videodrome was Canadian Cronenberg’s first film to get backing from a major Hollywood studio. Though it had the highest budget of any of his films at the time, it was a box office bomb. It did, however, receive praise for its special makeup effects, for Cronenberg’s direction, and for the performances of Woods and Harry. It’s now a cult classic, and is regarded as one of Cronenberg’s best films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Since Videodrome (“video arena,” or “video circus”) is about a broadcast signal, “Videodrome,” showing snuff films, a signal that lures its viewers into a hallucinatory world of mind control and paranoia that ultimately kills them, the film can be seen as an allegory of how the media in general is used to manipulate us, the people, into believing anything the media’s corporate owners want us to believe, and to act on those beliefs, no matter how harmful they may be. Such manipulation includes manufacturing consent for wars, which can be seen as symbolized by the violence of the snuff films seen in the movie.

What’s so alluring about Videodrome is precisely this video aspect, for the TV screen can be seen as a metaphorical mirror reflection of the viewer, analogous to the mirroring back and forth between one person and another to whom he or she may be talking at one time. We see an example of such an analogy at the beginning of the film, when Bridey James (played by Julie Khaner) wakes up her boss, Max Renn (Woods) through the use of a TV to remind him of a meeting he is to have that very day with Japanese pornographers about a film to be shown on his Toronto UHF TV station, CIVIC TV, which specializes in showing extreme erotic content.

Her talking to him on a TV screen, rousing him from his sleep is meant to look almost like one side of a conversation. As Professor O’Blivion (Creley) will tell us later, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” Seeing Bridey on the screen is like seeing her eye to eye; the worlds of fantasy and reality are blurred and fusing.

If looking at someone on a TV is hardly to be distinguished from looking at someone in real life, in front of oneself, then we can extend this idea to what I’ve discussed before of the dialectical relationship between the self and the other, of how there’s a bit of the self in the other, and vice versa. One could relate this idea to how Ian Anderson once introduced the Jethro Tull song, “The Minstrel in the Gallery,” as being about the performer not just being watched in his performance, but also him watching the ‘performance’ of his audience, for “he saw his face in everyone” after “he threw away his looking glass.” As I said above, the TV in Videodrome is a metaphorical mirror, or looking glass, in which the viewer sees his face in everyone on the screen, and narcissistically identifies with each of them.

The point is that Max projects his own unconscious desires onto the screen when he watches Videodrome, and the violence of his resulting hallucinations is a reflection of what’s inside of him. Then Videodrome in turn projects its violence back onto him, making him consciously act out his unconscious violent urges.

He watches the TV…and the TV watches him, so to speak, at least in his hallucinations. There are, or seem to be, two-way conversations going on between him and whoever is on the TV screen. This sense becomes more explicit when Max sees the Marshall McLuhan-like O’Blivion address him on the video he watches, the video when we see O’Blivion killed.

One establishes one’s sense of ego, as a distinct self, by seeing oneself for the first time as an infant in front of a mirror. One sees oneself, but the self is ‘over there,’ as if another person. One establishes oneself, yet is alienated from that self, hence conversely, there’s the sense of the self in the other, and vice versa.

Metaphorical mirrors exist in people we face in two-way, dyadic relationships, as with the infant held by his mother, them looking into each other’s eyes. An analogous two-way relationship is felt between the viewer and the person being viewed on TV.

When the media successfully manipulates our emotions, making us feel what its corporate owners want us to feel, this manipulation is the TV watching us back, like those two-way telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s significant that O’Blivion is meant to represent McLuhan in Videodrome, for recall what McLuhan said about the modern media: “The medium is the message,” or “the massage,” or the “mass age,” or the “mess age”; how the message is presented is, if anything, more important than its content.

Yes, the medium also massages us–that is, how the content is presented, in the case of Videodrome, via TV videotapes, is a visual form that charms us as a mother does her baby, she being one of those metaphorical mirrors; and through this charming, this massaging, the media gets us to do its bidding. It is the mass age because we’re in an age in which the media does this charming and manipulating of the world’s masses, interconnecting us all to the point of creating a global village. The medium is also, by making a mess of our age, a mess age.

Such manipulating is why some are concerned about CIVIC TV. Max appears on a TV show to defend his channel by rationalizing that, by giving his viewers an outlet to release their dark fantasies onto, they won’t feel the need to vent them on non-consenting people in real life. It is at this TV show where he meets Nicki Brand (Harry), and he immediately finds her attractive in that red dress.

That the two quickly begin a sexual relationship, all while Max has been watching his first samples of Videodrome, is significant, for she in her seductive beauty personifies the allure of Videodrome. The show presents plotless, realistic scenes of sadism, while Nicki is a masochist, enjoying being pricked with pins and burned with cigarettes.

That a masochist should personify a show featuring sadism, the dialectical opposite of her desires, is reconciled with a quote from Freud: “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.”

Nicki is so taken with Videodrome that she decides to go and “audition” for the show. That she so quickly becomes part of Max’s hallucinations on his TV screen shows us how much she is, and has always been, at one with Videodrome.

Another character, one closely associated with Nicki as I’ll point out soon, is Masha (played by Lynne Gorman). She, in about her mid-fifties, is old enough to be 34-year-old Max’s mother (“Masha” could be heard as a pun on “Mama”), which is significant, because he occasionally flirts with her, indicating a transference of the Oedipus complex.

That Masha is associated with Nicki is made clear in the scene when Max hallucinates first whipping tied-up Nicki, who masochistically enjoys it, then realizes he’s whipping Masha, tied up and in Nicki’s place, even wearing red, as Nicki was. Max wakes up and hallucinates seeing Masha lying next to him in bed, still tied up and gagged, and dead from the beating; this indicates further his Oedipal transference onto her, as well as her association with Nicki (i.e., her involvement in the erotic fantasy).

If ‘Mama’ Masha is associated with Nicki, then Nicki is also a kind of displaced Oedipal transference, which can be seen in the earlier scene when Max hallucinates seeing her on his TV screen, and she says to him, “Come to Nicki,” which almost sounds like, “Come to Mommy.”

Therefore, Masha represents his good mother, and Nicki represents his bad mother, to use concepts from Melanie Klein. Masha is the good one because, apart from submitting ‘nice’ porn to CIVIC TV, she also warns him against looking further into Videodrome. Nicki is the bad mother because, of course, she lures him more and more into Videodrome.

This splitting of Max’s mother transferences into good and bad objects reflects what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: paranoid because of his fear of the bad internal object possibly persecuting him (which Nicki does, of course); and schizoid because of the splitting of his world into absolute good and bad, black and white. Trying to reject the bad, through projection, will result in bizarre objects, Wilfred Bion‘s term for hallucinated projections of the bad objects. Such projective identification is why Max is hallucinating.

One crucial thing to understand about his Oedipal transferences is that they are narcissistic in origin. Seeing that mirrored other face in front of oneself, be it the mother’s, a maternal transference, or a face on the TV screen, is a participating in a dyadic relationship with the other (only one other person), as opposed to Lacan‘s Other, meaning the many other people of society in general. The one other is a mirrored reflection, or an extension, of the narcissistic self, and that other is selfishly hogged, never to be shared with other people.

In his being sucked further and further into the dangerous world of Videodrome, Max is isolating himself and regressing to an infantile state where fantasy and reality have a blurred boundary. The removal of the societal Other, as represented by a father figure (here in turn represented by O’Blivion, whom we see killed, reduced to oblivion, on the videotape), is what Lacan called foreclosure, which leads to psychosis, Max’s break with reality, leading to more hallucinations and more delusions.

The media’s manipulation of us, beguiling us with those seductive images on the TV screen (or, in today’s world, our computer screens or smartphone screens; and incidentally, McLuhan predicted the internet) and twisting our minds with propaganda, is doing basically the same thing to us as Videodrome is doing to Max. In mindlessly supporting imperialist war after imperialist war, we’ve become as narcissistic, violent, delusional, and paranoid/schizoid as he is.

Max asks Masha to find out more about Videodrome for him, and as I said above, she tries to warn him to stay away from it. She insists that these snuff films show real murders, not faked ones. Of course, any producer of snuff films, in his right mind, would never risk being charged with murder when he could just fake the killings, as is done in mainstream films. Videodrome, however, doesn’t fake the killings because, as Masha tells Max, it has a philosophy.

When Max asks for a name behind this philosophy, she tells him that it’s Professor Brian O’Blivion. I would say, however, that the name behind this philosophy is that of the Marquis de Sade, who in his erotic writings merged pornography with philosophy, anti-religion, a glorification of cruelty and crime, and an ironic commentary on the oppressive power structures of our world–the Church, the state, and class antagonisms.

Right after learning about O’Blivion, Max goes to find him, and it’s significant that the building he goes to is a place where the homeless are made to watch marathon sessions of TV. Here we see a parallel of the relationship this film makes between sex and violence: the pleasure of watching TV, of being seduced by images on the screen and being put in that infantile, dyadic, almost Oedipal relationship, is associated with the structural violence of being reduced to poverty.

The rich and powerful, like Sade’s wealthy characters, his politically influential sex criminals, are torturing and killing the weak and poor. The people behind Videodrome represent these powerful people, at least the corporate media faction, indulging in transgressive, pleasure/pain jouissance and getting the surplus value of what Lacan called plus-de-jouir. Sadomasochism in the film represents the pleasure the ruling class gets from oppressing the working class.

Just as there are competing capitalist, imperialist interests, so are there competing factions for the control of Videodrome: there’s the agenda of O’Blivion and his daughter, Bianca (Smits), and there’s the agenda of Barry Convex (Carlson) of the Spectacular Optics Corporation, and of Harlan (Dvorsky), the operator of the CIVIC TV satellite dish who, though feigning subservience to Max, his “patrón,” nonetheless has lured his boss into his obsession with Videodrome by getting him to watch a broadcast of it at the beginning of the film.

Before meeting with Convex, Max has had a particularly disturbing hallucination in which he sees a yonic slit appear on his belly. He has a handgun with obvious phallic symbolism, for he puts it in the slit, along with his fist. This scene reinforces the thematic link of sex and violence in the film. It also suggests an internalizing of the combined parent figure, an infantile phantasy based on a child’s witnessing of the primal scene, of his parents having sex, which looks painful to the child and arouses Oedipal jealousy, a feeling of being left out.

Connected with this unconscious phantasy (recall Max’s maternal transferences onto Masha and Nicki) is his feeling of lack, as symbolized by that yonic slit, in turn a symbolic wound from castration. A lack of being able to be, or to have, the phallus for the mother (Masha or Nicki) gives rise to desire, which is the desire of the Other, to be what Masha or Nicki desires, these two being manifestations of Max’s objet petit a.

Consider in this connection a scene not filmed, but in the novelization by “Jack Martin,” pseudonym of Dennis Etchison, in which Max sees a TV rise out of his bathtub like Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus. If you recall the myth behind the painting, Venus, or Aphrodite, appeared from the foam after Uranus‘ severed genitals were thrown into the sea. As I discussed in this post, the castration of Uranus leading to the birth of Venus can be allegorized as Lacan’s notion of lack giving rise to desire.

Max’s desire, fueling his growing obsession with Videodrome, puts him in such a vulnerable state that he can now be easily manipulated and exploited by Convex, who comes in right on cue and has Max driven over to a branch of Spectacular Optical, a seller of eyeglasses. Since, as O’Blivion informed us, “the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” then these glasses, through the association of TV with one’s eyes, are a metaphorical television in themselves. And since Convex is Videodrome’s producer, as a member of the eyeglasses company, we see a stronger link between the glasses and TV.

In his self-introduction to Max in the car on the way to the Spectacular Optics branch, which is done fittingly on a small TV screen in the car, Convex explains that the eyeglasses company makes cheap glasses for the Third World, paralleling Bianca’s having homeless people watch TV. Convex’s company also provides missile guidance systems for NATO, so we can see a sinister link between his use of media manipulation via Videodrome, his eyeglasses (as I suspect) controlling and shaping what the poor of the Third World see, and imperialist capitalism.

It is at the back of the eyeglasses store that Convex has Max wear a device on his head to record his hallucinations of whipping Nicki, then seeing himself whip Masha. His inner fantasies of dominance and control, over the two representing his objet petit a, are being manipulated and exploited (and therefore in turn dominated and controlled) by Convex.

When Max later learns of Harlan’s involvement in luring him into Videodrome, and of Harlan’s association with Convex, Harlan tells him of the need for the West to toughen up against its toughening Eastern enemies, who I suspect were the communists. We’ve seen this Western toughening up since the time Videodrome was made, suggesting how prophetic the film was in linking media manipulation of the masses with the neoliberal counterrevolution starting in the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher.

Another surreal moment comes when Convex puts a videocassette into that slit in Max’s belly. Since, as I said above, that slit is yonic, Convex is putting the cassette in Max against his will, and the insertion is done to control Max, it can be seen as a symbolic rape, another fisting.

Convex wants Max to give CIVIC TV to Videodrome, and to kill his two business partners. Here we have a pun already seen in American Psycho: murders and executions for the sake of mergers and acquisitions. Videodrome is an example of big capitalism swallowing up small capitalism–CIVIC TV. Once again, I must give that quote from Marx: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Max holds his handgun, which merges with his body and becomes an extension of his fist, a phallic fist, like those hands that put organic videocassettes into his vaginal belly.

He does as commanded. He goes into the CIVIC TV building and finds his two business partners, Raphael (played by David Bolt) and Moses (played by Reiner Schwarz; since Videodrome was filmed and set in Toronto, I wonder if this second business partner was named after Moses Znaimer, head of Citytv at the time). Max kills both of them, then flees the building, having pretended also to be wounded and therefore supposedly not guilty of the attack.

Here we see Max no longer just unconsciously getting his kicks from snuff films. And no longer is he just being manipulated by and hooked on Videodrome, as if it were a drug. Now he is an assassin for Convex. Just like those of us who start off enjoying transgressive, taboo pleasures (jouissance) brought about by Lacan’s lack and a narcissistic wish to be mirrored by a mother substitute (objet petit a), then are manipulated by the media to channel our aggressive, violent urges on specific, political targets, so is Max being used to wipe out Videodrome’s enemies.

Next, he is to find Bianca and kill her. She, however, has been expecting him, and she shows him a video recording of Nicki being murdered by the people in Videodrome, Bianca’s purpose being to sway Max over to the O’Blivion side. (But has Nicki really been killed, or is the recording yet another of Max’s hallucinations, an attempt to manipulate him into working for Bianca? Indeed, for that matter, was even her father really killed, or was his assassination, apparently done by Nicki, yet another hallucination?)

In any case, just as the killing of Professor O’Blivion represents the Oedipal wish to annihilate the father figure so as to have the mother transference (Masha/Nicki), so is the killing of mother figure Nicki a reflection of an unconscious Electra complex in Bianca (her “father’s screen”), a wish to protect her father…or at least to protect his legacy. With Max under her control now, him having seen a hand/pistol emerge from a TV, and having been shot by it (projective identification from the TV back to him, and we furthermore see bullet wounds in the ‘chest’ of the TV screen, indicating once again the mirrored, two-way relationship of the viewer and his TV), he is now to destroy Videodrome.

He recovers from being shot like a resurrected Christ, the bullet wounds being his stigmata. Accordingly, he is now “the video word made flesh,” and so, “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!” As a brainwashed, quasi-religious zealot for the manipulative media, narcissistically flattered to be associated with Christ, he will go off to kill Harlan and Convex.

His switching to the O’Blivion side mustn’t be seen as him being any better than before. The Videodrome/O’Blivion conflict is just symbolic of controlled opposition, as far as it represents media manipulation of the public. The two sides just represent competing capitalists.

Harlan puts another videotape–this time, a surreal, fleshly one–into that vaginal slit in Max’s belly; but now that Max is working for Bianca, the symbolic wound of castration that that slit has been is now a kind of castrating vagina dentata that closes up on Harlan’s hand, his fisting, symbolic phallus, and bites it off, leaving the remainder of his arm vaguely resembling a mixer’s beater. Max has gone from feeling powerless, like a eunuch, to powerful. His Lacanian lack feels fulfilled.

After killing Harlan, Max finds Convex at a Spectacular Optics convention on the theme of Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom the following two quotes are (erroneously) attributed: “Love comes in at the eye” (actually from WB Yeats‘s poem, “A Drinking Song“), and “The eye is the window of the soul” (not definitively attributable to any one source).

Apart from being, as it seems, a mere error on Cronenberg’s (or Convex’s) part, could there be any deeper meaning behind associating these quotes with the Italian Renaissance statesman, banker, and patron of the arts? Perhaps the point of linking Lorenzo de’ Medici to Videodrome is to say that he was, on the one hand, the McLuhan/O’Blivion of his day, and the art of men like Botticelli and Michelangelo (whom he sponsored) was the TV of the time; and on the other hand, his political power was like that of Convex, Bianca, et al.

In any case, Nicki’s love surely has gone into Max’s eye, which is the window of the soul that he’s lost to Videodrome.

We see Convex come on a stage after a dance performance, and he says to the audience, “Well, you know me, and I sure know you.” We also hear a member of the audience say, “Yeah, we know you.” This exchange reinforces the theme I discussed earlier of the reciprocity between performer (e.g., Jethro Tull), or person on TV, and audience, or TV viewer.

With his hand-flesh-gun, Max shoots Convex, who falls to the stage floor with his body tearing to pieces in a manner reminding us a bit of the climactic scene in The Evil Dead. This over-the-top death is explained in the novelization as being the result of Max not shooting Convex with normal bullets, but rather with “new flesh” ones.

Max’s ever-increasing madness is, of course, resulting in his ever-increasing isolation. He escapes to a derelict boat in the Port Lands. He has a hallucination of Nicki on a television set there. Recall how I’ve characterized that mirror-like reciprocity between TV image and viewer as a narcissistic one, how the ego is established in what Lacan called the Imaginary. Alongside this experience has been Max’s traumatizing, maddening experience of the Real, these surreal, hallucinatory states that cannot be symbolized through language (how the novelization managed such verbalizing is anyone’s guess); in other words, the psychologically therapeutic realm of the Symbolic is absent here. Max can only get madder and madder; he cannot return to the social world.

Accordingly, Nicki tells him that he must “leave the old flesh” to destroy Videodrome once and for all. This means he has to kill himself. In his narcissistic imagination, Max thinks that doing so will raise him up to a higher level of existence (“the new flesh”), rather like Christ’s death and resurrection giving Him a ‘spiritual body.’ Since Max, in his insanity brought on by media manipulation, is bordering on psychological fragmentation, such narcissistic imaginings can feel like a shield against said fragmentation.

He sees himself on the TV screen putting a bullet in his head, then he immediately does the same to himself. He and the TV are one, a mirror of each other, because the media, in controlling him, have made him destroy himself…just as today’s media, in manufacturing our consent for war with Russia and China, are making us all destroy ourselves through escalation and raising the threat of nuclear war.

Like Max Renn, we are all mesmerized by the images we see on our screens, be they TV, tablet, computer, or smartphone. Neoliberalism has caused us to feel a particularly gaping lack, a hole in our lives like that slit in Max’s gut. We’ve been propagandized to see things in a split-up, black and white world, with ourselves narcissistically as the white, Christ-like good, and other nations as the black, absolutely evil enemy. Political parties, like Videodrome vs. O’Blivion, pretend to be at odds with each other, when actually they push for essentially the same agenda. And we are driven to support aggressive, violent policies that could end up killing us all, like Max the flesh-gunned assassin.

Media manipulation is making us see a world so divorced from reality, so distorted a version of the truth, so surreal, that we could be understood to be hallucinating. If we’re not careful, we’re all going to “leave the old flesh.”