Category: Freud

Synchronicity and September 11th

I: Introduction–What is Synchronicity?

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

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

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

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

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

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

II: The Three September 11th Years

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

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

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

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

III: The Chilean Coup D’état

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

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

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

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

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

IV: Bush’s ‘New World Order’ Speech

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V: The Terrorist Attacks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI: The Collective Shadow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VII: Conclusion (Including 119 and November 9th)

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

I see patterns. I can’t help it.

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Frantic’

Frantic is a 1988 film directed by Roman Polanski and written by him, Gérard Brach, and Robert Towne. It stars Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, with Betty Buckley, John Mahoney, and Yorgo Voyagis. Ennio Morricone wrote the film score.

The film was a box office disappointment, except for in countries like France, but it was a critical success. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 77% positive reaction, based on 43 reviews. Siskel and Ebert, though critical of aspects of it, gave it “two thumbs up.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a transcript of the dialogue.

The film begins with Dr. Richard Walker (Ford) and his wife, Sondra (Buckley), in a cab going from the airport to their hotel in Paris. From San Francisco, they’re here because he has to do a medical conference (they also had their honeymoon here twenty years before). One normally associates a trip to France with the height of romance, but a business trip like this tends to deflate those feelings of excitement for a return to the place of one’s honeymoon.

What’s more, so much of Paris has changed since the last time the Walkers were here that it’s hard for him to rekindle those romantic feelings through nostalgia. The sky is grey and overcast. Their cab even gets a flat tire.

A shower and a sleep are all the jet-lagged husband and wife want when they get to their hotel room. He speaks as if he’s going to ride her like a stud when they’re in bed, to which she coolly replies, “Promises, promises.” Indeed, after years of marriage and a few kids, it’s hard [!] to imagine a rekindling of the embers of the old fires of passion.

Even worse, she picked up the wrong suitcase, something that will have huge significance later. Though she thinks he should have lunch with Dr. Maurice Alembert, a colleague, since she thinks the latter knows that she and Richard have arrived early enough for them to have lunch together, he doesn’t want to go, so averse is he to extending the business aspect of his trip to Paris. She wants Walker to give her a note she can use to contact Alembert about the lunch, but he’s so opposed to it that he eats the paper.

Walker calls their kids at home and finds out that there are worries over there, too. Somebody has called for Sondra…from Paris (more significance about this will come later), and their teen daughter, Casey, is on a date that night all of a sudden. All of these concerns just add to the atmosphere of a very non-gay Paree.

Walker takes a shower and shaves, and during this time, Sondra has put on a tight red dress and left their room without his knowing. When he realizes she’s gone, he assumes that she’s just stepped out for the moment. Room service has given both of them a meal. He lies on the bed and takes a nap.

When he wakes up, this is when his worries really begin to grow. Things aren’t dull any more.

It’s interesting that he slept before the excitement has begun. I’m not saying that the rest of the movie is a dream. I’m not about to describe what literally happens in Frantic, but rather what I feel is the symbolic meaning of what happens, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Walker sleeps…perchance, to dream. And as Freud pointed out, “the interpretation of dreams is  the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” This association, of Walker having a brief sleep, dreaming, and therefore his unconscious expressing itself, is sufficient in itself for my purposes here.

His trip to France, so far, has been one disappointment after another, one annoyance after another. He wants some excitement in his life, and he’s about to get it…whether he likes the form that excitement is about to come in, or not.

One of the chief things we need to understand about the unconscious is that it’s all about conflict. One part of the mind wants to do one thing, while another part of the mind wants to do something else. Part of Walker wants his wife back, of course…but another part of him wants to get rid of her.

Sure he loves her–there’s no doubt about that; but she’s getting older, and it’s common for married men his age–especially in romantic Paris–to have the seven-year itch and want to chase young women, as morally objectionable as that may be. He’s a strait-laced, conservative family man, but he’s also a handsome, successful doctor, the kind of man many young women would find attractive and see as a good catch.

Surely Walker is aware of how potentially appealing he must be, including to sexually appealing young women like Michelle (Seigner), so he must be feeling the temptation to cheat on Sondra while she’s gone. It doesn’t matter that he never ends up cheating on her–the point is that he feels the temptation, and part of what’s making him so…frantic…about finding Sondra as soon as he can is his wish to make impossible any more opportunities to cheat.

What we see in Walker is the classic manifestation of the id, the ego, and the superego. His id, to put it perfectly bluntly, wants to fuck Michelle’s brains out. His ego knows that jeopardizing his marriage, a divorce from which would probably mean losing custody of his kids, makes an affair out of the question. Yet even if he can get away with sleeping with Michelle while Sondra’s missing, and she never learns about his adultery, Walker–being the strait-laced, conservative man that he is–has a superego that would plague him with guilt over doing such a naughty thing…especially while his wife is being held for ransom!

So the events as they unfold in the film give him his adventure, while resolving the conflict between to do or not to do (Michelle). The girl helps him find his wife, there are a few sexy, suggestive moments between them, and he gets Sondra back physically unharmed, though having had a big scare. In short, Frantic is wish-fulfillment for Walker…though because of his conflicted feelings, it’s also a nightmare.

As he’s trying to get help from such people as the hotel management and the American embassy, it is suggested one or two times that Sondra may have sneaked away to have an affair of her own. After all, she changed into that red dress just before leaving the hotel. Walker, of course, is offended at the idea of his wife betraying him; yet in his unconscious, this betrayal could also be a wish-fulfillment for him, since it now allows him to fool around with a clear conscience. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) has similar thoughts, and therefore similar temptations.

Now, it can be argued that, with his wife out of the picture for the moment, Walker in his unconscious thoughts can explore homosexual possibilities as well as heterosexual ones, as is suggested when he asks about “the good-looking guy” working at the hotel desk to see if he knows where Sondra went. This man is later found in a gym, exercising and lifting weights, so his muscle tone is clear to see through the T-shirt he works out in.

Of course, Walker doesn’t make advances on this “good-looking guy” any more than he does on Michelle, but that isn’t the point. In his unconscious thoughts–allowed to come out with fewer inhibitions while he’s in a drowsy state of jet lag–his id explores the possibilities while his ego rejects them as unrealistic and his superego morally condemns their very contemplation.

The adventure and excitement aren’t limited to sexual possibilities. There’s also the contemplation of doing drugs. In a bar called The Blue Parrot, Walker is looking for a man named Dédé Martin (played by Boll Boyer). He meets a Rastafarian there who intuits that he’s desperately looking for “the white lady.” While Walker assumes the Rastafarian is talking about Sondra, he really means cocaine, a sample of which he gives Walker to snort in a toilet stall in the bar’s washroom.

Now, of course Walker doesn’t want–in his conscious mind–to be high on cocaine while he’s searching for his wife, so he washes it out of his nose as soon as the Rastafarian leaves. His acceptance of “the white lady” up his nose for the moment, however, is only out of politeness on the conscious level; unconsciously, he’d love at least to give coke a try, so he resolves his conflict about it by having it up his nose briefly, then washing it away.

Mistakenly equating “the white lady” with Sondra also rationalizes his indulgence with the drug, however brief it may be. [Later, when Michelle is helping him and they’re in her car, she snorts a line of “the white lady”…until he angrily stops her from doing it. Again, there’s a brief indulgence in it (his id projected onto her), then his ego and superego stop it.]

Walker asks the Rastafarian to give him Dédé’s address, which he gets from Michelle at a table farther off in the bar; so Walker and Michelle, maybe, see each other ever so briefly, without thinking much of it. Her distinctive leather jacket and hat make her more recognizable to him than vice versa, but her recognizing him seems to have more significance when we consider her liking of a particular song by Grace Jones: “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango).”

Walker finds Dédé in his apartment with his throat cut. Michelle goes there at a later point, when Walker’s also there, and they meet right when she’s trying to process the shock of seeing Dédé’s body. She initially assumes Walker’s the killer, and she must be thinking that she’s seen his face before, him having asked the Rastafarian about Dédé’s whereabouts.

Now we can begin to understand the significance of the Grace Jones song as it relates to Michelle’s experiences of the plot of the movie. Walker isn’t “hanging ’round [her] door,” but rather Dédé’s; still, since Walker has accosted Michelle, frightening her in her already traumatized state upon having seen the corpse, he’s “like a hawk stealing for the prey,” as she imagines him.

Walker “shadows [Michelle] back home,” that is, he goes back to her apartment [his spastic crawling on the roof of which–with the suitcase–reflects his conflict over being with her vs resisting the temptation], because she mistakenly took Sondra’s luggage, and he needs to find out what’s in Michelle’s (which has been in his hotel room), to get what’s in it to exchange it with the kidnappers and get Sondra back.

What Grace Jones says in French sounds like something Michelle wants to say to Walker: “What are you looking for, meeting with death [i.e., Dédé’s corpse]? Who do you think you are [i.e., sticking your nose in my business]? Ah, you also hate life [i.e., your disappointing trip to France and your dull married life and work routine].”

Towards the end of the film, Walker and Michelle will “dance in bars and restaurants” (one in particular, called A Touch of Class, and they’ll dance to this song in particular). Before that, she’ll be “home with anyone who wants” to be there with her: namely, two Israeli agents who are also looking for what was smuggled in her luggage (a krytron), and later on, Walker will be there.

Michelle finds Walker “standing there alone” with “staring eyes” that “chill [her] to the bone,” because in spite of his conservative restraint, she–as an extremely desirable young woman–can sense that he wants to have her. His desire both scares and excites her. Indeed, she offers him plenty of opportunities to have her: in her apartment the first time, she changes shirts, being briefly topless and allowing him an opportunity to check her out; later, she gives him a peck on the cheek in his hotel room; and when she dances with him, she undulates seductively in a provocative red dress [!] that accentuates her curves.

Grace Jones’s next words in French seem, for the purposes of this movie, to be equating “Joël” with Walker; for he is in his hotel room with his suitcase (or Sondra’s, or Michelle’s, whichever). His hotel room has been ransacked by those trying to find the krytron, so he’s looking at his clothes, among other things lying all over the place. There are photos of Sondra that he’s used to help him find her; Michelle notices how happy his wife looks in one of them. The idea that he left without regret or melodrama sounds like irony or denial, since he slammed the door and stormed off.

Leaving Paris without regret or melodrama, while having also slammed the door of his hotel room and stormed off, sounds like his attempt at reconciling his unconscious wish to have an adventure without Sondra while consciously fearing for her life the whole time.

To continue discussing the events of Frantic as a symbolic expression of Walker’s thought processes, as I said above, Michelle changing her shirt in the bedroom of her apartment is such an example. While she’s briefly topless, he’s in her bathroom; he sees her and promptly closes the bathroom door. In his actions we can see him resolving his conflict of ‘to see, or not to see’ in this brief look and closing the door.

Not convinced that he secretly wants her? Later, he returns to her apartment with her suitcase (i.e., that clumsy entrance I mentioned above). Having sneaked through the bathroom window, and hearing her being questioned aggressively by the two Israeli agents, Walker gets naked and lies in her bed. He interrupts the interrogation, pretending to be her boyfriend; she goes along with it and sits on the bed with her arms around him.

He gets out of bed with only a stuffed animal to cover his groin. She’s standing behind him as he threatens one of the Israelis, giving her a clear view of his bare ass. Why the need to be nude, except as part of a wish to have a sexual relationship with her? His id wants him to be nude, while earlier, his superego closed the bathroom door.

In another scene earlier in the movie, Walker and Michelle are at the airport getting the suitcase, and they run into some old American colleagues of his, one of them–“Peter”–played by David Huddleston. Though nothing sexual is going on between Walker and Michelle, it must look that way to Peter and the other colleagues. The worried look on Walker’s face can be easily misconstrued as guilt, since the colleagues know Sondra…but in Walker’s unconscious, he really does feel guilty, not just worry that they’ll be gossiping about him and Michelle later.

In his hotel room with Michelle–and the French authorities and hotel staff are with him investigating his wife’s disappearance, since he knows the kidnappers will kill Sondra if he involves the cops–he gets rid of them by claiming he wants to be alone with Michelle, implying he’s having an affair with her, and also claiming they were right to think Sondra was also having an affair with someone. Again, on the surface, this is just an excuse to get rid of all of them; but unconsciously, he’d really like to be with her. He must have enjoyed her peck on his cheek.

To get back to the krytron, it’s hidden in, of all things, a statuette of the Statue of Liberty, which was in Michelle’s suitcase. How ironic it is that something used as a switch for a detonator for nuclear weapons has been put inside a symbol of ‘freedom.’

There’s a terrible fear of Arabs getting their hands on nukes (and Sondra’s kidnappers are Arabs, still routinely portrayed in movies of the time as villains); but the US created the first atomic bomb, and is the only country to have used nukes to kill people, yet we in the West don’t worry about American possession of nukes. France also has nuclear weapons, and while the Israeli government likes to keep to a policy of ‘deliberate ambiguity’ about having them, they most certainly have many.

The men at the American embassy (one of them played by Mahoney) are eager to get their hands on the krytron, as are the two Israeli agents, as if it would somehow be ‘safer’ in their hands. All Walker knows it that it’s the key to Sondra’s survival. To Michelle, as the smuggler of the krytron into France, it’s something she should have asked a lot more money for.

After a failed attempt to give the krytron to the kidnapper (Voyagis) in a parking lot to get Sondra back, Walker and the kidnapper agree to meet in A Touch of Class to arrange another exchange, this time, on the Île aux Cygnes. During Walker’s sexy dance with Michelle in that tight red dress, and Grace Jones is singing “I’ve seen that face before,” there are Arab men in the bar looking at him.

On the surface, Walker’s fearful face on the dance floor would seem to be because he thinks the watching Arabs are working with the kidnapper (lots of Arabs frequent A Touch of Class, as Michelle has remarked earlier), and that Sondra’s life is in their hands. On an unconscious level, though, Walker’s nervousness is really his guilt over dancing with Michelle while his wife’s in danger. He’s uncomfortable because he’s enjoying himself. When they walk into the bar, he politely says she looks nice; he’s really thinking that she looks hot.

The exchange on the Île aux Cygnes is next to the Paris replica of the Statue of Liberty. Recall the juxtaposition of an electronic detonator of nuclear weapons encased in a statuette of “Lady Liberty.” Now, the dangerous exchange of Sondra for that detonator is near another replica of “Lady Liberty.”

Just as there’s the paradox of fantasizing about an extramarital affair mixed with guilt over such thoughts, so is there the paradox of the ideal of democratic freedom mixed with coercion (the kidnapping) and the threat of using a weapon of mass destruction. A surface of goodness (marital fidelity, bourgeois democracy) hides the darkness inside us all (affair fantasies, ambitions of global imperialist dominance through nuclear deterrence).

Though Walker finally gets Sondra back, and it’s interesting to see both her and Michelle in those tight red dresses as they pass each other in the exchange, Michelle complicates the exchange by demanding payment from the kidnapper for having smuggled the krytron into France. A gunfight ensues, because the two Israeli agents arrive, demanding they hand over the krytron. In the struggle, Michelle is mortally wounded from a gunshot in the back from the pistol of the kidnapper, who’s been shot by one of the Israelis.

She puts the krytron in Walker’s pocket as she’s dying in his arms. The parallels between her and Sondra continue: where Sondra was in danger of being killed by the kidnapper, Michelle actually is killed by him. As she’s dying, Walker calls her “baby,” just as he was calling Sondra “babe” a number of times at the beginning of the film.

The point is that the second woman in a red dress has been a double for the first, having replaced her for a time. Now that Sondra is back, though, her appealing double is no longer needed in Walker’s unconscious fantasy world. His calling Michelle “baby” implies his wish, however unconscious, for her to be his new lover.

Siince all the Arabs are killed, the two Israelis approach Walker and Sondra for the krytron. He shows his contempt for them and their coveting of such a dangerous device, which has caused so much trauma and death, by throwing it into the Seine. The preoccupation with the krytron over human lives, a preoccupation on all political sides–American, Israeli, and Arab–as opposed to our sympathetic protagonist’s disregard for it, is meant to represent that old liberal “there’s bad on all sides” position on contentious political issues, a stance that ignores how there’s typically much more bad on one side (the US and Israel) than there is on the others (the Arabs and Soviets).

The movie ends with Walker and Sondra in a cab on their way out of Paris, paralleling their entrance into the city at the beginning. Where in the beginning, the couple were jet-lagged and bored, in the end, they’re emotionally scarred.

On the surface, those scars are from the scary kidnapping and killings they’ve witnessed; unconsciously, though, there’s guilt over fantasies about affairs–did Sondra have such unconscious thoughts, too? Is the fear of violence and death a cover for such guilt? Is that what everyone’s so…frantic…about?

In his review, Ebert criticized Frantic for having a number of ‘unnecessary’ scenes, such as the dance scene. As I’ve tried to show in my psychoanalytic interpretation, though, those scenes are very necessary. For the kidnapping is really a camouflage for unconscious fantasies of tossing aside one’s spouse to have an affair. The fear is really guilt.

Analysis of ‘Chinatown’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Spellbound’

Spellbound is a 1945 psychological thriller directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, with Michael Chekhov, Leo G. Carroll, and John Emery. The screenplay was written by Ben Hecht, from a treatment by Angus MacPhail, after an earlier treatment by Hitchcock’s wife, Alma Reville, which all was “suggested” by the 1927 novel, The House of Dr. Edwardes, by Hilary St. George Saunders and John Palmer (the two authors going under the pseudonym of Francis Beeding).

The film was a critical and commercial success; it was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, and it won Best Original Score. The score, by Miklós Rózsa, inspired Jerry Goldsmith to become a film composer. (I must be honest, though, in saying that I find the love theme rather mawkish, and the spooky music, with the whistling theremin, melodramatic; but you can hear the music and decide its merits for yourself, Dear Reader.)

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the full movie, and here’s a link to the novel by ‘Beeding.’

When we see how often this story was revised, and was “suggested” by the 1927 novel, we see an example of how a Hitchcock film has changed so much of the original story as to retain very little, if anything, from the original (The Birds is another example of such radical changes.).

The few things that Spellbound retains from The House of Dr. Edwardes include the character names of Dr. Edwardes, Constance (Bergman)–though in the film, she’s Dr. Constance Petersen, and in the novel, she’s Dr. Constance Sedgwick (the change of surname owing presumably to a need to accommodate Bergman’s accent, which sounds anything but English), and Dr. Murchison (Carroll). Also retained is the idea of having a mentally ill man impersonate a psychiatrist, though in the film, Dr. Edwardes is impersonated by, as we eventually learn, John Ballantine (Peck), whereas in the novel, a madman named Geoffrey Godstone impersonates Dr. Murchison.

A huge transformation in plot from novel to film is how, in the latter, Constance and Ballantine are chased by the police while she, in love with him, tries to cure him of a guilt complex in which he believes he’s killed the real Dr. Edwardes, while in the former, Godstone not only relishes in his crime of imprisoning, incapacitating (with drugs), and impersonating Dr. Murchison, but also practices Satanism in Edwardes’s mental hospital, a secluded castle on a mountainside in France!

Despite these huge differences between novel and film, though, they do share a few common themes that deserve investigation. Namely, these are the blurred line between doctor and patient, or sane and insane, as well as the juxtaposition of the life and death drives, or Eros (which includes libido) and Thanatos.

The first of these two themes is especially significant in that it calls into question the authority of the psychiatrist. Though common sense reminds us that the doctor is as much a fallible human being as the patient is, we nonetheless have a habit of attributing great wisdom and expertise to the analyst, whom Lacan called “the subject supposed to know.” The novel and film punch holes in this supposed psychiatric authority, in both literal and symbolic ways.

Not only do madmen impersonate psychiatrists in these stories, they also manage to fool the rest of the staff in their respective mental hospitals, if only for a relatively short time. Only Dr. Murchison knows the truth right from the beginning: in the novel, because the real Dr. Murchison is being held against his will by the madman; in the film, because Dr. Murchison is Dr. Edwardes’s real murderer!

In the novel, an old castle in France, the Château Landry, has been made into a mental hospital. Its inaccessibility among the mountains, as well as the evil practices believed by the local villagers to be going on there, reminds me of the Château de Silling, a castle in the German Black Forest, in the Marquis de Sade‘s unfinished erotic novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, adapted as Salò by Pier Paolo Pasolini, in which four wealthy libertines (who, being a duke, a bishop, a president, and a banker, are also of dubious authority) sexually abuse, torture, and kill a number of young, often naked, victims. This clash between a place supposedly meant to heal the sick, but really a place of Satanism and/or perversion, underlines the implied anti-psychiatry and antiauthoritarianism of the novel.

In the film, the blurring of the lines between sane and insane, and doctor and patient, can be seen not only symbolically in Ballantine’s brief impersonation of Dr. Edwardes, but also in the growing mental instability of Dr. Murchison, which leads to him murdering Dr. Edwardes, threatening to murder Constance, and finally committing suicide, all with the same pistol. Finally, Constance’s own professionalism as a doctor is taken into question when she lets her countertransference for her patient, Ballantine, run wild: she’s as much in love with him as he is with her.

Her love for him, translating into a need to have him, is representative of a Lacanian application of Hegel‘s master/slave, or lord/bondsman, dialectic, a holdover from feudal times. She would be the one in authority over him, as analyst over analysand, but her countertransference weakens that authority.

As Ian Parker says in his book, Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, “…Hegelian phenomenology…[was]…influential on Lacan’s early work…the psychiatrist becomes a master who discovers that he is dependent on the slave he commands to work, who discovers that he himself relies on the other he imagined he would dominate, for without that domination his activity would amount to nothing. This master-slave dialectic is actually rooted by Hegel…in the feudal relationship between what he preferred to term ‘lord’ and ‘bondsman’, and it only then starts to have retroactive hermeneutic effects on the way longer past historical relations between masters and slaves might be understood…we can already see the spectre of a totalising system of knowledge–very much of the kind [Hegel] is accused of unrolling and celebrating on the stage of history–haunting psychiatry.” (Parker, page 23)

In the novel, that the mental hospital is in a castle, an icon of feudal times, is significant in how early, authoritarian forms of psychiatry came out of the feudal world, thus reinforcing the mystique around the authority of psychiatrists over the mentally ill, an authority that is challenged–symbolically and literally–in both the novel and the film.

“The bourgeois-democratic revolutions that ushered in new forms of the state in Western Europe to guarantee capitalist interests never completely eradicated feudal power relations, and the remnants of feudalism were recruited into and re-energised in specific ideological projects that served class society well. Psychiatry was thus incorporated into the psy complex, the meshwork of practices that individualize subjectivity and regulate the activities of bourgeois subjects…This replication and recuperation of feudal social links under capitalism has consequences for political-economic analysis of the development of psychoanalysis.” (Parker, page 25)

The fact that, back in feudal times, mental illness was perceived as being caused by demonic possession (recall how Hamlet, in having seen his father’s ghost, is quite possibly really mad, and not merely pretending to be) is echoed in the novel in how not only the villagers neighbouring the Château Landry believe that the patients are possessed, but also rightly suspect that Satanism is being practiced there. This devil-worship, practiced by a madman who convinces the medical staff for quite a time that he’s Dr. Murchison, reinforces the blurring between doctor and patient.

As for the authority of those who have practiced psychoanalysis, a method endorsed in Hitchcock’s film, I am greatly influenced by it myself, as many of my articles have demonstrated, but I have no illusions about it. Psychoanalysis is no science. Freud got a lot more wrong than he got right. Wilfred R. Bion was much more insightful, but his own traumas from his war experiences further demonstrate the blurred line between doctor and patient. Lacan, with his frustratingly obscurantist way of communicating his ideas, comes off as a pretentious narcissist.

For all of these reasons, a novel and film about the mentally ill impersonating psychiatrists seems a fitting topic. In the larger sense, people in all positions of authority–be they psychiatrists, politicians, or bosses–are far too often impostors.

The mad can often do an expert job of faking sanity and self-control, as Ballantine does for much of the film, despite his frequent moments of agitation. Psychopaths and narcissists are also frequently skilled at pretending to be empathetic, caring, and socially conforming; we can see Dr. Murchison do this throughout the film, right up to his suicide; we can also see this self-control in Godstone as he impersonates Dr. Murchison through most of the novel.

These characters wear masks of sanity that slip only from time to time. We all wear masks.

The film begins with a nymphomaniac patient, Mary Carmichael (played by Rhonda Fleming), being taken to see Constance for a therapy session. Fleming’s portrayal of a madwoman in the one scene we have of her (most of the rest of her character was removed from the film for having stretched the limits of 1940s movie censorship…rather like repression of unacceptable unconscious urges, is it not?) is, I’m sorry to say, terribly overacted; still, maybe that’s the point. The mentally ill, in their inability to blend in with society, are simply ‘bad actors.’ the sane know how to maintain the dramatized illusion of sanity.

Constance’s ‘performance’ of a woman totally uninterested in sexual or romantic feelings is impeccable…until “Dr. Edwardes” arrives, that is. Dr. Fleurot (Emery), who up to the arrival of the surprisingly young and handsome “Dr. Edwardes” (In the novel, “Dr. Murchison” is also quite young, unlike Carroll’s Murchison.) and his effect on Constance, has remarked that embracing her is like “embracing a textbook.” So when Fleurot sees her schoolgirl-like crush on “Edwardes,” he can’t help poking fun at her for it.

One suspects that the origin of her countertransference is in her presumably Oedipal relationship with her father, since she complains of how the poets romanticize about love, raising our hopes with it, only for us to be disappointed and heartbroken; actually, our romantic feelings for someone are just a transference of our original Oedipal feelings for the (usually) opposite-sex parent. What’s more, she’s read all of Edwardes’s books, and obviously admires him for his psychiatric expertise, the way a child will regard his or her (then-younger!) parents’ knowledge as quite infallible.

Another patient in Green Manors, Mr. Garmes (played by Norman Lloyd), embodies the opposite, it seems, to Constance’s Oedipal feelings: he imagines he killed his father and has guilt feelings from this delusion, when it’s really just his unconscious wish to remove his father, rooted in childhood, so he could have his mother. Constance reassures him that analysis will help him see the truth buried in his unconscious, and seeing that truth will cure him of his guilt.

Now, Ballantine, in his impersonation of Edwardes, is listening to Garmes talk about his fantasy of having killed his father, and instead of understanding how unconscious Oedipal feelings, rooted in jealousy, can lead to delusions of guilt when the object of jealousy is killed, Ballantine can relate to that guilt and find it very real, since as we learn towards the end of the film, his own guilt complex is based on an accidental killing of his brother, presumably another object of jealousy, another rival for the attention of their mother.

So Ballantine’s most imperfect impersonation of a psychiatrist, especially apparent when he has a mental breakdown during surgery on Garmes, is symbolic of the human imperfections of psychoanalysts, reminding us of the limits of their authority.

To go back to the novel, it isn’t only the authority of the doctors that is questioned (only Constance seems to keep her head the whole time), but also the patients, who though being obviously ill are also often people associated with some form of authority. There’s an extremely forgetful colonel, an ineffectual, foolish druggist named Mr. Deeling, a reverend who finds himself easily brought under Godstone’s Satanic influence, and an elderly woman–normally someone who would be revered as a wise matriarch–who has delusions of being a little girl, and behaves accordingly. And the madman is often referred to as the Honorable Geoffrey Godstone.

The juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos as mentioned above, of feelings of love and of death, are demonstrated when Constance, always trying to deny her love for “Edwardes,” nonetheless gives in and embraces him. Just at that point, though, he becomes agitated when he sees the pattern of dark lines on her white robe, triggering his memory of ski tracks in the snow where he saw the real Dr. Edwardes fall off the side of a mountain to his death.

Constance realizes that “Edwardes” is an impostor when she compares his signature on a recently-written letter with that of the real Dr. Edwardes in one of his books. A parallel scene can be found in the middle of the novel, when Constance goes through some of the books of “Dr. Murchison” and finds writings on Satanism and the witches’ Sabbath. Not only is psychiatric authority to be questioned, but given the feudal era’s association of mental illness with demonic possession, it can sometimes also be the opposite of therapeutic.

Still, Constance is smitten with John B., as she knows him to be named, and she wants to help him get well, refusing to believe even his own insistence that he killed the real Dr. Edwardes. Her countertransference has gone from an Oedipal one (a ‘daddy thing’) to more of a Iocaste-like transference, with Ballantine, in his vulnerability and fear, being like a son to her.

He leaves Green Manors, having been found out to be not only an impostor but also a suspect in the killing of Dr. Edwardes. He’s left Constance a letter, telling her he’s staying at the Empire State Hotel, so she goes there. She’s waiting in the busy hotel lobby, not far from the elevators, out of one of which we see Hitchcock doing his cameo, him walking out of one of them carrying a violin case and smoking a cigarette.

A drunken lout (played by Wallace Ford) sits next to her and annoys her until the hotel detective (played by Bill Goodwin) gets rid of him. This hotel detective, well-meaning and wanting to help her, catches hints from her body language and facial expressions to help him figure out what she needs. He fancies himself something of a psychologist, since one needs to be one in his line of work. His discussion of his skills in human psychology with Constance, who as an actual psychiatrist finds his skills most charming, is yet another example of the film blurring the distinction between doctor and non-doctor.

As Constance tries to analyze Ballantine, he–not wanting to confront his traumas–tries to resist her probing, even getting angry with her. Such hostility to the doctor is as frequent a manifestation of transference as are feelings of love. Again, in this love/hate relationship we have an example of the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos.

Eventually, Constance and John end up at the home of her old teacher and mentor in psychoanalysis, the elderly Dr. Alexander Brulov (Chekhov). Though this doctor is a good, capable man, he has his own clownish eccentricities and idiosyncrasies that remind us of how human therapists also are. For example, he makes a few on-the-spot diagnoses that come across as rather ludicrous: he claims Ballantine has “photophobia,” and is a “schizophrenic.”

And in spite of Brulov’s assertion that “Women make the best psychoanalysts until they fall in love. After that they make the best patients,” he also shares some of that old-fashioned Freudian sexism, wishing that Constance wouldn’t fill his ears with “the usual female contradictions. You grant me I know more than you, but on the other hand, you know more than me. Women’s talk. Bah!”

Recall how Freud, on the one hand, wanted to have more female psychoanalysts to shed light on the “dark continent” of female psychology (hence his famous question, “What do women want?” and his daughter, Anna, becoming an analyst), yet on the other hand, he believed women to have a less-developed superego, and therefore a less-developed sense of morality.

Brulov quickly figures out that something is wrong with “John Brown,” and when he finds the man descending the stairs with a razor in his hand, held like a murder weapon, and with a wild look in his eyes, Brulov resolves to drug John’s milk to knock him out for the rest of the night.

Ballantine seen drinking the drugged milk is one of two significant POV shots that Hitchcock put in the film, the other being the one when Dr. Murchison points his pistol at his face and shoots himself. Apart from the POV linking the two shots is also the fact that both characters have obvious mental health issues, Ballantine in the film impersonating a psychiatrist, and in the novel, a madman impersonating Dr. Murchison.

Ballantine’s taking of the razor blade, as if to use it as a murder weapon, can be seen as a case of what Freud called “the compulsion to repeat,” in that Ballantine, imagining himself to be Dr. Edwardes’s murderer (rather than just the accidental killer of his brother), is repeating an expression of his toxic shame, in the futile hopes of processing that shame and thus eliminating it. Luckily, he never successfully reenacts that supposed inclination to murder on either sleeping Constance, with her white blanket and its dark, straight lines caused by shadow–which obviously has triggered Ballantine–or on Dr. Brulov.

After his long, drug-induced sleep, and an argument between Constance and Brulov over whether to treat him or hand him over to the police, Ballantine wakes up and describes the dream he’s just had to the two psychoanalysts. The designs for the dream, fittingly, were done by surrealist Salvador Dalí.

We see the inside of a gambling house with curtains with eyes all over them, suggesting that it represents Green Manors, and that the eyes on the curtains represent the guards of Green Manors, or just criticizing eyes in general. A scantily-clad woman, representing Constance in a wish-fulfillment for Ballantine, is going around from table to table kissing all the male guests in the gambling house.

Someone with huge scissors is cutting all the eye-covered drapes in half, suggesting a wish to eliminate all those critics watching guilt-ridden Ballantine, who has been playing cards with an elderly man in a beard…Edwardes. The card game could represent a therapy session between the two, since Edwardes’s unorthodox methods included allowing his patients to enjoy recreational activities…like in the skiing incident.

The proprietor of the gambling house, wearing a mask, suddenly appears, accusing the elderly card player of cheating. The former, representing Murchison, as we eventually learn, threatens to “fix” the latter; in other words, Murchison is threatening to kill Edwardes, and the masking of his face represents Ballantine’s repression of the memory of Edwardes’s real killer.

Next, we see the elderly man standing at the edge of a sloping roof on a building. The slope of the roof represents the snowy slope of the side of a mountain, where Edwardes and Ballantine were skiing. The elderly man falls off the roof; then we see the masked proprietor again, hiding behind the chimney of the roof. He’s holding a warped wheel, shaped a bit like a revolver. He drops it on the roof.

What the dream is trying to remind Ballantine, albeit in an extremely distorted form so as not to wake him in a state of great distress, is that Murchison, hiding behind a tree, shot Edwardes in the back, causing him to fall off the mountain to his death, so Murchison could stay on as the “proprietor” of Green Manors, instead of being replaced as such by Edwardes.

The dream ends with Ballantine being chased by a great, shadowy pair of wings down a hill. A speculation of angel wings leads to him recalling where the skiing with Edwardes occurred: a ski lodge named Gabriel Valley. Ballantine and Constance go there to ski, in the hopes that they can bring up more memories to fill in the puzzle of his troubled unconscious. As they’re going down the slope, though, the two skiers are also hoping he won’t, in a fit of repetition compulsion, kill her, too. In this scene, we again see the juxtaposition of Eros and Thanatos.

Just before they reach a precipice, he remembers the time he, as a child, accidentally killed his brother. Little John was sliding down a side ramp, where one puts one’s hand to go up or down stairs in front of a building, and his brother was sitting at the bottom of the ramp, with his back to John and ignoring his cries to get out of the way. John’s feet knocked him off and onto a spiked fence, stabbing the spikes into his guts.

This sliding down and killing someone became a repressed memory that returned to Ballantine’s conscious mind in the unrecognizable form of him sliding down a snowy hill on skis and seeing Edwardes in front of him, like his brother, then seeing him fall to his death. Such returns of the repressed in unrecognizable new forms is common enough.

His innocence of the death of Edwardes seems fully established, except for when the police find the body, right where Ballantine says it was…and with a bullet in the corpse’s back. Ballantine is arrested, tried, and convicted.

Refusing to give up on Ballantine, Constance keeps searching for ways to acquit him. She discusses her heartbreak over his conviction with Dr. Murchison, who lets it slip that he knew Edwardes “slightly” and didn’t like him. (He’d earlier said he never knew Edwardes…though Constance wasn’t in the room to hear him tell this lie!)

Suspecting him, she discusses Ballantine’s dream with Murchison, who freely interprets it in a way to help Constance incriminate him. Since under his calm shell, he is also mentally ill, Murchison in his cooperation with her is demonstrating the promptings of the death drive, especially when he pulls his gun on her. The imposter Murchison of the novel, though at first denying he’s really Godstone, also freely admits to it when the evidence against him is stronger.

In the POV shot of Constance leaving the room with Murchison’s pistol following her, we can expand on the parallels with the POV shot of Ballantine drinking the drugged milk. The perspective is of a madman who either has impersonated or is impersonating a psychoanalyst; the person being looked at is a real psychoanalyst. One receives a drug and sleeps; the other receives a bullet and dies–“to die, to sleep, no more…”

The person seen in both cases, an actual, sane doctor, as opposed to the madman seeing the doctor, is a metaphorical mirror, in the Lacanian sense, of the mentally-ill viewer of him or her. The doctor being watched is thus the ideal-I of the viewer, who in his frustration cannot measure up to that ideal, and therefore must be knocked out or killed.

In these observations we see how Spellbound can be understood to be a critique, allegorically speaking, of the psychiatric profession. One must be careful to ensure that the therapists are as psychologically healthy as humanly possible, for the line between doctor and patient is blurred. Hence, when Constance tells Ballantine that all psychoanalysts must first be analyzed themselves before they can begin practicing, he says, “Ah, that’s to make sure that they’re not too crazy.”

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 ‘Trilogy of Terror’

Trilogy of Terror is a 1975 made-for-TV horror anthology film directed by Dan Curtis. It features three segments based on unrelated short stories by Richard Matheson; the first two segments were adapted by William F. Nolan, while the third–and by far, the best–was adapted by Matheson himself, based on his 1969 short story, “Prey.”

All three segments star Karen Black in the roles of “Julie,” “Millicent and Therese,” and “Amelia,” which are also the names of the segments, since each story, as I’ll argue below, is really about the inner mental life of each character Black plays here. “Julie” costars Robert Burton, Black’s husband at the time. “Millicent and Therese” costars George Gaynes. “Amelia” is essentially a one-woman-play, with only Black and Walker Edmiston doing the voice of the Zuni doll.

Here is a link to a few quotes from the film.

The essential reason to watch, or own a DVD of, Trilogy of Terror is to watch “Amelia,” the excellent third segment, as the first two are rather mediocre stories. It’s never properly explained how Julie lures Chad Foster (Burton) into a brief sexual relationship before poisoning him: is she a witch, or some kind of succubus? And how come her sister (played by Kathryn Reynolds) never even suspects Julie of any kind of wrongdoing? That Millicent and Therese are two personalities in one woman’s body is pretty easy to predict–we never see the two together in the same scene.

It is, however, worthwhile to examine all three stories in terms of their common themes and elements, in order to grasp a deeper meaning in the superb and genuinely scary “Amelia.” All three stories are psychological studies of their titular characters, emotionally repressed women who are rigid, prudish, or otherwise neurotic on the outside, but who each have a hidden, inner dark side that is finally revealed at the end of each story.

These dark sides, or what Jung called the Shadow, are kept from the titular characters’ conscious minds (until the end of each story) through the use of a number of ego defence mechanisms: repression, projection (including projective identification), splitting, denial, and reaction formation. A merging with this repressed, projected, or split-off Shadow occurs at the conclusion of each story.

The sexual predator in Julie is projected (through projective identification) onto her young and handsome American literature student, Chad; the stereotypically male sexual predator becomes the victim of the erstwhile stereotypically female victim of sexual predation, thus reversing the stereotypes. He as a predator parallels the aggression of the Zuni fetish doll against Amelia.

Therese’s seduction of her father (or was it his seduction of her, as repressed by prudish Millicent?), of Thomas Anmar (played by John Karlen), and attempted seduction of Dr. Chester Ramsey (Gaynes) are all instances of Therese as a sexual predator. The Zuni fetish doll, with its phallic spear, and later, the phallic little knife, is symbolically predatory in a sexual sense.

Julie splits off her Shadow side onto Chad. Millicent splits off her Shadow side onto her “sister,” Therese. Amelia splits off hers onto the Zuni fetish doll, making it into what Wilfred R. Bion would have called a bizarre object, a hallucinatory projection of Amelia’s unconscious matricidal instincts.

All three stories involve some kind of strained family relations, the all-too-typical causes of mental disturbances. Julie’s sister, perpetually kept in the dark about Julie’s private life, just wants to help her, but doesn’t even know the half of the problem.

Was Therese’s incest with her father an expression of the Electra complex, including her killing of her mother; or was it (as I see as a possibility) that her father raped her, causing her to split into two personalities, and did her mother, knowing of the rape, kill herself in heartbreak?

Amelia’s mother places great restrictions on her social life, driving her to move out for the sake of at least some independence. The man she’s dating is named Arthur, which sounds like a pun on father and thus symbolically suggests, through transference, more of the Electra complex (which is further intensified by her plan to kill her mother at the end of the story), thus thematically linking this story to that of “Millicent and Therese.”

Along with this literal expression of the Electra complex in “Millicent and Therese,” and the metaphorical one (as I see it) in “Amelia,” there’s also–in how possibly forty-something Julie could be old enough to be the mother of her handsome young male students–a possible mother/son transference in her relationship with them, suggesting a Jocasta complex in her. We thus can see a thematic link among all three stories.

Amelia attempts to kill the Shadow in herself by stabbing the Zuni fetish doll; Millicent kills Therese (and herself, of course) by pricking a voodoo doll with a pin. Chad drugs Julie’s drink at the drive-in; Julie later poisons his drink.

Julie, in behaving so frigidly and unsociably, is engaging in reaction formation to hide her predatory interest in her handsome young male students. Millicent’s prudery is a similar reaction formation hiding how she, being in the same body as Therese, has the same sexual desires. In being so intimidated by her domineering, clingy mother, Amelia is using reaction formation to hide her wish to kill her mother and thus free herself from her.

Each of Black’s characters, in a symbolic or literal sense, merges with her Shadow at the end of each segment. Julie, in drugging Chad’s drink as he’d drugged hers, has merged with him (through their sexual relationship), her projected Shadow. Millicent pricks the voodoo doll representing Therese (since it’s she who wants to kill Therese, not vice versa), but has done so in Therese’s blonde wig, makeup, and clothes; in other words, both personalities had to have been present at the time of the killing, both of them sharing consciousness, or both “on the spot,” to borrow an expression from Billy Milligan, a merging of them in suicide. Amelia opens the oven in which the Zuni doll is burning, and its spirit enters her body, the resulting demonic possession being a symbolic merging of her with her Shadow.

Let’s now turn the discussion towards sharp teeth. There are the fangs in the vampire movie that Chad takes Julie to see. After he drugs her drink and she falls asleep in his car, he takes her to a motel, where he checks himself and her in as Mr. and Mrs., get this…Jonathan Harker, an allusion to the character in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula; Harker at one point is terrorized by Dracula’s vampiress brides, suggesting already that Chad is being used by Julie, not vice versa.

Then there are the sharp teeth on Amelia’s Zuni fetish doll, teeth that end up in her mouth at the end of the story. As with the drug or poison put in, respectively, Julie’s and Chad’s drinks, the biting teeth are symbols of projective and introjective identification, understood especially in the context of Bion’s notion of container and contained…that is, not the kind that mothers use to soothe their agitated babies, but rather negative containment, which leads to a nameless dread (see Bion, Chapter 28; for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic concepts, go here).

Bion used masculine and feminine symbols to represent, respectively, the contained and the container, suggesting phallic and yonic symbolism. In turn, the sharp teeth, like the spear and little knife the Zuni doll uses, are phallic (also like the vampire’s fangs), and the bite and stab wounds are yonic. In this negative containment, trauma (as opposed to the processing of pain that a mother does for her baby) is projected from the attacker and introjected into the victim.

The pricking of the pin into the voodoo doll representing Therese, as well as Amelia’s stabbing in the Zuni doll’s face as it tries to get out of the suitcase she’s trapped it in, are also symbolic examples of this projection and introjection.

With all these points of thematic comparison and contrast made, we can now focus on the deeper psychoanalytic meaning of the best segment, “Amelia.” As I said above, it’s fitting that these stories are all named after the women Black plays in each of them, because the real theatre of these stories dramatize what’s going on in the heads of these three mentally ill characters. That “Amelia” is more or less a solo performance emphasizes that we’re dealing with a drama happening entirely inside her mind.

I believe the Zuni fetish doll coming to life and attacking her is a hallucination, a projection of her repressed wish to kill her mother, who oppresses her with guilt trips to keep her from living a free life.

She buys the doll knowing about the warning not to remove the chain from it, that its removal will bring it to life. She doesn’t believe such a thing will really happen, of course, but the idea exists in unconscious phantasy for her. She looks at it, saying it’s so ugly that even its mother wouldn’t love it; saying this is a reflection of how the doll is a projection of her own unconscious matricidal urges–no mother, Amelia imagines, would ever love her daughter for having such feelings.

After arguing with her mother on the phone in the living room over whether they can cancel one night together (a regular Friday night get-together she and her mother always have) so Amelia can spend it with her boyfriend on his birthday, she–oppressed with guilt from her mother’s manipulations–brings up the doll, telling her mom of how it will supposedly come to life with the removal of the chain. Her bringing up of this is a wish-fulfillment and an implied warning to her mother, who, significantly, hangs up at just that moment.

Amelia then holds the doll, and she seems to have touched the chain at least a little. She sets it on the table and walks away. As we know, the chain falls off the doll’s waist. Now, consciously, she shouldn’t be concerned about this, since she doesn’t believe there really is a spirit inside the doll; but unconsciously, she has a wish that this spirit will come out, with the possibility of it one day attacking and killing her controlling mother. Therefore, Amelia’s fondling of the doll, leading to the chain falling off, is a parapraxis indicating her unconscious matricidal urges.

After being in the kitchen to slice up some meat (with that little knife) and put it in the oven, she returns to the living room to find the doll no longer standing on her coffee table. She looks around, including under the sofa (the obscurity below being symbolic of the unconscious), but can find only the Zuni doll’s spear, the tip of which pricks her finger. Her inability, at this point, to find the doll is representative of her repression of “He Who Kills.”

The living room lamp suddenly switching off represents further repression. Right when she goes to turn it back on is when the doll attacks her, at her foot. This attack represents the return of the repressed, in which the forbidden, repressed feelings return to consciousness, but in a totally unrecognizable form. In Amelia’s case, her matricidal desires have returned to consciousness in the form of a hallucination: the doll trying to kill her, rather than kill her mother.

So on the surface, conscious level, Amelia is terrified of the doll killing her, of course; on the unconscious level, though, she is afraid of what the doll represents–her matricidal Shadow merging with her, a merging caused by all those projective/introjective cuts and bites, the container wounds and the stabbing and biting of the contained.

Her real fear is her wish to kill her mother.

This fear/desire is what makes this third segment so scary.

So her attempts to stop the doll–wrapping it in a towel and drowning it in the bath water, stabbing it in the face, smashing it against a lamp, shutting doors to keep it out, locking it up in a suitcase, and burning it in the oven–are really attempts to prevent it from merging with her.

Now, there’s her wish to prevent the merging, but there’s also the wish for the merging to happen, hence, as I said above, her ‘accidental’ causing of the chain to come off, then her slipping and falling when running away from the doll–which allows it to get to her again–and, when she tries calling the cops, she oddly can’t remember the address of her apartment and thus can’t help the cops find her. This ‘forgetting’ is another parapraxis serving her unconscious wish to merge with her murderous Shadow as personified in the Zuni fetish doll.

Its unintelligible babbling, combined with her screams, is an expression of Lacan‘s notion of the Real, a realm of non-differentiation, of unverbalized trauma.The doll’s possibly killing her is far less horrifying that its merging with her to commit matricide, which–as the psychiatrist said at the end of Psycho–is the most unbearable crime of all. Amelia’s conflict is of the classic id vs. superego kind, or of gratification vs. morality.

As the doll is using the little knife to cut a hole in the suitcase she’s trapped it in, she tries to grab it by the blade with her fingers, a foolish, futile move that only gives her a bloody cut. Again, though, this act reflects her conflict between wanting to disarm the doll and stop its attacks on the one hand, and her unconscious wish to merge with it (i.e., the cut on her finger, the container, from the knife blade, the contained, as an act of projective and introjective identification).

Similarly, after she’s thrown the doll in the oven to burn it (as Julie burned down Chad’s apartment and him in it after poisoning him), she has to open the oven door…consciously, because she needs to make sure it’s ‘dead,’ but unconsciously because she wants to be merged with its spirit, which of course she does.

Now, just as I believe the doll’s coming to life is a hallucination that we, the viewers, share with her, so do I believe her merging with the doll’s spirit at the end, including her razor-toothed grin, is a hallucination, a delusion we viewers share with her. Her unconscious desire to kill her mother was there from the beginning; her belief that the demon in the doll has possessed her has given her a convenient excuse to kill her mother with a clear conscience. After all, it isn’t Amelia who wants to slice her mother up with that large knife she’s poking on the floor…it’s the ‘Zuni demon’ who wants to.

Similarly, Julie entertains the illusion in her mind that Chad is the sexual aggressor while she pretends to be innocent and frigid (her ‘witchcraft’ on him being a metaphorical projection onto him), and Millicent imagines Therese is a sister rather than a split-off personality bearing what’s actually Millicent’s middle name, another act of projection.

In therapy, one sometimes speaks of doing Shadow work, a confronting of and merging with one’s Shadow. Such a merging is not what’s happening here, with these three women Black is playing. Julie, Millicent/Therese, and Amelia split off, project, and repress their respective Shadows with such vehemence that the inevitable merging comes with a violent force that has tragic consequences.

One must assimilate the Shadow, but it must be the conscious personality that integrates the Shadow, not vice versa. Jekyll integrates Hyde, not the other way around. Julie projects Chad (remember that what we see on the screen is a dramatization of her inner thought processes; it’s not to be taken as literally happening), Millicent splits Therese off from her, and Amelia hallucinates the living spirit in the doll. These acts of projection result in Hyde taking over Jekyll.

Analysis of ‘Inception’

I: Introduction

Inception is a 2010 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife, Emma Thomas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, with an ensemble cast including Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine.

Nolan had been working on a story about “dream stealers” for nine to ten years, originally conceiving of it as a horror film before making it a kind of heist film. He was influenced by such movies as The Matrix, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and even his own Memento, to an extent. He postponed making Inception until he’d got enough experience making large-scale films like the first two of his Dark Knight trilogy.

Inception was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010; it is considered one of the best films of the 2010s, and it won four Oscars (Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects). It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Score.

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

II: Unconscious vs. Subconscious

What is, for me, especially intriguing about Inception is the intersection of several themes: the unconscious (here infelicitously called the “subconscious“–more on that soon), manipulation, capitalism, trauma, strained family relationships, the blurred distinction between fantasy and reality, and perhaps most importantly, what shared, lucid dreaming can be seen to represent–the viewing of a movie in a theatre with other people.

Let’s now look at each of these themes one by one.

“Subconscious” is a popular term in psychology to refer to what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious. While I’m sure Nolan never intended to adhere to Freudian thinking to any significant extent (beyond, perhaps, the estranged, bitter feelings that Robert Fischer [Murphy] has for his dying father, Maurice [played by Pete Postlethwaite]), a bitterness that could be at least partly Oedipal), I must favor the term unconscious over subconscious, and here’s why.

Subconscious, as Freud explained, is an unclear way of expressing what that part of the mind is, what is ‘outside’ of conscious thinking. Is it topographical, i.e., existing underneath consciousness, as is almost literally indicated in the movie? Is it qualitative, indicating another, subterranean consciousness, again, as Inception seems to imply?

The unconscious, on the other hand, is not concerned with some kind of mental ‘place.’ Rather, it’s properly concerned with what we do not know. Unconscious impulses, for example, don’t ‘hide underneath’: the repressed, on the contrary, returns to consciousness, though in a new, unrecognizable form. It isn’t ‘underground’; it hides in plain sight.

Significantly, Dominick ‘Dom’ Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team of thought-thieves are fully aware of what’s going on in the “subconscious” world of their shared, lucid dreams. There’s something unmistakably topographic and subterranean in these dreams-within-dreams. So however psychoanalysts may cringe at the use of the word “subconscious,” we must go along with Nolan’s word choices and imagery, going down an elevator with Ariadne (Page) to lower and lower levels of this subterranean land to see what this “subconscious” actually symbolizes.

III: Fantasy vs. Reality

Here we come to one of the intersections of theme. The dreams-within-dreams of the “subconscious” represent further and further removes from reality, deeper and deeper forays into fantasy. That the dreams generally look as if they could be events occurring in reality (Ariadne’s alterations of the Parisian cityscape, among other exceptions, notwithstanding) shows how blurred is the distinction between fantasy and reality in the film.

Small wonder the dream-thieves have to carry around totems (e.g., the spinning top, or Arthur’s die) to test if they’re dreaming or in the real world. Small wonder that Mal (Cotillard) kept killing herself to wake up, only to do so again for the last time in the real world, her still being obsessively deluded (thanks to Dom’s planting of an inception in her mind) that she was always in dreams-within-dreams. Incidentally, the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is indicative of psychosis, which is what I suspect Inception is really all about.

IV: Capitalism and Manipulation

The implanting of false beliefs into the minds of the marks of the dream-thieves–be this implanting inception (putting the beginning of an idea into one’s mind) or extraction (stealing a company’s secrets as the goal of corporate espionage) through conning the mark into trusting the dream-thieves into opening up completely and thus making oneself vulnerable to them–is manipulation in the service of one set of capitalists trying to defeat their competition. As Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929) Here we see the intersection of the themes of manipulation and capitalism, in the realm of the unconscious, in deeper and deeper layers of fantasy that get confused with reality.

Indeed, the company that Dom Cobb works for, Cobol Engineering (not only on which his surname is a pun [i.e., Cobb is a microcosm of the company], but also on which cobalt–extracted from the earth, like company secrets, by poor Congolese children for use in our cellphones–seems a pun), is a kind of mafia organization in the field of corporate espionage, in which failure can endanger an employee’s life. As I’ve argued many times in other blog posts, the mafia (criminal businesses) is a fitting metaphor for capitalists: note the expensive suits we see on Dom, the dominant, leading member of the dream-thieves.

Those of us on the political left are acutely aware of how capitalism results in alienation, which in turn leads to such problems as strained family relationships (i.e., Fischer and his dying father, as well as Cobb’s inability to return to the US and be with his kids) and emotional trauma (the hurt Fischer feels from the contempt Maurice has always had for him; Cobb’s guilt over how his inception for Mal drove her to suicide).

V: Dream Theatre?

A number of commentators on Inception have interpreted its use of shared, lucid dreaming as symbolic of people in a darkened movie theatre watching a film together. Getting caught up in the movie’s story is hypnotic, dreamlike. We can see more thematic intersection here in how not only the marketing of movies is a part of capitalism, but also how films are used to manipulate their viewers emotionally. The CIA is often consulted by moviemakers, who are required to portray the organization–known for ruthlessly helping in the overthrow of many governments opposed to US imperialist interests–as benign. Accordingly, films like Top Gun: Maverick and the Marvel superhero movies are blatant American military propaganda.

Now, this notion of shared, lucid dreaming as symbolic of people watching a movie together can be extended, I believe, to the idea of people watching TV together–TV shows and commercials–listening to the radio, being hooked on the internet, etc. In other words, the fantasy world of dreams can be a metaphor for the hypnotizing effect of the media.

Note the dream-like quality of many of our recent TV commercials. Instead of focusing on the products, as the commercials of the past did, these ads focus on images of a happy, carefree life. The commercials are fantasies, removals from reality, just like the shared dreams in Inception. An escape from the world…all in the service of capitalism, while pretending that the profit motive of capitalism isn’t at all present. The urge to buy what’s being sold sneaks into the unconscious by association with the fantasy presented, the inception of the desire for the product, our imaginary appetites…all while extracting our cash.

We might want to remember how Edward Bernays–whose double uncle was Freud, incidentally–used psychoanalytic concepts to help advertisers and political power structures to colonize the unconscious and manipulate people into buying this or that product, and to manufacture consent. (Bernays, by the way, was involved in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état for the sake of the United Fruit Company.)

VI: Putting All the Themes Together

So these are all the ways that the unconscious, manipulation, capitalism, trauma, strained family relationships, the hazy line between fantasy and reality, and dreams as a metaphor for film (and the media in general) intersect in Inception. Though inception means beginning, or the establishment of an institution or activity, I see in the word a pun on deception, or the planting of a deceptive idea into someone’s unconscious.

So the film can be seen to be about how the capitalist/imperialist-run media manipulates the mind, and how our attempts to escape the horrors of the capitalist world, in order to enter a haven of fantasy, can backfire and lead to psychosis.

VII: Inception of Inception

The film begins with Cobb washed up on a shore, then taken by Japanese guards to see an extremely aged Mr. Saito (Watanabe), the businessman who wants Cobb’s team of dream-thieves to plant the inception of an idea into young Fischer’s head, to break up his dying father’s corporation so that of Saito–Fischer’s competition–can reign supreme. We eventually learn that this washing-up on the Japanese shore isn’t the beginning, but the near-end, of the story.

After this, we go back to the beginning of the story, when Cobb’s team is attempting an extraction of company secrets from the unconscious of dreaming, younger Saito while on a train going in the direction of Kyoto. We see the same big house as in the previous, deep-fantasy scene of aged Saito.

We soon learn, after the dangerous meddling of Mal (actually, Cobb’s projection of her, or as I see her, his internal object of her), that this scene in Saito’s house is really a dream within a dream, this ‘outer’ dream, as it were, being that of Nash (played by Lukas Haas), Cobb’s dream architect before the team employs Ariadne.

A couple of interesting points should be made about Nash and his dream, which make me question his motives. His dream includes a huge mob of insurrectionary rioters out in the streets, all about to force their way into the building where Cobb, Saito, and Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) are having the dream within the dream, in Saito’s house. Note that, according to Freud, a dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Later, Nash betrays the rest of Cobb’s team. Is Nash a man with unconscious leftist sympathies (i.e., with revolutionaries in his wish-fulfillment-dream) making a failed attempt at undermining capitalist Cobol, and is his botching of the carpet a Freudian slip, reflecting his conflicted commitment to the team?

VIII: What Cobb Will Do to Get Back Home

Cobb wants so badly to be reunited with his son and daughter back in the US that he’s willing to take Saito’s offer to clear his name there of Mal’s death, in exchange for planting an inception in Robert Fischer’s mind, an undertaking Cobb knows is extremely dangerous and difficult to do. After all, he did it to Mal, and what happened? Still, he can’t bear to be separated from his kids.

To assemble his new team, he first goes to Paris, where his father-in-law, Professor Stephen Miles (Caine), who taught him about navigating the unconscious mind, recommends he hire Ariadne. Her name, an obvious reference to the woman in Greek myth who helped Theseus navigate the Labyrinth so he could get out after killing the Minotaur, is fitting. She proves her skills as a potential dream-architect by quickly improvising mazes complex enough to convince Cobb she’s up for the job. Just as the mythical Ariadne helped Theseus get out of the infernal Labyrinth, so does Inception‘s Ariadne help Cobb find the strength to confront his trauma over Mal’s suicide, to let go of his attachment to his internal object of her, and thus to be able to navigate his way back up to the top, to escape the hell of endless dreams-within-dreams.

Next, Cobb has to go to Mombassa, Kenya–a city crawling with Cobol agents looking to catch and kill him for his failed mission in Japan–to find Eames (Hardy), a forger able to impersonate people in dreams. The agents chasing Cobb through the streets of Mombassa is the one instance of an ‘action movie’ scene in Inception that happens in the real, non-dreaming world…or is this the real, non-dreaming world? (More on that later.)

Eames recommends Yusuf (Rao), a chemist who will provide a sedative to keep the team under as they navigate the different layers of the “subconscious,” dream-with-dream worlds, while also allowing the team to hear a recording of Edith Piaf singing “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“I regret nothing”), their synchronized cue, or “kick,” to wake them at the right time.

IX: Drugs

Though we’re not meant to think of Yusuf as some kind of drug dealer, that scene of him with all those people taking his sedative in the dark basement of his place of work…it sure makes one think of, say, an opium den. These users of the sedative dream for four hours each day because, as one of them tells Cobb, “The dream has become their reality.”

Even if Yusuf is not to be understood to be an actual drug dealer, what he’s doing in this basement is surely symbolic of what a drug dealer would do, at the very least. Such an understanding is crucial when we consider the theme of the unsure distinction between fantasy and reality as presented in Inception. After all, as I noted above, psychosis is characterized by an inability to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and drugs (with their hallucinogenic effects) can induce psychosis, including sedatives.

Furthermore, in the alienating, cutthroat world of capitalism, emotional trauma often leads to substance abuse as an attempt to escape that pain. An escape into fantasy relieves, however temporarily, one of the pain of facing reality, and drugs obviously help with that feeling of escape. Drugs can cause mental illness, just as the stress of living under capitalism has been observed to cause mental illness. In these connections, it’s easy to see why Dom and Mal went so deep into the dream world, into so many layers under layers of dreams-within-dreams; in searching for the Garden of Eden, they ended up in the ninth circle of Hell.

X: Splitting

Mal’s suicide, as I’ve said, is a pain that Dom finds unbearable, especially since his planting of the inception in her mind–that her world was unreal–means he’s guilty of causing her death. He cannot let her go, so he keeps her internal object as a kind of ghost haunting his mind. She’s there, but the trauma of her suicide is also there; so he tries to protect himself from that pain, however unsuccessfully, through the defence mechanisms of projection and splitting.

Dom thus experiences what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position—paranoid because of the persecutory anxiety he feels whenever her projection interferes, often violently, with his team’s attempts at extraction; and schizoid because of the splitting of Mal into absolute good and bad versions of herself.

Dom, in his unconscious attempts to preserve the good Mal, can’t help but be forced to confront the bad Mal–hence her apt name as a pun on the French word for bad. Only when he goes the farthest down all the layers of his “subconscious,” down all those dreams-within-dreams, to return to the paradise/hell that he constructed with her, back before she died, only then do we see the good Mal, when he tells her he has to let her go.

His trauma is one example of how capitalist alienation harms relationships, including family ones. Another example is that of Robert and Maurice Fischer. The dying father, founder and owner of a great, powerful corporation, is annoyed that he has to pass on the control of the family business to a son he regards as inadequate for such a great responsibility. Some of this father/son hostility could be Oedipal, as I mentioned above; on the father’s end, it could be a Laius complex, or a fear of the son supplanting the father.

XI: Sympathy for the Dominant

One thing that is, or at least should be, striking about this story is how we, the audience, are all lulled into sympathizing with these characters. We’re dealing here with dishonest, lying, manipulating, gaslighting people who are all out for themselves, all working within a capitalist context. Manipulating young Fischer into ending his father’s business is meant to allow their competition, Saito’s company, to thrive. It is the insidious nature of neoliberal capitalist ideology–“there is no alternative“–that tricks the audience into sympathizing with a bunch of con men.

Dom is seen on several occasions, just after waking up, to be spinning a top to make sure he isn’t still dreaming. As we understand, if it stops spinning, he’s relieved to know he’s in the real world…or is he? One’s totem–like Arthur’s die–is supposed to be known only by its owner: its look, feel, weight, etc. Dom, however, has come into the habit of using a top originally owned by Mal. So even if it stops spinning, is his reassurance of no longer dreaming valid?

XII: In Dreamland

Back to the story. The team is assembled and ready. On a flight to the US, Fischer is put to sleep to share a dream with Dom, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, Saito, and Yusuf. This first shared dream, Yusuf’s, is set on the streets of a city in teeming rain.

Fischer, trying to take a cab, is kidnapped. Arthur, whose job was to research Fischer thoroughly, has failed to learn that the team’s mark has unconscious security to fight off extractors like them. Dom is furious with Arthur for his oversights.

This unconscious security, in the form of men shooting at Cobb et al and therefore putting them all in danger–if shot and killed in the dream–of being trapped in Limbo (an inescapable labyrinth of the unconscious, like being in a coma) because of Yusuf’s powerful sedative, is a personification of Fischer’s ego defence mechanisms, these ones being unconscious.

As the Ego Psychologists understood unconscious ego defence, here’s an explanation: “the ego also contains complex unconscious defensive arrangements that have evolved to satisfy the demands of neurotic compromise, ways of thinking that keep repressed impulses out of conscious awareness in an ongoing way. Unlike unconscious id impulses that respond with enthusiasm to the prospect of liberation in making their presence felt…, unconscious ego defenses gain nothing from being exposed. Their unobtrusive, seamless presence in the patient’s psychic life is perfectly acceptable (ego syntonic) to the patient; they often function as a central feature of the patient’s larger personality organization…The ego, charged with the daunting task of keeping the peace between warring internal parties and ensuring socially acceptable functioning, works more effectively if it works undercover.” (Mitchell and Black, page 26)

XIII: Wake Up Dead?

One fascinating idea in this film is the paradoxical notion that if you are killed in a dream, you wake up. It’s the reverse of what Hamlet said: “To die, to sleep–/No more” (III, i, 60). Now, with Yusuf’s sedative, dying in the dream makes matters much more complicated: “To die, to sleep;/To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub;/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause.” (III, I, 64-68)

Another complicating factor in Fischer’s troubled family life is his “Uncle Peter” Browning (Berenger), his godfather and fellow executive of his father’s company. Browning acts as a kind of surrogate father for Fischer, being there for him in ways that his father never wanted to be. Cobb’s team will manipulate this relationship through Eames’s impersonation of Browning, to introduce the idea of Maurice having an alternate will to dissolve the company.

Inception, as Eames has previously pointed out, is “a very subtle art.” Fischer’s first introduction to the idea of the alternate will is to be a negative one, a plausible further instance of his father’s contempt for him; further down in the dreams, the dissolving of the company is meant to be a positive exhortation of him to do his own thing, giving him a catharsis.

XIV: Dreams-within-dreams

Anyway, everyone on the team except Yusuf–who is driving around on the first dream level, since it’s his dream–is sedated into going down to the second dream level, Arthur’s dream, which is set in a hotel. Here, Dom convinces Robert that his ‘security’ is really working against him, as part of the ruse to go deeper into his “subconscious.” Here we have Dom gaslighting Robert into distrusting his own unconscious ego defence mechanisms.

To get to the layer of Fischer’s “subconscious” where he will receive the inception of the idea to end his father’s business to start something of his own, the team must be sedated further, into a dream set around an alpine fortress. Several problems occur: Mal interferes again and shoots Robert before he can receive the inception; also, Yusuf sets up the Edith Piaf kick too early.

Arthur and Eames therefore must improvise a new set of kicks to be synchronized with them hitting the water in Yusuf’s truck in the first dream, with Arthur rigging a hotel elevator with all the floating dreamers tied up, and with the alpine fortress being set up with explosives. Saito having been shot as well as Robert means both of them are in Limbo, forcing Dom and Ariadne to go further down another level to rescue them…in Dom’s constructed dream-world with Mal.

Here is where Dom must confront his trauma with Mal. He must let go of his attachment to his internal object of the good Mal, and he must do it quickly, for getting Robert and Saito back is of paramount importance. Indeed, Ariadne importunes Dom to hurry…but can one be cured of one’s trauma in such a short time? (Indeed, Ariadne shoots Mal to speed things up.)

It seems that he has managed to do so, for he leaves Mal, and they get Robert and Saito back–the rescue of the latter through, essentially, a repeat of that opening scene with Dom washing ashore on the beach and being taken to Saito’s big house by his Japanese guards. Neither Dom nor Saito wants to die a lonely old man, filled with regret, hence the choice of Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as the kick to wake everyone up with.

XV: Maladaptive Dreaming

No rationally thinking person wants to waste away in a fantasy world, only years later to snap out of it and be full of regret for such a wasted life. Yet the alienating world of capitalism makes such a retreat into fantasy so tempting. Small wonder so many of us out there escape reality through drugs, online video games, porn, movies, TV, consumerism, internet addiction, etc.

Robert returns to the alpine fortress dream and receives the inception. Everyone, including Dom, manages to get back up using all the synchronized kicks in time. I’d say it’s all a little too good to be true.

Dom wakes up on the airplane with all the others, who smile at him, glad to see him back. Saito makes the necessary phone call to clear Dom of the charge of murdering Mal, so he can go through customs without a hitch. Recall above how I mentioned that, according to Freud, dreams are wish-fulfillments. Dom’s wishes are all being fulfilled, aren’t they?

The action and excitement of the dreams, fighting off Robert’s unconscious security, is an instance of how these shared, lucid dreams parallel the entertainment of watching a movie in a theatre. We’re back in the ‘real world’ now, in the airport; but Dom had an ‘action movie’ moment in Mombassa, too. Has his ‘waking’ world been real, or has it been dream, too?

XVI: Conclusion–Nothing But a Dreamer

Here’s an interesting thought: we’ve been assuming that Mal killed herself, mistakenly thinking she was trying to wake herself from a dream, but…what if she was right? Could Dom have lost count of all the dream layers, thinking his time with her on the building ledges was real, when it was actually another dream? She’d been assessed by three different psychiatrists to be sane, so is he the one with a psychotic inability to distinguish fantasy from reality?

When he claims that she didn’t want to go back to the real world, is he projecting onto her his wish to stay in the world of dreams? Is this what calling Mal his “projection” really means?

At the end, when he spins the top and walks away to see his kids, he doesn’t care if it stops spinning or not. Or maybe he’s afraid to see it keep spinning. In any case, the top was Mal’s totem originally, so if its slight wobble at the very end indicates that it will stop spinning, this hardly assures us that he’s in the real world now.

Some think the real plan, masterminded by Miles (who, recall, recommended Ariadne to be the architect), was to pull Cobb out of the dream world. If so, I don’t think it worked. Cobb prefers fantasy to reality, like so many of us with our drugs, movies, TV, etc. I think Mal is still waiting for him in the waking world; but like those TV commercials that show people enjoying quality time with family, or like all those action movies we enjoy in the theatre, Cobb would rather escape from, than have to continue living in, the stresses of the capitalist world.

His Hell is his Eden…even without Mal.

Analysis of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a 1984 horror movie written and directed by Wes Craven. It stars Heather Langenkamp, John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Robert Englund, and Johnny Depp in his film debut.

The film got rave reviews and is considered one of the best horror films ever made, spawning a franchise with six sequels, a TV series, the crossover film Freddy vs. Jason, and a remake of the same name. It shares many tropes of the horror films of the 70s and 80s, such as Halloween: these include the killing of sexually promiscuous teenagers (an implied moral judgement on them), and the final girl trope.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

A striking feature of A Nightmare on Elm Street is the blurred distinction between dream and reality. These two can be seen to correspond respectively with the unconscious and conscious minds, for as Freud once said, “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.”

That dream and reality overlap to such a great extent in this movie, implying a corresponding overlap between the unconscious and conscious minds, helps us understand the true relations between these two mental states. Hence, the psychoanalyst‘s preference of the term unconscious over “subconscious”: the hidden world expressed in such things as the symbolism of dreams is not ‘beneath’ consciousness, it isn’t in another realm relative to consciousness; rather, it hides in plain sight, right in the conscious realm of reality. We see and hear that hidden world all around us in waking life–we just don’t recognize it as such. It isn’t known to us…it’s unconscious.

This is why Freddy Krueger (Englund) manifests his presence in both the dream and the waking worlds. He’s there in conscious life, but what he represents remains unknown to the conscious minds of the teens he terrorizes: he personifies what Melanie Klein called the bad father.

Krueger attacks teenagers, who are full of conflict over their love/hate relationships with their parents. They love and need their parents, but they’re also sick and tired of being told what to do by them. This love/hate relationship is personified in the image of the teen’s parents as good mother/father vs. bad mother/father, a result of the defence mechanism known as splitting, what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (PS). ‘Schizoid’ refers to the splitting into absolute good and bad; ‘paranoid’ refers to the paranoid fear of being persecuted by the bad internal objects of the parents, as represented by Krueger.

An important insight of ego psychology is the fact that, since much of the ego is unconscious and preconscious, much of the defence of the ego is also unconscious. The ego “…contains complex unconscious defensive arrangements that have evolved to satisfy the demands of neurotic compromise, ways of thinking that keep repressed impulses out of conscious awareness in an ongoing way. Unlike unconscious id impulses that respond with enthusiasm to the prospect of liberation in making their presence felt in the analytic hour, unconscious ego defenses gain nothing from being exposed. Their unobtrusive, seamless presence in the patient’s psychic life is perfectly acceptable (ego syntonic) to the patient; they often function as a central feature of the patient’s larger personality organization…The ego, charged with the daunting task of keeping the peace between warring internal parties and ensuring socially acceptable functioning, works more effectively if it works undercover.” (Mitchell and Black, page 26)

What the teens in this film are really terrified of isn’t Freddy, but rather the return of repressed bad objects, which WRD Fairbairn compared to demons who emerge and possess their victims (PDF, page 6). Freddy is a child murderer who was hunted down and burned to death by such parents in the Elm Street community as Marge Thompson (Blakley), mother of Nancy (Langenkamp); he’s come back, however, as a demon to continue his terrorizing of the young–the return of repressed bad objects. His immolation, thus, represents a temporary victory of the good parent internal objects over the bad ones.

So the movie is really about teenage rebellion (e.g., the lovemaking of Tina [played by Amanda Wyss] and Rod [played by Nick Corri] in her parents’ bed) vs. the wrath of their authoritarian parents (symbolized in Tina’s being killed immediately after that lovemaking).

The film begins with Freddy assembling his glove, attaching the blades to its fingertips. These phallic razors represent what Klein would have called the bad penis. In the original script, Freddy was supposed to be a child molester; though this aspect was excised from the movie, a kind of repression in itself, it can be seen to be hovering in the background, an implied dark sexuality to Freddy’s violence. In this way, he as bad father can be linked to the precursor of Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, the seduction theory.

Tina is terrorized by Freddy in a dream. Her mother comes to her room to see if she’s OK, and she says it was just a dream, though she’s still visibly shaken. Her father comes by and shows affection to her mother, the kind of thing that can provoke unconscious jealousies in parents’ children, as well as such night terrors as the contemplation of the primal scene.

Tina grabs the crucifix from the wall above her bed; but what does the crucifix indicate? God the Father sending God the Son–who said, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”–to an excruciating death. Since, as Freud noted, belief in God represents a need to continue to have one’s father’s protection, the crucifix indicates again the frustrations of the parent/child relationship, so it won’t save Tina, and she knows it. “Five, six, grab your crucifix,” from the rope-jumping little girls’ chant right after this scene, is a meaningless warning to her.

Indeed, the next night, when she has her friends sleep over with her so she won’t be alone, that is the night when Freddy kills her. He appears in her nightmare, stretching out elongated, phallic arms, suggesting the sexual undertones of his terrorizing of youth, as well as reinforcing the phallic symbolism of those finger-blades.

Tina calls out, “Please, God!”, to which he replies, “This…is God,” referring to those finger-blades. God the Father here is the bad father, the phallic, seductive father who destroys teens with, symbolically, the same sexual defilement that he judges them guilty of (i.e., Tina’s and Rod’s moment in her parents’ bed) and punishes them for.

At one point during the chase, he uses the blade-glove to slice off a few fingers on his other hand. This dismemberment is a symbolic castration, which in turn symbolizes the lack that gives rise to desire–in Freddy’s case, a desire to merge the libido of Eros with Thanatos, the drive to kill, but to do so in a sexually symbolic way. Furthermore, this self-injury, meant to terrorize Tina all the more, merges Freddy’s sadism with masochism. Recall Freud’s words: “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.”

Freddy typically attacks his victims in an old boiler room where he, when alive, killed his child victims. This place, dark and fiery hot, symbolizes the dark passions of the unconscious, also the realm of the repressed, bad internal objects of these teens who are so conflicted in their attitudes to their parents.

Freddy’s killing of Tina, the use of his phallic finger-blades to tear up her guts, is a symbolic rape, a hint back to Craven’s original intention to make Freddy a child molester. With her death comes the introduction of Nancy’s overprotective, domineering father, Lt. Thompson (Saxon, who also played a cop in Black Christmas, a film about a serial killer who sexually terrorizes young women, and which warps Christian meaning into something obscene and violent).

Though little children are in awe of parental authority, imagining Mom and Dad to be faultless fountains of knowledge and wisdom, when these kids become teens, the flaws of their parents become harder and harder to ignore, and so that naïve awe wears off. Their disappointment in their so-imperfect parents, combined with their having grown weary of Mom’s and Dad’s dos and don’ts, causes them to want to rebel. Thus comes the return of the splitting of their parents into absolute good (the vestiges of that original, awesome authority) and absolute bad (the disappointingly human, all-too-human parents, exaggerated into something much worse in the unconscious mind).

With this schizoid splitting into absolute good and bad comes the paranoid anxiety that the bad aspects will come after, punish, and persecute the rebellious teens. This splitting, as a defence mechanism, tends to be unconscious: hence, Freddy as the bad father appears in the teens’ dreams.

The disappointing faults we see in the parents include not only Nancy’s father’s annoying overprotection, but also that of the father of Glen (Depp), who imagines that Nancy’s ‘craziness’ is a potential danger to his son; hence, he wishes to have Glen no longer see Nancy. Another flaw is seen in Nancy’s mother, an alcoholic.

Parental transferences are made in other authoritarian figures for the teens to scorn: teachers, student hall monitors, and policemen, regardless of whether they’re authoritarian or merely perceived to be so.

After Tina’s death, Nancy is in English class, nodding off at her desk from not having slept well recently, for obvious reasons. Her teacher is discussing Hamlet, a play dealing with much parent/child conflict, as between the Danish prince, his mother the queen, and his uncle, the usurping king, who married her after killing his father, the ghost of whom wanting him to get revenge by killing his uncle. (Freddy, the bad father, is also seeking revenge for his murder.)

The teacher mentions Hamlet’s “mother’s lies,” and has a student read a passage from Act One, scene 1, lines 112-126, spoken by Horatio after he and two of the castle guards, Marcellus and Bernardo, have seen the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The passage is full of spooky imagery, full of omens presaging the assassination of Julius Caesar; the eeriness of what Horatio is describing is meant to be compared with that of his having just seen Old Hamlet’s ghost for the first time, a possible omen for the downfall of the kingdom of Denmark by Fortinbras.

This creepy speech is also an ill omen for nodding Nancy, who now hears her classmate recite lines occurring much later in the play, when Hamlet says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.” (2, ii, 253-255)

And indeed, Nancy beings to have a bad dream of her own.

She sees Tina’s bloody ghost, wrapped in a body bag in a way suggesting the veil of the Virgin Mary, a juxtaposing of extreme good and evil imagery suggestive of splitting. Nancy follows her, soon to be stopped by a nerdy female hall monitor nagging her about a hall pass. Nancy’s defiance against this annoyance, from a transference of her domineering parents onto the hall monitor, brings about the unconscious splitting of her parents into all good vs. all bad, the paranoid-schizoid position (PS).

With the splitting of the schizoid aspect of PS also comes the paranoid aspect; hence, the hall monitor is seen to resemble Freddy more and more, first with his red and green striped sweater, then with his bladed glove. Soon after, Freddy himself is chasing her in that boiler room.

Her method of escape is significant: to wake herself up, she–cornered by Freddy–burns her arm on a hot pipe to her left. Such self-injury, to get her away from the violence of the bad father, is symbolic of an unconscious ego defence mechanism, turning round upon the subject’s own self.

If a little child is being abused by his or her mother or father, contemplating that the parent is a bad person is far too terrifying for the helpless child to bear; so turning the badness round upon him- or herself, though painful in its inducing of wrongful guilt, nonetheless saves the child from the far more unthinkable realization that the parent he or she depends on has evil intentions. If it’s the child who is bad, then at least Mommy and Daddy aren’t bad; splitting is thus overcome.

Nancy wakes up screaming in terror and is sent home. Since she has spoken to Rod in prison–who in spite of the charge of Tina’s murder on him, insists he’s innocent–and she has learned that he, just like Tina, has dreamt of Freddy, too, she realizes these are more than just nightmares.

Nancy is taking a bath that night, and she’s nodding off, her head almost going underwater. Her mother, just outside the bathroom, warns her about the danger of falling asleep in the water and drowning. Nancy is annoyed with her oversolicitous mother, especially when she says she’ll give Nancy some warm milk, which seems infantilizing and associative of breastfeeding.

Just before her mother’s warning, Nancy dozes off briefly, and in an iconic scene we see Freddy’s bladed glove rise out from the water between her legs, just below the crotch. With the phallic symbolism of the glove, this image is suggestive of Klein’s notion of the terrifying combined parent figure, Nancy’s internalized phallic mother, a reaction to her mom’s nagging, overprotective attitude. Freddy’s near drowning of her in the bathwater only reinforces her terror of the unconscious bad mother internal object, a terror ended by her mother’s intervening, a re-establishment in Nancy’s mind of her whole mother, both good and bad.

Later that night in her bedroom, The Evil Dead is playing on her small TV, Ash‘s climactic confrontation with the demons in the cabin in the woods. It’s interesting that this, of all movies, would be the one she’s watching, for as I explained in my analysis of that film, the demons also represent repressed bad internal objects.

Her boyfriend Glen, who lives across from her home on Elm Street, goes over to see her not by knocking on her front door to ask her parents if he can see her, but by climbing a trellis to her second floor bedroom. This clandestine meeting of teen lovers, in defiance of their parents, reminds us of another Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet, which also involves parent/child conflict (i.e., Old Capulet‘s fury when Juliet refuses to marry Paris). Indeed, Glen climbing that trellis to Nancy’s bedroom suggests the famous balcony scene in Act Two, Scene ii of the play.

She wants Glen to watch her while she sleeps, to wake her if he sees her having a nightmare. She dreams of bloody Tina wrapped in the body bag, but with a centipede crawling out of her mouth, then a pile of snakes slithering on the ground where Tina’s feet should be. This juxtaposition of hateful images with that of Nancy’s beloved friend, in that veiled Marian look, again suggests unconscious splitting into absolute good and bad.

Nancy also sees Freddy about to kill Rod in his sleep in his prison cell. She needs Glen to wake her fast so they can go to the police station and get to Rod before Freddy does. They’re too late, of course: it looks as though Rod has hanged himself, though of course we know that Freddy killed him. To understand this film from a psychoanalytic perspective, however, if we see Freddy as the personification of a repressed bad father internal object, we can understand Rod’s nightmare of Freddy (as well as Nancy’s nightmare) as the two teens’ having projected Rod’s suicide onto Freddy.

Rod has every reason in the world to want to kill himself. A criminal type already from the start of the film, he’s had trouble with the law through his involvement with drugs and violence. Seeing the gory killing of his girlfriend is beyond traumatizing, and to pour salt on his psychological wounds, he is blamed for killing the last person in the world that he’d ever want to kill, with no way of proving his innocence. (Or has he, in spite of his love for Tina, killed her in a brief fit of psychosis [we know he’d had a fight with her, and that he was “crazy jealous”], and he’s now unconsciously projecting his violence onto Freddy?)

As a criminal, Rod despises authority figures like Nancy’s father, people who no doubt are transferences of his own parents, with whom he must have a troubled relationship. Projecting his hanging onto a bad father figure thus makes his suicide easier to commit, since in his despair there is nonetheless another part of him that still wants to live, and he is thus conflicted about whether to be or not to be.

Nancy is getting increasingly traumatized, and therefore unwilling to sleep. Her rejection of what Freddy represents, the bad aspects of her parents that have been split off from the good aspects and projected outward, has resulted in her being terrorized by that projected representation of the bad father. Since there’s a blurred distinction between dream and reality in this film, it’s legitimate to doubt the physical, objective reality of any of the supernatural phenomena seen in the film.

So much of what we see, if not all of it, could be collective teen hallucinations based on their neurotic, conflicted feelings about their parents and other authority figures. Wilfred Bion observed in his psychotic patients an inability, or unwillingness, to process the raw sensory data of emotional experiences for use in such things as dreams; if his patients didn’t dream, they didn’t sleep [Bion, page 7], as is the case with Nancy, who it would seem is having a psychotic break with reality. (See here for more on Bion’s concepts, as well as other psychoanalytic terms.)

Bion wrote of a particular kind of hallucination he called a bizarre object, which is actually something projected from the psychotic onto the outside world. This is how we can interpret the teens’ experience of Freddy, particularly Nancy’s experience of him, she who is resisting sleep to avoid dreaming.

After Rod’s funeral, Nancy’s mother drives her to see a doctor who will examine her while she sleeps. She’s still too afraid to dream, but Dr. King (played by Charles Fleischer) tells her that if she doesn’t dream, she’ll go (he points to his head, implying that she’ll go crazy, like Bion’s psychotics). She has a nightmare from which she awakens and her bed seems to produce Freddy’s hat; I interpret this as a hallucination that she imagines others have shared with her.

Back at home, she and her mother argue about whether her experiences with Freddy are real or not. Nancy learns his name from reading “Fred Krueger” on his fedora. Her frustration with her mother’s denials provoke her to make an impertinent remark about Marge’s alcoholism, making her slap Nancy.

In this moment, we can see an example of the root cause of Nancy’s psychopathology: her traumatic disappointment in realizing that her mother, like everyone else, has faults. The idealizing child in Nancy can’t accept these faults, so in her unconscious she uses the defence mechanism of splitting to keep her mom’s good side pure.

The problem is that the bad side turns into Freddy.

Later, Glen tells Nancy about how the Balinese deal with nightmares, something called “dream skills.” They wake up and write down the dream content, using it in their art and poetry. This sounds like the defence mechanism known as sublimation, taking unacceptable unconscious feelings and turning them into art. Glen also says the Balinese will turn their backs on whatever scares them in their dreams, taking away the evil spirits’ energy and thus defeating them. This turning one’s back on the anxiety-producing elements of the unconscious sounds like denial.

Nancy returns home to find bars on all the doors and windows. Infuriated at this latest manifestation of authoritarian parental repression, she confronts her mother. Marge takes Nancy into their basement, a symbol of the unconscious. There, Marge tells her about Freddy when he was alive, when he preyed on children and killed at least twenty of them. Though arrested, he was let go on a technicality, so the parents of the Elm Street community hunted him down and burned him to death in his boiler room.

Marge takes his bladed glove from the furnace to reassure Nancy that he’s dead and gone; symbolically this killing of Freddy is an attempt by the good in parents overcoming the bad, yet another attempt at splitting. Still, Nancy of course will not be convinced of any of Marge’s assertions; she’s convinced that Freddy is an avenging demon; he’s a projection of her unconscious persecutory anxiety brought on by the bad father she’s internalized and tried to project into the outside world.

Nancy would have Glen help her catch Freddy once she’s summoned him in her next dream, but Glen has an overprotective father of his own who, seeing craziness in Nancy, doesn’t want his son around her anymore; so when she calls Glen on the telephone, telling his parents she urgently needs to speak to him, his father hangs up on her and leaves the receiver off the hook. She can’t contact Glen at all now, but Freddy can terrorize her by making her phone ring and speaking to her on it…after she’s yanked the cord out of the wall. His claiming to be her new boyfriend not only implies the killing of Glen, but also suggests the bad father of Freud’s seduction theory.

I discussed in my analysis of Black Christmas (link above) not only sexually charged phone conversations, but also how the use of the telephone can be symbolic of alienation, in that we communicate with it, but don’t see the person we’re chatting with face to face (rather like the alienation felt today when communicating with others through social media–we’re still far away from them). Nancy can’t connect with her boyfriend on the phone, thanks to his grumpy, authoritarian father; but she can get unwanted communication with her projected bad father object.

Speaking of alienation, media, and meddling parents, Glen is in bed with headphones on and a small TV nearby. His mother comes in his room to nag him to go to sleep, but he wants to watch Miss Nude America, not caring what she has to say, just fetishizing her body.

Given what’s just happened with Glen’s officious parents, it’s interesting to note specifically how he dies once he’s fallen asleep. Freddy’s blade-gloved arm comes up from a hole formed in the bed, and he pulls Glen in, his victim screaming for his mom.

Freddy, as a representation of the bad aspects of either parent, is usually shown as the bad father, with that phallic bladed glove. We saw the symbolism of Klein’s combined parent figure, the phallic mother, in the bathtub scene with the bladed glove between Nancy’s legs. Now, Freddy’s phallic glove emerges from a yonic hole in Glen’s bed. He and his TV get sucked in the hole, the mother’s baby killed by bringing him back, ironically, to his uncanny place of birth.

Blood sprays up from the hole to the bedroom ceiling, in a geyser of red. Since the hole has yonic, maternal symbolism, the blood can be seen as symbolic either of menstrual blood or of the blood coming from the emasculated phallus. Menstruation indicates that a woman isn’t pregnant, hence, no baby, no life. Emasculation means a man can’t get a woman pregnant–no baby, no life. The parent who fails to be a parent can be seen as a kind of bad parent, flawed, infertile; or bad in the sense that he or she wishes the child had never been born, hence Glen’s return to the womb, so to speak.

Nancy screams in hysterics over Glen’s death. Her father goes to Glen’s house with the coroner, paramedics, and other police; she now has only her father to help her catch Freddy. To deal with the bad father, she needs help from the good father. We hear the love of the good father in Lt. Thompson when he, full of concern for his daughter, tells her to get some sleep, shows his eagerness to catch the killer, calls her “sweetheart,” and tells her he loves her.

This goodness in her father contrasts with the bossy, bad-tempered father we saw before. In this new side of him that we see, the bad and good are seen as one. The splitting that resulted in Freddy is being overcome, and in this union of good and bad, we can see a way to defeat Freddy.

Before confronting Freddy, Nancy spends a moment with her mother, who’s drunk in bed. Instead of feeling anger toward her, Nancy is reviving feelings of affection for her, just as she has with her father; again, this will be part of how she’ll stop Freddy, as I’ll explain further below.

After this moment with her mother, she begins booby-trapping her home using instructions from a book she showed to Glen when he told her about Balinese “dream skills.” (If one didn’t know better, one might think of her booby-trapping as anticipating the Home Alone movies.).

She goes to sleep and provokes an attack from Freddy, getting him to run into the booby-traps, and even lighting him on fire, which triggers his own traumatic memory of when the Elm Street parents burned him to death. This violence that she inflicts on him, as a desperate act of self-defence, represents the defence mechanism–introduced by Sándor Ferenczi and developed by Freud’s daughter Anna–known as identification with the aggressor: on one level, her violence identifies her with him; on another level, it identifies her with those parents, including her own, who burned him the first time. Since Freddy represents these parents’ bad aspects as neurotically experienced by the teens, both levels can be seen as essentially the same thing.

She screams through the window for the police across the street at Glen’s home to get her father, but the policeman who answers doesn’t cooperate as she so desperately needs him to, so she reverts to defying authority by calling him an “asshole” and demanding he get her father.

At one point in the chase, Freddy significantly tells her he’ll “split [her] in two.” Well, naturally: as I’ve been arguing all along here, the terror of this film is based on psychological splitting.

Nancy’s father finally arrives, and the two of them are in her parents’ bedroom. Freddy kills her mother there; she is sucked into the bed, similar to how Glen was. Since her affection for her parents is being revived, the thought of Nancy losing her mother is causing her to feel what Klein called depressive anxiety, which overshadows the persecutory anxiety of the paranoid-schizoid position (PS); and so her splitting can be cured. Nancy is now experiencing the depressive position (D); she wants her mother (and friends) back.

Since her splitting is dissolving, Freddy doesn’t seem so real to her, so she isn’t afraid of him anymore. Now she can apply those Balinese dream skills: she turns her back to Freddy as he’s emerging from her parents’ bed, and she tells him that she’s taking back all the energy she gave him.

Without her fear, Freddy no longer has power over her. In denying that he’s anything other than a dream, she’s using the defence mechanism of denial. When he tries to pounce on her, he vanishes.

The next and final scene seems too good to be true. Not only do we see a beautiful sunny morning outside the front door of Nancy’s house on Elm Street, but she and her (resurrected!) mother seem a little too blissful.

All of a sudden, Marge just ‘doesn’t feel like drinking anymore’; what alcoholic is able to do that? It would seem that in Freddy’s defeat, he’s given back Nancy’s mother and her three friends, who are in a car ready to take her to school with them…a car with a red and green striped convertible roof. Nancy gets in, and the teens are about to drive away.

Since Tina, Rod, Glen, and Marge have all come back to life, it would seem that their deaths were all hallucinatory fantasies. Freddy has returned, though, in the form of that car, which locks the screaming teens in and drives them away without the control of Glen, who’s in the driver’s seat. Marge, at the door, is grabbed and pulled inside through the door window by Freddy’s gloved hand.

She hasn’t responded to her daughter’s cries for help: her idealized, good mother state has had the bad parent state, personified in Freddy, split off from her. We see the little girls’ jump-roping and chanting of the creepy Freddy Krueger rhyme from the beginning of the film, with “five, six, grab your crucifix.” In this, we see again the blurred line between dream and reality. Are our protagonists being killed again for real, or is it just a terrorizing of the mind?

One doesn’t move from PS to D once and for all; these two positions–splitting vs. integration–oscillate back and forth throughout one’s life, especially during the turbulent years of adolescence. Bion, a Kleinian psychoanalyst who developed her theories to a great extent, expressed this oscillating relationship graphically, like this: PS <–> D. (Bion, pages 34-35)

Will Nancy and her friends switch back to the integrated peace of the depressive position, or will they stay trapped in the psychotic splitting of the paranoid-schizoid position? I suppose the sequels, outside the scope of this analysis, will answer that question.

In any case, the very title of the film suggests psychological splitting, with the street’s name suggestive of the stately trees lining the sides of the street to give a sense of the peaceful opposite of nightmare. To offset the extremes of nightmares, one must be willing to lessen the peacefulness of those elm trees. That’s how we get rid of Freddy for good.

Analysis of ‘Tommy’

I: Introduction

Tommy is the fourth studio album by The Who, released in 1969. Most of the songs were written by Pete Townshend, with two songs by John Entwistle (“Cousin Kevin,” and “Fiddle About”), “The Hawker” being Townshend’s adaptation of a song with lyrics by Sonny Boy Williamson II; and “Tommy’s Holiday Camp,” though credited to Keith Moon, being based on his suggestion of what kind of religious movement Tommy could lead, was actually written by Townshend, too.

Though there are some historical precedents dating from the mid- to late 1960s, Tommy is the first album to be billed as a “rock opera,” according to Scott Mervis of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Townshend himself made some musical forays beyond the simple three-minute pop song from 1966 onwards, with songs that have extended narrative elements, resulting in such suites as “A Quick One, While He’s Away” and “Rael,” the latter having melodic material in its second half that was used in “Sparks” and “Underture.”

In 1968, Townshend became influenced by the Indian spiritual mentor Meher Baba, and deaf-dumb-and-blind Tommy Walker’s connection to the world through vibrations (making him amazingly gifted at pinball, as well as a spiritual leader in his own right) came from Baba’s mysticism. Indeed, this mystical connection is the flip side to Tommy’s self-isolating trauma response to the killing he, as a sensitive child, has seen, but has been forbidden by his perpetrator parents to acknowledge having seen or heard, or to speak about. This trauma reaction, Tommy’s mental block, was also influenced by Townshend’s own experiences of childhood trauma. As of 1968, the rock opera was referred to by such tentative titles as Deaf, Dumb and Blind Boy, Amazing Journey, Journey Into Space, The Brain Opera, and Omnibus.

Tommy was acclaimed on its release by critics, who called it The Who’s breakthrough. It has been developed into other media, including the Ken Russell film of 1975 and the 1992 Broadway musical. The album has sold 20 million copies and has been inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.

Here is a link to all the lyrics of the album.

II: Traumatic Beginnings

The Overture is mostly instrumental, incorporating themes from “1921,” “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” “Go to the Mirror!”, “See Me, Feel Me,” “Pinball Wizard,” “Listening to You,” and “Sparks.” Another musical highlight is John Entwistle’s French horn. The song ends with one verse sung by Townshend, establishing that Tommy’s father, Captain Walker, is missing in action in WWI and presumed dead.

Tommy’s mother, left to raise the boy alone, takes on a lover. Though the year is 1921 in the album’s version of the story, Russell’s film changes the year to 1951; the war is thus changed to WWII, and her lover (played by Oliver Reed) has Fifties style hair. Furthermore, while on the album, Captain Walker kills his wife’s paramour, in the film, killer and killed are reversed.

Since the killing is the traumatic event that causes Tommy’s psychosomatic deafness/muteness/blindness, it’s interesting to explore the precise psychological circumstances of this trauma. We’re dealing with either the killing of Tommy’s father, implying an Oedipal wish-fulfillment (especially relevant given how the little boy’s mother is played by the oh, so hot Ann-Margret in the film), or the killing of her lover, suggesting what the boy’s daddy might do to him if he were to satisfy his Oedipal desires with her. (While Freud is generally considered passé today, recall how Townshend’s story was conceived at a time when the ideas of the founder of psychoanalysis were still in vogue, and his ideas are therefore a valid interpretation of the story’s meaning.)

Another crucial aspect of little Tommy’s traumatizing is the denying of what he’s seen and heard. The man and woman screaming at the boy, “You didn’t see it, you didn’t hear it!” happens while he says he did see and hear it, though his words are ignored. Such denial, or refusal to validate a painful experience, is the essence of gaslighting, which causes the victim to doubt his or her perception of the world–in Tommy’s extreme case, to doubt his very senses to the point where he feels forbidden even to use two of them.

The ultimate trauma, though, is in his being forbidden to talk about the painful incident. Being able to put one’s trauma into words is indispensable to healing, and his own parents, refusing to take any responsibility for what they’ve done, are denying the very thing the boy needs to do to get better. One is reminded of that old poem by Philip Larkin.

III: Lacan’s Angle

So this trauma, making Tommy psychosomatically deaf, dumb, and blind, has cut him off from society. The inability to communicate with others has isolated him from the world. Normally, a child of his age would, using Lacan‘s terminology, shift from the narcissistically Oedipal Imaginary Order to the Symbolic; that is, he would go from the dyadic mother/son relationship of self and other mirroring each other’s narcissism, to the healthy relationship of self to the many Others of society. Tommy’s move from other to Other would have been mediated by the Non! du père, the father’s prohibition of Oedipal incest with the mother, and the introduction of language, culture, law, and social customs.

Tommy, however, gets neither the Non! du père nor an introduction to language and culture. The murder of his mother’s lover (or, in the film, the killing of his father) precludes the boy’s entry into society with him seeing his father commit a crime (an antisocial act pushing Tommy in the opposite direction of society), or be killed. He cannot use language and relate to the Other of society if he’s deaf, dumb, and blind, so he cannot enter the Symbolic. Instead of le Non! du père, his is a case of les non-dupes errent: that is, not being duped by the hypocrisies of social life (because not initiated in society), Tommy errs in a non-Symbolic, solipsistic world.

If his mother is reunited with his father (or if, in the film, “Uncle Frank” [Reed] replaces his father, as Uncle Claudius replaced King Hamlet by crawling into Gertrude‘s bed), then Tommy cannot indulge in his incestuous, Oedipal desires with her, the transgressive jouissance of the Imaginary. He can be in neither the Imaginary nor the Symbolic. Therefore, Tommy is trapped in the traumatic world of the Real, a world of the undifferentiated, because of the absence of sight, sound, and speech.

IV: Heaven and Hell

Now, the undifferentiated world of the Real, or of Wilfred Bion‘s O, is not necessarily all traumatic. It’s actually on the cusp where heaven meets hell; it involves the dialectical relationship between the highest happiness and the most traumatizing pain. The only thing that marks the difference between an experience of bliss or one of horror is whether or not one is still attached to one’s ego (something formed during the mirror stage in the Imaginary).

In his essay Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley wrote of what he called antipodes, or extreme opposite “regions of the mind,” where one can have blissful or hellish visionary experiences, brought on by trances, meditation, self-flagellation, fasting, or the use of such drugs as LSD or mescaline, all of which in some sense biologically disable the mind–that is, turn off the senses, as Tommy has had his turned off.

Huxley wrote of how quickly one can shift from the blissful to the hellish experience: “In life, even the blissful visionary experience tends to change its sign if it persists too long. Many schizophrenics have their times of heavenly happiness; but the fact that (unlike the mescaline taker) they do not know when, if ever, they will be permitted to return to the reassuring banality of everyday experience causes even heaven to seem appalling. But for those who, for whatever reason, are appalled, heaven turns into hell, bliss into horror, the Clear Light into the hateful glare of the land of lit-upness.” (Huxley, page 90)

Now, we’ve already examined the traumatizing aspect of Tommy’s loss of connectedness with the social and sensory worlds. We must also look into the blissful, mystical aspect of his experience, something first heard in the song “Amazing Journey.” We learn that the “deaf, dumb, and blind boy [is] in a quiet vibration land.” The unifying vibrations of the Brahman-like universe are his only connection with everything around him…but they are also a powerful connection with it, because a connection not requiring the senses. Here we see the influence of Baba on Townshend.

These vibrations will be the mystical source of Tommy’s incredible talent at pinball. Since the regular, wave-like movement of these vibrations suggest a rhythm, we can see how Tommy’s interpretation of the world around him can be understood as a musical one. Such a context is what we need to hear “Sparks” in: a kind of musical dream. In this sense, “Sparks” can be interpreted to mean tiny flashes of symbolic light to guide Tommy through the darkness, and the rhythm of those vibrations is a sound he can feel rather than hear.

V: The Manic Defence

A quack/pimp known as The Hawker claims his wife, a drug addict/prostitute known as the “Acid Queen” can cure Tommy. The use of the lyrics to Sonny Boy Williamson II‘s blues song “Eyesight to the Blind,” which refer to how the beautiful prostitute’s sexy walk is so compelling that it would restore a man’s eyesight, his ability to talk and to hear, are effective in how they dovetail with my psychoanalytic interpretation of the cause of Tommy’s trauma.

The sexual allure of the Acid Queen (played by Tina Turner in the film), as well as the hedonistic escape that her drugs represent, embodies what Lacan called the objet petit a, the unattainable object-cause of desire. Since part of Tommy’s trauma is based on the violent expression of the paternal prohibition against the boy having his mother (given on the album in the form of his father killing her lover, on whom Tommy has projected his Oedipal desire; and given in the film in the form of “Uncle Frank” killing the boy’s father, usurping his position as his mother’s new lover and causing Tommy to have guilt feelings about a murder he himself has, however unconsciously, wished for…like Hamlet vis-à- vis Claudius, in Freud’s interpretation), the Acid Queen as seductress attempts to act as a replacement, a transference, for the Oedipally-desired mother, which if she succeeds, she theoretically could cure him of his mental block. Since the objet petit a never ultimately satisfies that forbidden desire, though, the Acid Queen’s attempt is doomed to fail.

Similarly, the boy may enjoy an intense LSD trip, as musically expressed in “Underture,” with musical themes similar to those of “Sparks” (implying the similarity between a drug trip and a blissful mystical experience of universal oneness, as Huxley observed), still, drugs won’t cure Tommy of his trauma any better than sex will. If anything, indulgence in these fleeting pleasures are the opposite of a cure, for they are only a manic defence against facing the pain, which is the only real cure. Hence, the Acid Queen’s drugs will fail, too.

VI: The Opium of the People

If drugs fail to help Tommy, religion, “the opium of the people,” will also fail. At “Christmas,” his parents fret about how the boy’s disconnect from the world around him means he doesn’t know about Jesus, and therefore cannot be “saved from the eternal grave.” Of course, these parents–being impenitent about a murder they’ve kept secret, a murder whose very secrecy is the cause of Tommy’s trauma–are in no position to judge whether Tommy, or anyone, for that matter, needs to be saved by Christ or not. Their main concern, in making Tommy a ‘good Christian,’ is in integrating the boy with the hypocritical bourgeois values of society.

Making Tommy know of religious custom, or the laws of morality and mores of society, is another manifestation of the Nom, or Non! du père (in this case, God the Father). But with Tommy, who won’t accept pretending he never saw or heard the killing (recall his protests of having seen and heard it in 1921), and who therefore won’t talk about it, is someone not willing to be duped by his parents’ social hypocrisies (including the phoney pretence of Christian piety). Therefore, the boy’s response to le Non! du père is les non-dupes errent: he won’t be duped into following the hypocrisies of society, so he errs in his psychosomatic disabilities.

Along with Tommy’s rejecting of hypocritical Christian piety is his flouting of other social graces. His playing of “poxy pinball,” of course, is a presaging of his uncanny skill at that game, but it’s a game played alone, without friends, and skill at pinball, like skill at billiards, is a sign of a misspent youth. Note how kids at Christmas normally are very excited, but the holiday means nothing to Tommy. He also “picks his nose,” a social horror that guarantees most people won’t like him. Still, since these dysfunctional habits are trauma responses to something his selfish parents have brought on, it is they, not he, who are to be blamed.

His parents ask, “Tommy, can you hear me?”, but if they’ve refused to hear him when he’s said he saw and heard their murder, why should he obligated to hear them? They should be more focused on removing the beams in their own eyes than on removing the mote in his eye (Matthew 7:3-5). Meanwhile, Tommy mentally pleads, “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me“: he so desperately wants to be able to connect with his parents, to be cured of his mental block.

VII: Fiddling About with Fourths

Indeed, far from making a decent attempt at curing him, his parents emotionally neglect him, something carried to the extreme that they “think it’s alright” to leave the deaf, dumb, and blind boy in the more-than-questionable care of, first, his bullying “Cousin Kevin” and his drunk, child molester Uncle Ernie, thus compounding Tommy’s childhood traumas.

A recurring musical motif in Tommy is the back-and-forth progression of suspended fourths to major chords (and variations thereof), a progression epitomized in “Pinball Wizard,” but also heard on “1921” (i.e., when we hear, “Got a feeling ’21 is gonna be a good year.”), and on such tracks as “Sparks” and “Underture” (i.e., the theme they share with that of the second half of “Rael”). In a way, it’s even heard on Townshend’s guitar part in “Cousin Kevin,” though the ‘suspended fourth’ part is actually in the context of a dominant 7th chord resolving to the tonic (i.e., the ‘fourth’ is really a minor 7th).

This back-and-forth, up-and-down movement between the suspended fourth and major third can be seen to symbolize the up-and-down, wavelike movements of the vibrations that Tommy feels are connecting him with the world. They’re the source of his mystical bliss, but paradoxically, they are also caused by his trauma. Significantly, the movement from suspended fourth to the major third chord is also a movement from musical tension to resolution (i.e., a symbolic move from pain to peacefulness). Hence, while we hear the back-and-forth of fourths and thirds in the mystical, visionary instrumentals (“Sparks” and “Underture”), as well as in “Pinball Wizard,” we also hear them in some of the trauma-oriented songs (“1921” and “Cousin Kevin”).

The trouble with childhood trauma, especially the kind that results in the “freeze” trauma response that Tommy’s deaf-dumb-and-blind mental block represents, is how quickly it attracts predatory types. Bullies like Cousin Kevin and child molesters like Uncle Ernie find people like Tommy, now a teen in the story, to be easy prey. Bullies and pedophiles are cowards who cannot take out their pain on people who fight back, so they prey on the weak, resulting in re-victimization for people like Tommy. PTSD thus grows into C-PTSD.

“Cousin Kevin” is sung by Townshend and Entwistle on the album, while in the film it’s sung by Paul Nicholas, whom we see torturing Tommy, who in turn is played by Roger Daltrey. “Fiddle About” is sung by Entwistle on the album, while in the film, the lyrics are growled by Moon, who plays Uncle Ernie. An amusing performance of this role, done during the reunited Who’s 1989 tour, was done by Phil Collins, dressed in the stereotypical pervert’s bathrobe, underwear, and with messy hair and glasses. Billy Idol did a profanity-laced performance as Cousin Kevin during that show.

“Fiddle About” switches from 4/4 to 3/4 when the song’s title is heard in the lyrics. That creepy, rocking 3/4 suggests the act of molestation, to our ears’ horror.

VIII: Heaven and Hell 2

It is fitting that “Cousin Kevin” should occur just before the Acid Queen giving Tommy his acid trip (“Underture”) in the sequence of songs on the album; then, that “Fiddle About” should appear just before “Pinball Wizard.” That is, two of the most traumatic events in his life should happen just before a great mystical or visionary moment, a move from hell to heaven. (Similarly, the traumatic “You didn’t see it!…” of “1921” immediately precedes the mystical/visionary “Amazing Journey” on the album.)

This juxtaposition of the worst with the best brings us back to what I discussed above about the traumatic and blissful aspects of Lacan’s Real Order and Bion’s ineffable O. Rudolf Otto, in his book The Idea of the Holy (1917, Das Heilige), wrote of the non-sensory numinous, the dual nature of experiencing God, which is both blissful and traumatic, mysterium tremendum et fascinans. Tommy’s traumas are so extreme that he’s come out the other end, dialectically speaking, from hell out to heaven; he’s so well connected to the world, so touched by God, so to speak, that he can excel at pinball without even seeing the ball.

As I’ve discussed in many other posts, I use the ouroboros to symbolize the dialectical relationship between opposites: the serpent’s coiled body represents a circular continuum with the biting head and bitten tail representing extreme opposites that meet, phasing into each other. All intermediary points are on the coiled body of the ouroboros, the head and tail of which can represent any pair of opposites–heaven and hell, sanity and insanity, etc.

In Tommy’s case, his mental state is right where the serpent’s head is biting its tail: the bitten tail is his trauma, and the biting head is the bliss of his mystical, visionary consciousness. So with the trauma of Uncle Ernie’s molestation of him, immediately preceding his amazing extrasensory powers as the usurper of the Pinball Wizard, we have a perfectly fitting juxtaposition.

IX: Tommy Uses the Force

“How do you think he does it?” you wonder. “What makes him so good” at pinball? That Tommy has “no distractions” reminds me of that scene in Star Wars, when Luke is practicing with his lightsaber on the Millennium Falcon, and Ben has him wear a helmet with the blast shield down, making Luke unable to see the remote. Ben says, “Your eyes can deceive you. Don’t trust them.” Then he tells sightless Luke, “Stretch out with your feelings,” and Luke can, through the “mystical energy field” surrounding him, sense when and where the remote will shoot at him, and he can deflect its shots perfectly. Similarly, Tommy is, so to speak, using the Force when playing pinball.

On the album, Daltrey sings most of “Pinball Wizard,” while Townshend, elsewhere quickly strumming those suspended fourths and major third chords on his acoustic guitar, sings some lead vocals during the bridge (quoted at the top of the previous paragraph). In the movie, Elton John plays the Pinball Wizard (in huge shoes!) and, on his piano, plays over the suspended fourth and major chord acoustic guitar strumming with fast, descending arpeggios of subdominant and tonic triads. The film version of the song is extended to include variations on the main guitar riff to “I Can’t Explain.”

X: The Mirror

A doctor is found who, his parents hope, will cure Tommy. In the film, he’s played by Jack Nicholson (“The Specialist”), who–like Oliver Reed–also sings…for good or ill. In the song on the album, we hear a refrain of Tommy’s “See me, feel me…”, a reflection of his trauma; then soon after, “Listening to you…”, a reflection of his mystical, visionary state of mind–again, a juxtaposition of his inner heaven and hell. Realizing that Tommy’s disabilities are all psychosomatic and not at all biological, the doctor et al advise that Tommy “Go to the Mirror!”

It is interesting, from a Lacanian perspective, that blind Tommy would be brought before a mirror, of all things, as an essential part of his cure. An infant establishes its ego, its unified sense of self, an ideal-I, by seeing itself in the mirror reflection for the first time, bringing it into the Imaginary Order. Apart from seeing itself in the specular image, the infant feels itself to be a fragmented body, awkward, lacking in boundaries between me and not-me, and lacking in a unitary identity.

The traumatic arrest in Tommy’s development as a child came from his having witnessed the murder and his parents gaslighting him into not seeing, not hearing, and never talking about it. Also, his having been deprived of his Oedipal desires (note that a baby seeing his mother’s loving smiles is also a metaphorical mirror that returns his infantile narcissism back to him; note also that, in the film, Tommy’s oh, so desirable mother is seen in the mirror reflection with Tommy during “Smash the Mirror”) is connected with the need to establish his ego before the mirror, something his trauma has frustrated. This connection is now key to curing him.

Having Tommy stand before a mirror and stare at himself also symbolically suggests therapy through the methods of Heinz Kohut–that is, a temporary indulging of narcissism through the mirror transference before gently weaning him of this indulgence through optimal frustration. The problem is that Tommy’s mother, chanting “Tommy, Can You Hear Me?” with the others, grows impatient and frustrated herself, and she decides to “Smash the Mirror.”

Such a smashing is far from the gentle weaning of optimal frustration. It’s much too sudden and abrupt, and the fragmenting of the mirror, its shocking suddenness, is symbolic of the threat of psychological fragmentation, a danger often averted by resorting to pathological narcissism. Sure, Tommy’s mental block is gone: he can finally see, hear, and speak, but his “Miracle Cure” is a superficial one.

XI: The Messiah

Now, the narcissism of Tommy’s fancying himself as a Messiah-figure is the one thing keeping him from falling apart and having a psychotic break with reality. What’s worse, as we see especially in the film, his family is indulging his megalomania to make a buck or two.

Tommy has already had “disciples” from the discovery of his amazing pinball skills, but now he’s become a “Sensation,” gaining many more followers, including groupie-like “Sally Simpson,” whose preacher father disapproves of her involvement in Tommy’s cult. Since he’s “free,” Tommy is trying to get as many followers as he can, people who, devoted to him, are treated as mere extensions of himself. They are the other, a mirroring back to himself of his ego, the other of the Imaginary (i.e., a form of the objet petit a, where a is French for autre, only one ‘other’), not the Other (many people) with its radical sense of alterity, the alterity of the Symbolic.

Wishing to cash in on Tommy’s new celebrity, his Uncle Ernie, his mother and Frank (in the film), set up “Tommy’s Holiday Camp.” This whole set-up would be the rock opera’s satirical take on all those who would exploit the spiritual yearnings of the masses for profit.

And at first, the masses go along with it. There’s an ironic twist in having them wear ear plugs, eye shades, and a cork in their mouths. As we know, Tommy’s psychosomatic disabilities gave him a mystical connection with the “deep and formless infinite”; but his followers, seeking to be pinball-playing imitators of Tommy as Christians would be imitators of Christ, are being wilfully deaf, dumb, and blind followers…that is, unthinking adherents of this phoney new religion that gives Tommy narcissistic supply.

When Tommy starts scolding certain of his followers for drinking, smoking pot, or being “Mr. Normal,” they grow disillusioned with him and his restrictions on their freedoms, realizing he is no different from any other religious leader who becomes too authoritarian and repressive. Thus, they all chant, “We’re Not Gonna Take it,” and reject his phoney cult.

XII: Rejection of the Messiah

Their rejection of Tommy leads to an ironic repeat of his “See me, feel me…” plaintive singing. Before, the traumatized boy had our sympathies; now that he’s not only regained his senses but also become a powerful cult leader, his pleas to be heard and healed fall on…deaf…ears.

This irony leads to yet another. The masses’ rejection of Tommy, their refusal to indulge him in his narcissism and megalomania, has made him retreat into himself again. Now, his singing of “Listening to you…,” instead of being straightforwardly visionary and mystical, has become dubious in this new, narcissistic context.

XIII: Conclusion

So, what are we to make of the ending of Tommy? Is it a happy one? To hear the driving guitar, bass, and drums of Townshend, Entwistle, and Moon, as well as the operatic grandeur of Daltrey’s vocals, harmonized by Townshend and Entwistle, one would think it’s a happy ending. The lyrics certainly seem upbeat at the end. Let’s consider, however, what has happened in light of the plot.

Tommy’s recovery from his trauma, from staring at a mirror which is then smashed by his mother, is a shaky recovery to say the least. He’s replaced his previous isolation with a narcissistic Messiah complex. In the end, his followers have rejected him, relegating him to his loneliness, and he’s withdrawn into himself. From this, can he really “see the glory,” “climb the mountain,” and “get excitement at your feet”?

I would describe these ecstatic words not as an attainment of nirvana, but rather as him deluding himself that he’s attained it, as a narcissistic defence against fragmentation. He can convince himself that he’s found the highest bliss, though he’s actually lost his mind, because as I’ve argued above, the heavenly and hellish mental states are actually opposite sides of the same coin.

Still, the very dialectical proximity of these opposing states makes the ending of Tommy ambiguous rather than pessimistic. Just as his childhood trauma also gave him his mystical connection with everything, so can his new isolation, with all the pain of the world’s rejection of him, make him once again pass the ouroboros’ bitten tail to the biting head of visionary bliss.

The “you” he’s “listening to,” “gazing at,” and “following” could thus be his rejecting herd of followers, or it could be God…or it could be both.

Analysis of ‘Pierrot Lunaire’

I: Introduction

Pierrot lunaire (“Moonstruck Pierrot“), or Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds “Pierrot lunaire” (“Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud‘s ‘Pierrot lunaire‘”), is a 1912 composition by Arnold Schoenberg for “reciter” (actually, a soprano using Sprechstimme) and small instrumental ensemble (flute/piccolo, clarinet in A/clarinet and bass clarinet in B-flat, violin/viola, cello, and piano–the groupings of these vary from one poetic setting to another, and even within individual settings). The text is Otto Erich Hartleben‘s very liberal German translation of twenty-one poems from the cycle of French poems by the Belgian Symbolist Albert Giraud.

Schoenberg was composing in a freely atonal style at this point in his musical career, having come to the conclusion that the traditional major/minor system had been more or less exhausted. He hadn’t yet devised his 12-note system, so he was faced with the challenge of giving his “emancipation of the dissonance” a coherent melodic and harmonic structure.

Luckily for him, building music around “three times seven poems,” each of which consist of three verses of four, four, and five lines (the first two lines being repeated in the last two lines of the second verse, and the first line being repeated at the end of the final verse), meant composing a short structure for each. Added to this, he used traditional musical forms for them, such as canon, fugue, passacaglia, rondo, theme and variations, and free counterpoint.

Though the dissonance of the music and blasphemy of some of the poems surely caused at least some controversy during its early performances, Pierrot lunaire is now considered one of the most important compositions of the 20th century.

Here are links to two recordings of it, one with the score, and a live performance with English subtitles. Here is a link to the text, in German, French, and English…though I–not very happy with the English translation, will mostly use one from the notes to a Deutsche Grammophon recording.

I will be analyzing Schoenberg’s selection of poems as a totality in themselves, not in the context of Giraud’s fifty poems; and I’ll hardly be dealing with these characters in their commedia dell’arte context, either. The composer’s three-times-seven, deliberately numerological selection seems to tell a narrative of its own that I want to focus on.

II: Part One

Moondrunk

The piece begins with a dreamy motif played on the piano and violin pizzicatos in three bars of 2/4 time; the music of this first poem will, for the most part, alternate between 2/4 and 3/4 time. The expressionism of the Sprechstimme adds to this dreaminess since, being halfway between singing and speaking, the soprano’s voice won’t sustain any pitches, but will rather let her voice rise up or drop down in glissandi to give off the effect of high-pitched speaking.

The wine that, with the eyes, one drinks must be white wine, for this liquor is the very moonlight. Pierrot, drunk on the moon he gazes at with “desires terrible and sweet,” is identified with the poet who, “in an ecstasy,” is inspired by her (the cello enters at Dichter). By extension, the tragicomic buffoon Pierrot can be seen as an everyman we all can sympathize with.

Colombine

The music begins in 3/4 time with a high G-sharp dotted half-note sustained on the violin for the first bar, then going down to an E-sharp dotted quarter note, accompanied by piano notes first played cantabile, then staccato, then legato.

In the commedia dell’arte, Columbina is Pierrot’s often unfaithful wife who betrays her foolish cuckold with Harlequin. A columbine is also a flower, rather like “the pallid buds of moonlight/those pale and wondrous roses.” In this we have a three-way identification of Columbina with the flower and with the moon, establishing how Pierrot, the poet, is not only inspired by the moon, but is also in love with her.

His longing would be fulfilled if only he could besprinkle on Columbina’s dark brown hair, “the moonlight’s pallid blossoms.” The besprinkling onto her hair symbolizes the transference of the moon’s divinity onto his wayward wife.

The piano stops for the moment at the words, “Gestillt wär all mein Sehnen” (“all my longings would be satisfied”), leaving the recitation to be accompanied only by the plaintive violin. Flute and clarinet begin playing staccato notes (with a return of the piano, also with staccato notes) at “leis entblättern” (“quietly besprinkle”), musically describing the sprinkling most vividly.

The Dandy

Pierrot is “the taciturn dandy of Bergamo,” who takes “a phantasmagorical light ray” and “bedaubs all his face” with it. This taking-on of the moonlight is his introjection of the moon, an attempt to make her, whom he so loves, one with him. He rejects “the red and the green of the east,” for the white of the moon is his true colour.

I find it safe to assume that, during these first several verses, Pierrot has been contemplating a full moon. This isn’t just Pierrot lunaire, but also Pierrot the lunatic. He is going mad with love–hence the wildly dissonant, expressionistic music of this melodrama. We hear this right from the beginning, with the quick sixteenth notes in the clarinet and piccolo, and in the staccato piano backing.

Laundress Moon

Next, the moon is compared to a laundry maid, her moonlight being “nightly silk garments,” her “snow-white silvery forearms/stretching downward to the flood.” I would say that comparing the moon to a laundress suggests the qualities of a dutiful mother; recall that these poems were written back in the late 19th century, when sex roles were still rigidly defined. I’ll develop the mother theme later.

The music opens with flute, clarinet, violin, and piano, all playing a soft, slow, and languid theme, suggesting the dull drudgery of the work of the laundress.

Valse de Chopin

Though this music, played on the flute, clarinet (later bass clarinet, in the third verse), and piano, is in 3/4 time, it doesn’t sound all that waltz-like (much less anything like Chopin). Indeed, Schoenberg deliberately avoided traditionalist musical clichés or repetitions, and this seems to be the real reason most listeners find his music difficult to appreciate–not so much the harsh dissonance, but the lack of a sense of musical beginning, development, and ending; which isn’t to say his music lacks these structural elements, but that they aren’t presented in the old, familiar, and reassuring ways.

The theme of sickliness is introduced in this poem, “as a lingering drop of blood/stains the lips of a consumptive,/so this music is pervaded by a morbid deathly charm.”

I sense that the moon is waning.

Madonna

The music begins sadly with flute, bass clarinet, and cello pizzicatos. It’s in common time. The piano and violin come in, with harsh chords, only at the end, as the reciter says the final iteration of the words discussed in the following paragraph.

“Madone des Hystéries!” translated into German as “Mutter aller Schmerzen” (“Mother of all Sorrows“) introduces Mary as the mater dolorosa, sorrowfully contemplating the crucifixion and death of Jesus. She is to “rise…from the altar of [the poet’s] verses.” She has the wounds described here, though, not her Son’s, blood from her “lean bosom/where the sword of frenzy pierced it.”

Her “ever gaping gashes/are like eyelids, red and open.” Her eyes bleed the pain of seeing her “Son’s holy body.” The poem immediately after this one, “The Ailing Moon,” suggests a connection with this one. Mary as the Queen of Heaven suggests a connection with the Moon Goddess through an association with the pagan Queen of Heaven. Though the ancient pagan Queens of Heaven weren’t generally lunar deities (though this research suggests it could occasionally have been otherwise), the connections between Catholic and pagan, lunar Queens of Heaven are sufficient in a symbolic sense at least.

The fact that there’s an “altar of [the poet’s] verses,” and later, in poem 14, “The Crosses,” we learn that “holy crosses are the verses,” we come to realize that the poet, already identifying with Pierrot, is also identifying with Christ, the Son of the “Mother of all Sorrows,” whom we’ve also identified with the pagan Moon Goddess. Here we find the blasphemous content of these poems.

If the poet/Pierrot/Son of God is in love with the Moon Goddess/Colombina/Mother of all Sorrows, then we have an Oedipal relationship between the two. Colombina is Pierrot’s objet petit a, the unattainable object-cause of desire, rooted in one’s relationship with one’s mother, but later transferred and manifested in relationships with other females, those idealized as religious figures, just as one’s mother was once idealized, in childhood.

The idealizing of one’s parents, along with the notion of the grandiose self, are the two poles of what Heinz Kohut called the bipolar self, the basis for regulating one’s narcissistic tendencies. The poet/Pierrot, by blasphemously identifying with Jesus, is displaying an inflated grandiosity, while narcissistically linking with the most idealized of parents, Mary. If this bipolar configuration breaks down, the poet/Pierrot will be in danger of psychological fragmentation.

…and recall–the moon is waning…

The Ailing Moon

The music begins with a sad flute melody, in 6/4 time, accompanying the reciter. There is no other instrumental accompaniment for this poem’s musical setting. It ends with a ritardando evocative of dying.

As I’ve already said, the moon is “ailing” and “death-awaiting” because she is waning. Pierrot, as her son/lover, is suffering in his own way because she is leaving him, abandoning him. Just as the mater dolorosa suffered to see her Son suffer, Pierrot suffers to see his Mother ailing. The two are symbiotic in their mutual empathy.

She is a mirror reflection of him; she reflects his narcissism. She is white, and Pierrot is white. She’s dying “with unrequited love,” a reflection if his own unrequited love…and a projection of it. He is a lover, “stirred by sharp desire” who “exults in [her] bright play of light,” but she is waning, so the bipolar configuration I described above is breaking down, and Pierrot is coming into a state of mental instability.

And with this breakdown ends Part One.

III: Part Two

Night

The light of the moon is gone.

All is black.

Pierrot has lost his beloved moon, and he’s descending into a state of madness. He, as the poet, is comparing the blackness of night to black moths killing the bright rays of the sun. These moths are “great hordes of monsters” coming down to earth.

The music is in the form of a passacaglia, opening and ending with a dark, brooding motif in the bass, beginning with three notes wth the melodic contour of a rising minor third, then a descending major third, played on the piano (very low register), then accompanied on the cello and bass clarinet in the form of a canon; after these three notes, there is a trail of seven mostly descending chromatic notes (the last being an ascending major 6th). This motif is heard in a number of variations throughout the poetic setting.

As the reciter speaks/sings of “Erinnerung mordend!” (“destroying memory,” that is, causing the fragmentation of the foundation of Pierrot’s sense of mental stability), we hear sul ponticello (am Steg in German) in the cello, a creepy sound that adds to the horror of Pierrot losing his mind.

Those monsters come down “on the hearts and souls of mankind,” a projection of Pierrot’s inner turmoil onto the rest of us; because madness is an intolerable agitation that must be expelled.

Prayer

With the blackness of the new moon opening Part Two, the poet/Pierrot has lost his idealized parental imago, and therefore he must rely on himself for narcissistic mirroring, the grandiose self. He doesn’t have her for a mirror anymore, so the poet must rely on the idealized version of himself, Pierrot, for that mirror.

This idealization of Pierrot, who as I mentioned above has been identified with Christ, the Son of the Queen of Heaven, is now the object of the poet’s prayer, since this idealized self in the metaphorical mirror is also alienated from the self, as Lacan explained. The poet has “unlearnt” his laughter, or hidden it between his teeth, as Giraud’s original text says. With the loss of his beloved moon, the poet, like Hamlet, has lost all his mirth. (Recall that Hamlet, in Freud‘s interpretation, has lost his unconsciously Oedipally-desired mother, Gertrude, to his uncle Claudius, leading to the Danish prince’s possible…if not probable…descent into madness.) The brightness dissolves (“Zerfloß!” as given succinctly in Hartleben’s German translation) in a Shakespearian mirage, according to Giraud’s original text.

The papillons noirs of Night are now the pavillon noir that “files…now from [the poet’s] mast.” He prays that that ideal-i of his mirror reflection, white Pierrot, the Christ-like “healer of spirits,/snowman of lyrics,/monarch of moonshine,” will give him back his mirth, his laughter, changing black back to white.

Throughout, the music has clarinet and piano accompanying the reciter, in common time.

Loot

We hear flute, clarinet, and muted violin and cello, opening in predominantly staccato notes, in common time. We hear a lot of hurried sixteenth and thirty-second notes, suggesting the rush to commit a theft. This poetic setting ends with some soft piano notes in a final bar of 4/4.

Pierrot, in his growing state of mental instability, is taking to crime to vent his frustrations. But what does he want to steal? “Ancient royalty’s red rubies,/bloody drops of antique glory.”

The rubies are symbolic of the blood of Christ, with whom Pierrot narcissistically identifies, for narcissistic identification with something grandiose is an effective defence against fragmentation. He and his criminal gang of partying drinkers would steal this blood, then he’d incorporate it to make himself more at one with Christ. Giraud’s original French uses the word ravir, which is ‘ravish’ in English, and rauben (‘rob,’ also ‘ravish’) in German. This is more than theft: it’s also a blasphemous suggestion of homosexual rape.

He and his friends would try this outrage, but fear stops them, “turns them into statues.” Pierrot still cannot be quite this wicked.

Red Mass

This music opens in 3/4 time with bass clarinet, viola, cello, and piano. We hear the first note of the piccolo on the word “Kerzen,” or “candles.” We hear some ascending solo piccolo notes between the first and second verses. On the words, “Die Hand” (“the hand”), we hear loud dissonances on the piano, when Pierrot’s hand is tearing through his priestly clothes.

Pierrot continues with this blasphemous identification with Christ by approaching an altar in priestly vestments, which he tears during this “fearsome grim communion.” He shows the frightened faithful a dripping, bloody Host, identified with his heart, and which is therefore blasphemously in turn identified with the Sacred Heart.

Song of the Gallows

Continuing in his wickedness and madness, all the result of the disappearance of the moon, his mother/lover, Pierrot replaces her temporarily with “the haggard harlot.” Though he’d imagine this girl to be “his ultimate paramour,” the hastily sped-through music (sehr rasch), played on piccolo, viola, and cello in 2/4 time, suggests she’s only a passing phase for him.

The thin girl, with her long neck and pigtail being like a rope, would make his mating with her seem like him hanging himself, his sinful indulgence with her an act of self-destruction. For she, as his whore, is the opposite of his saintly moon, his life-giver.

Decapitation

The moon is waxing.

In the horned shape of a quarter moon, she is “a polished scimitar,” or a short sword with a curved blade. With all of the wicked things Pierrot has done in her absence, he is feeling guilt and fear. He has blasphemously tried to identify with Christ, and he has been unfaithful to her by fornicating with the skinny harlot. Now he feels he must be punished for his sins by feeling the “hissing vengeful steel upon his neck.”

We hear bass clarinet, viola, cello, and piano playing tense, dissonant music in common time to express his inner turmoil. After the recitation of the poem, we hear a soft postlude with a bar of 3/4, then in 6/4, played on the flute, bass clarinet, viola, and cello. In the midst of this postlude, we hear a bar of 3/4 with viola pizzicatos, then a return to 6/4 time with the viola returning to arco playing, and sul ponticello on the viola and cello.

The Crosses

The music begins with the piano accompanying the reciter. After the first verse, there’s a bar of quick solo piano playing, with sixteenth and thirty-second notes, a crescendo, and trills. The flute, clarinet, violin, and cello all come in at the end of the second verse. The third verse opens with soft music, but it gets loud and tense with the final repetition of “Heilige Kreuze sind die Verse!” (“Holy Crosses are the verses!”), after which a soft, brief flurry of flute notes is heard, and finally, loud, dissonant chords on the piano, accompanied by trills on the flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.

Just as Pierrot identifies with Christ, so does the poet, having already identified with Pierrot. Just as the narcissist identifies with grandiose ideals, so does he like to see in himself a pitiful victim. Seeing oneself as Christ on the Cross is perfect for both purposes.

He “bleed[s] in silence” with similar articulate martyrs. “On their bodies swords have feasted,” reminding one of the spear in Christ’s side (John 19:34). Pierrot’s crucifixion-like suffering would thus provoke the lamentations of the Mother of all Sorrows, identified here with the waxing moon, which will appear after the sinking “sun’s red splendour.”

With this ends Part Two, and the moon is back.

IV: Part Three

Nostalgia

This one opens in 4/4 with a bright, arpeggiated piano chord, accompanied by a violin pizzicato note. The violin then switches to arco, and the clarinet comes in with staccato sixteenth-notes. The music has a soft, plaintive sound. After the second verse, we hear the clarinet, violin, and piano playing belebend (“invigorating”) music that gets loud, with trills in the piano right hand.

The third verse includes time changes to a bar of 3/4, then a bar of 2/4, then 4/4, as Pierrot forgets his old, tragic ways. The final repeat of “Lieblich klagend–ein krystallnes Seufzen!” (“Like a plaintive sigh of crystal”) is played very softly, then there’s a very fast cello part, accompanied by trills and tremolos in the clarinet, piccolo, and piano.

“Pierrot is now…sickly sentimental,” remembering his old days performing in the Italian commedia dell’arte. But now that he has his moonlight back, “the pallid fires of lunar landscape,” and “the foaming light-flood [that] mounts his longing,” he “abjures the tragic manner.” Remembering the good old days, and having his moon-lover back, Pierrot is happy again.

Atrocity

The music begins in ziemlich rasch (“quite fast”) 3/4 time, with violin pizzicatos of two and three notes at a time, the cello playing mostly sixteenth notes, and a piano chordal backing. The now-softer piano slows down at “mit Heuchlermienen” (“with hypocritical expressions”), the violin and cello no longer playing for the moment. Piccolo and clarinet come in, with the violin and cello returning, at “einen Schädelbohrer” (“a skull-drill”); the flurry of notes heard suggests the shock and surprise of hearing such a word.

At the end of the second verse, we hear a piercingly shrill note on the piccolo, like a scream in response to the tobacco shoved in the hole of the skull of Cassander, “whose screams pierce the air.” Next, a descending pair of notes from the clarinet, and a return of the tense opening violin and cello playing brings in the third verse. The music ends, Pierrot tapping ashes from the bald pate of Cassander, with five more piercingly high notes on the piccolo, a kind of pipe, if you will, suggesting the puffing of Pierrot’s ‘pipe.’

Cassander is the father of Colombina, Pierrot’s ever-unfaithful wife. Pierrot is also Cassander’s servant. Since I’ve identified her with the moon, and the moon in turn with Mary, mother to Pierrot’s Jesus, I have described his love for her as Oedipal.

Cassander, as Colombina’s father and Pierrot’s master, can also be seen as a transference of Pierrot’s Oedipally-hated father. Such a relationship would explain Pierrot’s comically violent and irreverent behaviour with regards to Cassander.

Here, Pierrot drills a hole in Cassander’s bald pate, then stuffs tobacco in the hole. Next, he sticks a pipe in and smokes the tobacco.

Pierrot may have the moon back, but the trauma he has suffered from her absence–however temporary it may have been–still lingers in his mind. The Oedipal loss of a boy’s mother to his father is best understood as a narcissistic trauma. The nom…or Non! du père forces a child out of his dyadic, one-on-one, mirror-like relationship with his mother and into a relationship with a society of many others.

Pierrot doesn’t want this forced change, so in his narcissistic fantasies, he plays out a farcical, commedia dell’arte-like skit of himself as disrespectful to this father-figure in Cassander as a kind of ‘screw you’ to him.

Parody

The music opens with clarinet, viola, and piano in 4/8 time. The piccolo comes in, with chromatic descending thirty-second notes, at the end of the first verse, with its reference to a red dress. The time changes to a bar of 7/8 at “sie liebt Pierrot mit Schmerzen” (“she loves Pierrot with aching pain,” which the Sprechstimme of the reciter delivers with melodramatic ornament), then goes back to 4/8 time. It’s as if the one bar of 7/8 is meant to give a sense of the awkward irregularity of her misplaced love. Some solo dissonant piano is heard for a few bars before the repeat of the first two lines, about knitting, when the other instruments come back with the reciter.

The music shifts from the louder, jaunty opening music and goes into a softer ritardando between the second and third verses. At this point, the Duenna can hear, in a sharp whistle in the breeze, the Moon-goddess tittering. The music speeds up and gets louder again (in the piano), as we find the Moon doing a parody of the Duenna’s knitting and desiring of Pierrot.

The knitting Duenna, in a red dress as stated above, “loves Pierrot with great passion.” Note how Duenna (used in the German translation, which being what Schoenberg set his music to, is our main concern with regard to interpretation) is practically a pun on Dirne (“harlot”) from “Song of the Gallows,” the skinny girl Pierrot has had a sexual encounter with. The Duenna can thus be seen as a double of the Dirne.

The Moon-goddess–having every confidence that she is the one whom Pierrot wants, and not the Duenna (he only had the Dirne because the Moon-goddess momentarily wasn’t there to satisfy him)–laughs at and mocks the Duenna in her knitting and hoping to have Pierrot.

A brief, dissonant segue on the piano in 3/4 time, ending with a thrice-stated motif of three notes with descending major seconds and ascending fourths (C-sharp, B-natural, E-natural; B-flat, A-flat, D-natural; and A-flat, G-flat, C-natural) in the left hand bass, leads us to the next poetic setting.

The Moon-fleck

The Moon-goddess wants Pierrot’s attention, so she shines a fleck of moonlight “on the shoulder of his black silk frock-coat,” as he strolls about at night (with a jaunty clarinet melody), looking for adventure. Normally, he wears white: why is he in black?

Could he still be feeling guilt over his actions in his Moon-lover’s absence? His search for adventure suggests a longing to sin again, while the Moon-goddess is trying to bring him back to her by putting white on his black, to remind him of his natural whiteness, a mirror of her own.

Instead of enjoying the sight of her presence on him, Pierrot sees “something wrong with his appearance.” Imagining it’s plaster, the fool tries…and fails…to rub the white off. This occurs when we hear a nervous violin part playing sixteenth and thirty-second notes as a tone painting of his nervous rubbing.

The music becomes palindromic in the piccolo, clarinet, violin, and cello parts; we hear a crab canon, in which the canon is reversed, right at the middle of the second verse (“…und findet richtig,” “and finds”), when Pierrot turns back to look at the moon-fleck. The music reverses right at his looking back, another example of Schoenberg’s tone painting. The reverse happens right at the repeat of the opening two lines.

This fleck of moonlight on him symbolizes her as his mother/lover, an internal object he has introjected. Though he feels Oedipal love for her, this kind of love is actually part of a love/hate relationship that is inevitable for a son or daughter to have for his or her parents. By troubling him thus with a guilt-inducing reminder of the allegiance he owes her, he is frustrated with her, seeing her as what Melanie Klein called the bad mother. Pierrot’s rubbing at the moon-fleck thus represents a wish to project and expel unwanted influence from his mother/lover object.

Serenade

Pierrot is scraping away discordantly on a viola, plucking a pizzicato or two…though Schoenberg oddly doesn’t score this poetic setting for viola, instead for cello and piano (his perverse sense of humour, I’m guessing). We hear the dissonant fiddle playing at the beginning, including pizzicatos, but they’re done in the high register of the cello. Even at the end, with a happy postlude for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano segueing into “Journey Home,” there is no viola part, as there are in some of the other poetic settings.

Cassander is furious (“wütend“) to hear the noise that this nighttime “Virtuosen” (note the sarcasm) is making. In another ‘screw you’ act of defiance to his master/father-figure transference, Pierrot tosses aside the viola, takes Cassander by the neck, and plays him like a newly-found fiddle.

Journey Home

This poetic setting is a barcarolle, naturally, because the poem narrates Pierrot on a boat going home. It’s in 6/8 time, typical of barcarolles. The music begins with the flute continuing from the postlude of Serenade. Soft pizzicatos are heard in the cello and violin, then the clarinet and piano softly play. These instruments, especially the piano’s ascending and descending arpeggios, play with a wavelike rhythm, suggestive of Pierrot’s oar pushing through the water.

Reunited with the Moon-goddess, whose “moonbeam is the oar” to guide him through the water on his waterlily boat, Pierrot, having satisfied his urge to spite Cassander, can now sail home contented.

He is the “snowy king” (“le neigeux roi,” in Giraud’s original), as white as his mother/lover, and no longer clad in black to reflect his guilty pleasures of before, in her absence. He is at peace as he sails in the approaching dawn.

O Ancient Scent

The soft piano and Sprechstimme open this final poetic setting (with the clarinet in the third bar playing three soft notes) with near triadic, almost tonal melody and harmony, suggestive of the sense of emotional resolution Pierrot is finally feeling. The clarinet returns and, later, the flute comes in at “Sinne” (“senses”) at the end of the second line. Violin and cello come in a few bars later.

The flute switches to piccolo in the middle of the third verse. At the end, we hear that ‘near-triadic’ harmony in the violin and cello, playing thirds. The whole piece ends shortly after, softly and at peace.

Again, Pierrot is nostalgic of old times, wishing to smell old fragrances again. With “desire finally gratified,” his…and the poet’s…”melancholy is dispelled.” He would seem to be happy with his beloved moon back, but…what of her next waning?

V: Conclusion

Schoenberg had a superstitious fondness for numerology, hence his grouping of these melodramas in three parts of seven poems each. Both numbers have a sense of completeness, of finality. Three gives us beginning, middle, and end, quite appealing to a classical musician trained to compose music with a ternary structure of A-B-A (statement, departure, and return).

We see this statement, departure, and return in the form of the moon that wanes, is temporarily absent, and waxes again, returning. Also, seven is a number of completeness in the sense that it suggests the seven Biblical days of creation. The final poem–the third seven–gives a sense of rest similar to God’s resting on the seventh day.

As we know from the Biblical story, though, right after God’s rest, the first man and woman find themselves succumbing to temptation and bringing about the Fall. I suspect that, after Pierrot’s restful moment, remembering old fragrances, he’ll be up to some more narcissistic naughtiness as soon as the moon wanes again. After all, some consider the narcissist to be something of a performing clown.