Category: horror movie

Analysis of ‘The Brood’

The Brood is a 1979 Canadian horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It stars Oliver Reed, Art Hindle, and Samantha Eggar, with Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Susan Hogan, Cindy Hinds, Gary McKeehan, and Nicholas Campbell.

It was a profitable film, grossing over five million dollars. Positively received by critics, The Brood became a cult film in later decades. Academics have shown a scholarly interest in the film for such themes as mental illness and parenthood.

The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 88th scariest film of all time in 2006.

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

Cronenberg’s inspiration for The Brood was his own acrimonious divorce and bitter child custody battle over his and his ex-wife’s daughter. In fact, Hindle and Eggar were cast as Frank and Nola Carveth because of their physical resemblances to Cronenberg and his ex-wife.

Another inspiration for the film was Kramer vs. Kramer, though The Brood is meant to be a correction of the optimistic ending of a marriage in the American drama that came out the same year. In spite of the science fiction element (“psychoplasmics”) of The Brood, Cronenberg described it as “more realistic” than Kramer vs. Kramer, and he called it “the most classic horror film [he’d] done” in retrospect.

Of course, divorce causes serious emotional trauma in the children caught in the middle of their parents’ fighting, and the link between The Brood‘s themes of mental illness, parenthood, and separation lead to another key theme in the film: child abuse–not just physical, but also emotional. I’m reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin, for in many ways, that’s what The Brood is all about.

Parental abuse, however, isn’t the only kind of abuse to be explored in this film. The ways in which psychotherapy can be abusive, intentionally or not, are also an issue here. And when one considers the ramifications of transference, an abusive psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst can be just like an abusive parent, as we see in the film’s opening scene.

Dr. Hal Raglan (Reed), a psychotherapist, is demonstrating to a group of people something he calls “psychoplasmics,” a form of therapy he’s devised to get his patients to release suppressed emotional trauma by making it appear as physiological changes to their bodies. His audience watches him facilitate a father transference in a patient, Mike (McKeehan), who has abandonment issues with his biological father.

Raglan speaks cruelly to him, like an authoritarian father, calling Mike weak and feminine for not looking him in the eyes. His harsh words are meant to bring out Mike’s psychological pain, as part of the therapy, but it just looks as though Raglan is retraumatizing him. Indeed, the last thing that those spots seen all over Mike’s chest and face look like are signs of healing.

Nonetheless, at least one of the members of the audience is amazed at the results of psychoplasmics, and thinks Raglan is a genius. Frank Carveth is less impressed, and he’ll be furious when he sees marks all over the body of his daughter, Candice (Hinds), concluding that Raglan is a fraud and that his ex-wife, Nola, has physically abused their daughter.

That demonstration, with the lights turned down low and Raglan and Mike on a stage embracing at the end, looks more like a theatre performance than real therapy. The doctor switching from abusive words to hugging Mike, in fact, looks like traumatic bonding.

In these contradictions, we see the anti-psychiatric critique in The Brood. Psychotherapy is supposed to help the mentally ill, not make them worse. One could consider this film to be an allegory on religion, too, with Raglan’s therapeutic innovations as the beginnings of a new cult, conning people into following him and paying him for a salvation that is nothing of the sort.

Indeed, Nola has been receiving Raglan’s therapy for her own mental health issues, and she’s getting worse rather than better. Frank wants to stop his ex from seeing their little girl, to protect her from further physical abuse, but Raglan won’t have it, since he feels that Nola’s seeing Candice regularly is crucial to her recovery. Frank threatens to sue Raglan.

Now, what is “psychoplasmics” as a form of therapy, really, in its essence? Symbolically speaking, it’s projection, and projective identification. The patient tries to push his or her pain outward, to get it out of him- or herself, hence the markings on the patient’s body.

The problem is that through projection and projective identification, the pain that is pushed out tends to be put into other people, and this is what is personified by the brood of deformed, killer kids that Nola parthenogenetically produces. “They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you,” as Larkin says in his poem.

The thing about projection and projective identification is that, as ego defence mechanisms, they act as a kind of amateurish therapy for the self, a self-soothing. If people have hurt you, by projecting that pain onto others (often not the ones who initially hurt you), you can relieve yourself of it, then carry on your life in a reasonably functional way. You kid yourself into thinking you’ve removed the pain from yourself and passed it on to somebody else (“Man hands on misery to man”), though that pain is still rooted in the unconscious.

This passing on of pain is what Nola is doing by creating the brood and having them kill for her. First, we see Raglan do a therapy session with her, in which he takes on the role of Candice to bring out the source of the abuse the little girl suffered. At first, Nola naturally denies it, even going to the point of claiming that “Mummies don’t hurt their own children.”

This, of course, is utter nonsense coming from Nola’s mouth. The ideal mother would never hurt her own child, certainly not intentionally…”They may not mean to, but they do.” Many mothers and fathers out there at least don’t deliberately hurt their children…but some do. Nola’s certainly aware of the knowingly hurtful ones, for as Raglan carries on with his therapy with her, the repressed pain comes to the surface, and she admits that “bad mummies…fucked-up mummies” sometimes hurt their kids (“But they were fucked up in their turn”).

Raglan gets her to admit that her own mother physically abused her. He now takes on the role of her mother, repeating her denials of mothers ever committing abuse in order to provoke more of a surfacing of Nola’s pain. And just as with Mike, he has her physically manifest her pain…but it doesn’t appear as mere marks on her skin. It comes out as the brood.

The fact is that Nola’s trauma is far more severe than Mike’s ever was. He suffers abandonment issues, which are surely terrible, but she as a child was beaten, scratched, and thrown down the stairs. Her alcoholic mother, Juliana Kelly (Fitzgerald), is as much in denial of what she did to little Nola as Nola is of what she did to Candice…through the brood, mind you, as we will learn.

These parental denials add a new dimension to the abuse, a psychological dimension called gaslighting. The victim’s refusal to acknowledge the pain she’s been through–as we see initially in Nola and in Candice’s quiet non-reactions to any violence–is a coping mechanism: an attempt to remove the pain by pretending it isn’t there.

But Nola, having felt the pain resurface, can find only one way to get rid of it now, and that’s through projecting it into the brood, one of whom goes over to Juliana’s house, where Candice also is. The evil, deformed child attacks and kills Candice’s grandma, and Candice, seeing the bloody corpse in the kitchen, gives no emotional response, but just goes up to her room to sleep, and forgets about the whole thing.

And just as Juliana would deny any knowledge of how little Nola got all those bumps on her body, Candice seems to know nothing of how Juliana got her injuries. The police psychologist, Dr. Birkin (played by Reiner Schwarz), has examined Candice, and he can tell that she has repressed trauma that must be dealt with. Taking Birkin’s advice, Frank tries to get his daughter to talk about what happened, but she stays quiet.

In another therapy session with Raglan, Nola has a father transference with him, complaining of her fears that Frank is taking Candice away from her. Raglan, taking on the father role, defends Frank’s actions as protective of their daughter; he claims that in a similar way, Nola’s father did his best to protect her, which provokes her into denying that protection, which truly never happened. As a codependent, alcoholic ex-husband to Juliana, Barton Kelly (Beckman), sat back and allowed Juliana’s abuse of Nola to happen.

When parents look away and ignore abuse, pretending it never happened, just as the abuser denies it, and even the victim pretends it never happened, all of this denial enables the abuse. When the victim does this, it’s wrongheaded but understandable, as confronting and trying to process the pain feels almost impossible; but when abusers, flying monkeys, and codependent enablers let the abuse slip by without judgement, they are in many ways as guilty as the abuser is.

Interestingly, as Nola is tearfully telling Raglan (as her father transference) that he looked away and never protected her from Juliana, he turns his back on her and looks the other way. At one point in the scene, he, in the role of ‘loving father,’ kisses her on the cheek and calls her ‘sweetheart.’ He, as a psychiatrist, is being as emotionally abusive to her as her father was, in however indirect that way Barton was (and Raglan is). In fact, that kiss also suggests he has a sexual interest in Nola, who is an attractive woman.

Frank takes photos of Candice’s bruised back as evidence to be used in a court case against Raglan and Nola. He also receives a visit from Barton, who’s happy to see his granddaughter, but saddened to know the cycle of intergenerational family abuse has resurfaced.

To get more evidence against Raglan, Frank sees Jan Hartog (played by Robert A. Silverman), who has also received psychoplasmics therapy and has lymphosarcoma on the front of his neck. Hartog knows he can’t prove in court that Raglan’s methods caused his cancerous condition, but he hopes that even a losing court case will hurt Raglan’s business by giving him bad publicity. Frank’s hoping for more convincing evidence for the court case.

Barton drives over to see Raglan about telling Nola of her mother’s murder, but Raglan doesn’t want her father to contact her, claiming that her isolation is key to her therapy. Isolating someone is, of course, a kind of emotional abuse, reminding us that therapists can be as bad as abusers, especially ones with Raglan’s narcissistic tendencies, i.e., his apparent god complex, which is something I’ll elaborate on later.

Barton is infuriated with Raglan’s refusal to let him see Nola, so he gets drunk that night in his old house with Juliana. Meanwhile, Frank is having dinner with Candice’s teacher, Ruth Mayer (Hogan), and there’s a potential romantic interest between the two, since she could be a new mother to the little girl. Nola will find out, though, and her rage against her non-protective father, and her jealousy of Ruth, will get both objects of Nola’s rage killed by the brood.

Now, before Barton is killed by one of the brood, as I said above, he gets drunk and ruminates sadly over his failed family in his old house, the one he lived in with Juliana. He talks on the phone with Frank, and he’s on the verge of tears.

The word brood has two significant meanings as far as this film is concerned. As a noun, brood refers, of course, to the group of deformed killer children that Nola produces out of her rage. As a verb, to brood is to ruminate sulkily about whatever is making you unhappy, as Barton does before he’s killed, and as Nola does in her rages that produce the brood.

While Frank is gone to get Barton before he does something foolish in his drunken depression, leaving his dinner date, Ruth, in his home, Nola phones Frank, with Ruth receiving the call and inflaming Nola’s jealousy…and causing her to brood in her own right. Just before Barton is beaten to death, he looks at his brood-killer and sees Nola’s face on it. Of course he does: the brood are all her projections.

When Frank arrives at Juliana’s house and finds Barton dead, the killer child tries to kill him, too, but it soon ‘runs out of gas,’ so to speak, and dies. The child’s body is examined, and we learn that it is sexless, having no genitals. It also has no navel, and therefore wasn’t born the natural, human way. It’s toothless and colourblind, too.

One should consider the implications, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, of it apparently seeing only in black and white. Since these brood children are fueled by a murderous rage, and are projections of Nola’s mental instability, we can understand their black-and-white vision as representative of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting.

The brood’s murderous rage comes from seeing the world as either all white (i.e., all good, as in Nola and Candice) or as all black (as all bad, or those to be killed). There is no grey in-between for them. Such is the mental state of what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (PS): paranoid, because of the paranoid fear that comes from contemplating a retaliation from the hated object; schizoid, because of the splitting of objects into absolute good and bad ones. All babies experience PS at first, but soon enough will acknowledge people as a grey mixture of good and bad, resulting in the mental state called the depressive position (D). The brood can never integrate the black with the white, so instead of experiencing D, they’re always in PS.

In this permanently split state, the brood can never be fully human, hence their lack of teeth, genitals, and retinas in their eyes; their physical deformity (including cleft lips) is symbolic of this human incompleteness. Furthermore, their tongues are too thick and inflexible for proper speech; all they can do to communicate is to grunt and scream without any articulation.

This inability to form words means that the brood cannot participate in society and culture–they have no sense of what Lacan called the Symbolic. Their violent world is that of the Real, an undifferentiated, traumatic, inexpressible world.

Nola’s mental instability is at such a severe state that she splits off and projects her hostility in personified forms that are symbolically comparable to what Bion called bizarre objects, projections that take on a life of their own.

When Raglan learns of the killing of Barton, and that the killer was obviously one of the brood, he realizes that, through psychoplasmics, he’s created a monster…or many monsters. In spite of his narcissistic tendencies, he isn’t all bad, for he’s feeling a pang of conscience.

That pang, nonetheless, isn’t inspiring him to make the best of moral choices, for he tells Chris (Campbell) to have all of his patients, save Nola, removed from his institute. This will feel like he’s abandoning these patients, especially Mike, as Chris tells Raglan. And while it’s true that Nola’s care needs special focus, Raglan’s form of therapy is the last thing she needs; the fact is, he still wants her for himself, so his narcissism wins out.

Frank learns through Hartog about Mike being sent out of Raglan’s institute, and that Nola, “the queen bee,” is the only one Raglan is interested in. She doesn’t even have to pay for the therapy, because Raglan can use her to prove how ‘effective’ psychoplasmics is at projecting pain outward. He, of course, isn’t really going to cure her: the creation of the brood is feeding his god complex.

Mike is now desperate for a father substitute, having been abandoned by his real father and now by Raglan. Mike wants Frank to be his new ‘daddy,’ and he’ll do anything for Frank in exchange for that. Mike will spy on and try to find out what Raglan’s doing with Nola.

To get an idea of how ‘effective’ the projections are in removing pain from oneself, we see after the killing of Ruth how at peace Nola is from waking from a restful sleep. The removing of that pain, however, is only temporary, for she’ll continue to be raging, jealous, and possessive of Candice, who’s been taken, by the pair of brood-children who killed Ruth, back to her.

Frank learns from Mike that Raglan has the brood under Nola’s care in a work shed at the institute, and he surmises that Candice, who’s been missing since the killing of Ruth, must be with Nola. So he rushes over in his car to the institute. He confronts Raglan in front of the work shed, the latter having a gun, and he learns that she is the brood’s mother, and that it was the brood that beat Candice at the beginning of the movie.

And here is where Raglan’s god complex comes in. Even though he can be implicated in the killings of Juliana, Barton, and Ruth, since it’s his psychoplasmics that created the brood in the first place, he won’t use his gun to shoot the killer kids, except in self-defence, as he does to some of them at the film’s climax. Deep down, he loves the brood, because he’s their father, if indirectly. He’s proud of his creations.

Raglan, in this sense, is like God the Father, though he’s more like the inferior Demiurge, creator of what’s physical (i.e., the skin markings, the brood). He’s an evil god, or at least an inferior one, and Nola is an evil Mary, giving virgin births to evil Jesuses, as it were, who kill rather than give life, then die themselves soon afterwards.

So in this sense, The Brood is not just a statement against failed parenting and bad psychiatry; it’s also symbolically a critique of religion’s failed attempts at healing and guiding people. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”: this includes therapists as parental transferences, priests (the Fathers in church), the Mother of God, and God the Father…whether they mean to, or not.

Interestingly, the first verse of Larkin’s poem was recited by a judge during an acrimonious divorce/child custody case in 2009, reminding us of that of Cronenberg and his ex-wife, which in turn inspired this film. The misery man hands down to man, incidentally, reminds me of Exodus 20:5, in its relation to a wrathful, jealous father-God.

Raglan, in an attempt at redeeming himself somewhat, offers to fetch Candice from the room where she is to sleep with the brood, as long as Frank can go in the work shed and speak to Nola in a conciliatory way, to keep her calm so the brood won’t be enraged and attack Raglan and Candice. The plan works at first, until Nola reveals her external womb, created through psychoplasmics, which produces brood-babies. Frank cannot hide his shock and disgust at her ripping open the womb, taking a bloody baby out of it, and licking the blood off of it.

Offended at Frank’s disgust, Nola is enraged, and the brood attacks Raglan, who uses his gun to shoot a few of them before the rest kill him. In her jealous possessiveness of their daughter, Nola tells Frank she’ll kill Candice before letting him take her from Nola. This forces Frank to choke Nola to death, since he knows otherwise that the brood will kill Candice through Nola’s rage; but with her death, the brood dies, too.

In Frank’s killing of Nola, since the two characters represent, and the actors even resembled, Cronenberg and his ex-wife, we can see just how much bitterness the writer/director must have felt toward her, enough to include a scene that is, in effect, a wish-fulfillment. I’m reminded of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” a song about the drummer/singer’s own bitter divorce–these lines in particular: “if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand.”

Frank fetches Candice, takes her to his car, and drives away. The movie ends with a shot of her arm, which has two of the kind of lesions Nola had as a child, which her mom noticed on her. Now, whether Juliana was telling the truth about Nola’s lesions as being there irrespective of the mother’s abuse of her daughter, or if she was lying and in denial about having caused the lesions, they are certainly at least symbolic of the passing on of intergenerational abuse.

The sins of Juliana’s and Barton’s generation are being punished in not only Nola’s but also Candice’s generation. “Man hands on misery to man.” Even outside the realm of family abuse, the sins of the baby boomers and those before them are being punished in generations X, Y, and Z. The brood, in their deformities, incompleteness, and violence, are surely personifications of this problem.

Analysis of ‘Messiah of Evil’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No one will hear you SCREAM!!!”

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

I: Introduction

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

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

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

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

II: Politics and Lies–a Brief but Necessary Digression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: Deathly Desires

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

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

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

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

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

IV: The Graveyard Scene

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

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

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

V: Franklin and the Hitchhiker

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

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

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

VI: Vegetarianism

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

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

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

VII: Abuse, Trauma, and Projection

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

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

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

VIII: A Brief Psychoanalytic Digression

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

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

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

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

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

IX: When Victimizers are Victims, Too

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

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

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

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

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

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

X: The First Killings

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

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

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

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

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

XI: Punching Down

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

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

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

XII: The Climax

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

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

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

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

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

XIII: An Abuser’s Mask of Sanity

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

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

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

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

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

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

XIV: Mirroring Faces

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XV: Escape

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

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

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

XVI: Leatherface, the Ultimate Victim

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Halloween’

Halloween is a 1978 horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by him and producer Debra Hill (he also composed the film’s music). It stars Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis in her film debut, with PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis.

Grossing $70 million, Halloween became one of the most profitable independent films of all time. Carpenter’s direction and score were particularly praised. The film, along with Psycho and Black Christmas, helped establish the slasher film genre; it’s considered one of the best horror movies ever made.

The franchise that resulted from the 1978 film is made up of thirteen films whose extensive backstory for antagonist Michael Myers sometimes diverges from previous installments. There are also a novelization, a video game, and comics based on Halloween.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Carpenter’s score is indeed an achievement in its own right. Apart from the eerie, atmospheric main theme in 5/4 time, subdivided into eighth notes of 3+3+2+2 and played mainly on the piano, we often hear tense minor seconds and parallelism in the harmonic progressions. Not bad for a filmmaker who dabbles in music and, by his own admission, can’t read music.

We hear the main theme as the credits are shown with a jack-o’-lantern. What must be remembered about the origins of Halloween is that there was a belief that during Samhain, on which Halloween was based, evil spirits walked the Earth, and such things as jack-o’-lanterns, bonfires, and the wearing of scary costumes were meant to ward off ghosts. Today, these things are done only for fun and so we can see in the film that the people in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois are not protected from evil spirits.

Yes, an evil spirit is how we should conceive of The Shape (played by Nick Castle), that is, the shape that the evil spirit takes in the body of Michael Myers. Carpenter himself has described the killer as “almost a supernatural force…an evil force” that is “unkillable.” For me, that’s close enough to Myers being possessed by an evil spirit.

Halloween was strongly influenced by Bob Clark‘s Black Christmas, by the idea of a serial killer acting without any apparent motive. In fact, Carpenter’s film is almost a sequel to Clark’s film, since Carpenter asked Clark what he would do if he were to make a sequel to Black Christmas. Clark had no intention whatsoever of continuing that story, but he said that if he did, Billy would have escaped from the mental institution he’d inevitably have been locked up in, he’d have returned to the neighbourhood that he’d originally terrorized, and he’d have resumed the killing…but on Halloween instead of Christmas.

We should keep the relationship between these two films in mind when we watch the opening shot of Halloween, with the camera approaching the white Myers’s house on Halloween night in 1963. Similar shots are seen at the beginning of Black Christmas, with the POV of Billy coming to the house of the sorority where he’ll enter through the attic window and begin killing the girls living there.

The shot of Billy’s POV is somewhat shaky, suggesting his body movements; but the camera approaching the Myers’s house, being as I imagine it to represent the POV of a disembodied spirit, moves more or less smoothly for that very reason. The evil spirit enters the house, reminiscent of Billy’s bodily entrance, and once inside, a light is turned on in a dark room, presumably little Michael’s doing, and we see his hand go into a kitchen drawer and pull out a knife. At this point, I’d say the evil spirit has just entered his body.

For this reason, I’d insist that possessed Michael is otherwise an innocent six-year-old boy. Seriously, there’s no reason for him to pick up a knife and stab his naked older sister, Judith, to death. Why would a boy so young have already developed such extreme, violent, psychopathic traits? Though Michael is generally expressionless, when we see his father remove the mask on the boy’s face, he seems remorsefully sad over the murder he’s been forced to commit.

To get back to his expressionlessness, though, we learn from Dr. Samuel Loomis (Pleasance) that Myers hasn’t spoken a word since that night. His face is devoid of any human feeling. Of course: what emotions would an evil spirit have?

Now, this lack of the use of language, combined with his relentless killing and the trauma that it causes the survivors, makes Myers the very personification of Lacan‘s notion of the Real. It’s a traumatic, undifferentiated world that cannot be verbalized; recall that Myers generally kills only at night, when the differentiation between things is obscured under the cover of darkness.

Some imagine that, because Myers’s victims tend to indulge in such naughty pleasures as marijuana and premarital sex, that Halloween, like the Friday the 13th movies, is a kind of puritanical morality play (one might recall that scene in Scream when Randy Meeks [played by Jamie Kennedy] insists that one mustn’t sin if one is to survive a slasher movie). Carpenter has strenuously denied any attempt to moralize against the partying of teens, and I agree.

Myers is “purely and simply…evil,” according to Dr. Loomis. If so, why would he kill sinning kids in a ‘morality play’? Laurie Strode (Curtis) smokes pot in one scene: shouldn’t she deserve to be killed, too, by Meeks’s analysis? And what sin does the German Shepherd commit (apart from some barking that annoys Annie Brackett [Nancy Loomis]) that it deserves to be killed no less than the teenagers? Myers kills because he is evil, not his victims.

The one murder we know of Myers committing in the daytime is of a mechanic, and he takes the man’s coveralls and wears them, along with a white, expressionless mask. Thus, he has his iconic look, his ‘Halloween costume,’ as it were.

Just as Black Christmas subverts and does evil parodies of Christmas traditions (see my analysis, link above), so does Halloween parody traditions of its holiday. As I mentioned above, the wearing of costumes was originally meant to ward off evil spirits; whereas Myers’s ‘costume’ seems to make him more complete as an evil spirit incarnate, and a killer. Recall six-year-old Myers’s clown costume when he killed his sister.

His mask is of particular interest. The one used for the film has the contours of the face of William Shatner, an actor known…and loved…for his, well, emotive performances, a quite ironic fact given that the mask renders Myers with a coldly emotionless face, one without any expression.

Though it’s just a mask, like the clown mask he wears as a little kid, one that by no means gives him any anonymity, it seems to give him a special power as a killer, a special evil, if only in a symbolic sense. When the mask comes off, as just before the six-year-old is to be sent to the sanitarium, and when Laurie takes it off his face, he seems to have lost his ability to kill. When it’s back on his face, though, and Loomis shoots him and he falls out the window and onto the lawn, he soon gets up, ready to kill again in the first sequel.

As when the mask is taken off the face of six-year-old Michael, when Laurie takes it off his face at the end of the movie, we see a sad expression on him, suggesting the real, remorseful Michael who is being forced to kill by the evil spirit possessing him. The power of the mask seems to come from how it hides feeling through its expressionlessness.

This understanding leads us to a discussion of where the evil in Halloween comes from. The mask’s lack of expression is linked to a general lack of social connection in Haddonfield. Myers always kills; he never talks, and we generally never see his face. As a personification of the inexpressible Real, Myers won’t enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic, Lacan’s world of language, customs, and traditions…including those of Halloween.

Not to defend the superstitious beliefs surrounding Samhain and Halloween, but one virtue of tradition is that it has a way of binding communities together. The idea of warding off evil spirits, in the context of this film, can be seen to symbolize the more general idea of communities protecting each other. Older societies, though believing in a lot of religious nonsense, as well as bigoted, chauvinistic nonsense, at least had a basic sense of togetherness, motivating them to be more protective and loving towards each other.

In contrast, modern society, though better educated in scientific matters and thus more open-minded and freer–all undeniably good and indispensable advances–is nonetheless plagued by alienation and self-centeredness. As a result, we see in Haddonfield a number of examples of parental neglect–with babysitters looking after kids…and often enough, the babysitters themselves are neglectful of the kids.

Annie Brackett–with her wandering off to wash her clothes, and her plans to hook up with her boyfriend, Paul, leaving Lindsey Wallace (played by Kyle Richards), the little girl she’s supposed to be babysitting, alone to watch The Thing from Another World (a film Carpenter would do a remake of several years after Halloween) on TV–isn’t the only one neglectful babysitter of the movie. So was Judith, who instead of watching over her little brother was making love with her boyfriend just before she was murdered.

Laurie can be said to be the surviving babysitter for moral reasons in that she is the one babysitter who is properly doing her job–watching over little Tommy Doyle (played by Brian Andrews) as well as Lindsey. Note that Tommy correctly identifies Myers as “the bogeyman.” It’s fitting that one of the three boys who bully Tommy at school, mocking him for his fear of the bogeyman, runs into Myers immediately after. The bogeyman is believed to punish children for bad behaviour; those teen babysitters who neglect their work are also ‘punished’ by Myers.

The bullies, supposedly too old to have childish fears of things like the bogeyman, nonetheless go to the Myers’s house on Halloween night, one of them being dared to go inside. The notion that a house where a murder has been committed has become haunted with the ghosts of the victims is a popular belief in small towns like Haddonfield, hence its inclusion in the film. The three ‘tough’ little boys are easily scared away by Loomis’s imitation of an angry spook hiding behind a bush near the house.

Even with these three boys, though, why aren’t they at home? Why aren’t their parents watching out for them? It’s this kind of neglect that leads to so much family dysfunction, which in turn results in the traumatic basis for so many mental disorders, which in turn, often enough, results in criminally insane behaviour, such as what we see in Michael Myers. Hence the evil in Halloween is the result of societal neglect and alienation.

Further proof that Myers must be possessed of a demon is in his unexplained ability to drive a car. All that Loomis can jokingly say is that, maybe, someone in the mental hospital gave Myers driving lessons. Only an evil spirit, with its supernatural abilities, could steer a car in the body of someone locked away since he was six.

While it’s still light out, Myers is driving around the neighbourhood of his boyhood, surveying his prey in Annie, Lynda Van Der Klok (Soles), and especially Laurie, who is the most disturbed of them by the presence of the man in the white mask. She’ll see him briefly for one moment, look away in worry, then look back to see he’s gone. We see, in how this stalking leads to the murders, that it’s the alienation between Myers and the girls that is the basis of the evil.

Mute Myers can’t communicate with them, neither verbally nor in gestures, and that mask ensures no facial expression of feeling. He just stands and stares, with neither the ability nor the willingness to connect with others. Exiled from the social realm of the Symbolic, Myers can only wait for the night to obscure the distinction between things so he can embody the traumatizing, inexpressible Real, and kill people.

His one, concrete (pardon the pun) act of communication is to steal the headstone from Judith’s grave and to place it at the head of the bed on which he’s laid Annie’s corpse, to give Laurie an especially bad scare before he attacks her. In Halloween II, Carpenter ret-conned her character to be Judith’s and Michael’s younger sister, adopted into another family, hence her new surname, Strode. Carpenter would regret this change; Quentin Tarantino rejects it altogether.

The idea that Myers is obsessed with killing his sisters is rather absurd. He kills more or less indiscriminately, though there’s an emphasis on babysitters as victims (Judith, Annie, and Laurie; bear in mind that I have little interest in the contradictory sequels, and therefore their wider variety of victims) because, as I’ve argued above, Myers has found them to be negligent in caring for kids.

The evil spirit entering the body of little Michael can be seen to symbolize the violent effect of the childhood trauma of feeling neglected and abandoned, felt to be a kind of betrayal from not only his parents leaving him at home to have dinner (or whatever it was that they were doing instead of watching over him), but also from his older sister, who was more interested in making love with her boyfriend than in taking care of him.

This isn’t to say that parents are never to be allowed occasionally to leave their kids with a babysitter to enjoy an evening together as a couple; nor is it to say that babysitters can’t occasionally relax and do a few enjoyable things while minding the kids. And of course, I’m not saying that these people deserve to be murdered for negligence! I’m saying that the laxity we see in Myers’s parents and in his sister on that fateful Halloween night in 1963 is symbolic of the kind of neglect that can lead to trauma in children, which in turn can lead to mental illness and violence.

Laurie, as I said above, is the only babysitter showing a proper concern for others’ well-being, so she manages to survive. Myers, in the traumatic state he’s in, symbolized by the evil spirit possessing him, can’t distinguish between good and bad babysitters (or good and bad people in general), so he tries to kill her anyway.

The other one seriously concerned about human life, Dr. Loomis, tried for years to connect with expressionless Myers, but couldn’t get through, because the damage had already been done, symbolized by the demonic possession. Loomis saw “the devil’s eyes” in little Michael. This disturbing look on the boy’s face was inspired by Carpenter’s having visited a mental institution in Kentucky, where he saw, among the most extreme cases, an adolescent boy with a blank, “schizophrenic stare.” Hence, the evil in Myers represents extreme mental illness.

Note that not only were Myers’s parents and sister neglectful, nor was only Annie neglectful of little Lindsey, but also Annie’s father, Sheriff Leigh Brackett (played by Charles Cyphers), isn’t all that motivated to find and stop Myers. He doesn’t even seem to notice the marijuana smoke in his daughter’s car when she and Laurie have been smoking up in it. His lack of sufficient vigilance leads up to his daughter’s murder.

Myers’s being possessed by an evil spirit, as well as his ‘Halloween costume,’ can be seen to symbolize something else–his alienation from himself. Trauma changes us, it causes a distortion of what we originally, really were. Whether the demon entered little Michael’s body outside the house, with the boy standing there and looking through the windows before entering, or if it entered the house, found and entered his body in a dark room before he turned on the light and got the knife, ultimately doesn’t matter. A little boy was left alone in the dark, left uncared for, and in his sensitive state, he found it emotionally overwhelming. The resulting trauma made him take on a false persona, that of a costumed, possessed killer, and the real Michael has hidden behind that false self ever since.

Of the many things that Friday the 13th ripped off from Halloween was making explicit what is implied in the latter and vastly superior film: negligent childcare leads to madness and murder. Unlike the Friday the 13th films, which are orgies of gore, Halloween shows next to no blood at all; the filmmakers wisely knew that the key to making a horror film genuinely scary is to maximize suspense and use lots of darkness and an eerie atmosphere (i.e., Carpenter’s music). [As a side note, I find it amusing that, though I originally intended to finish and publish this analysis just before Halloween, I ended up publishing it on Friday the 13th!]

Note how the two houses where the babysitting is going on, and where Myers is lurking, are facing each other across the street. The houses are like a head looking at itself in the mirror, and someone looking at himself in a mirror is in itself a Lacanian metaphor for the narcissist admiring himself and using others (metaphorical mirror reflections) as a means of furthering his self-interest, as Annie does when taking Lindsey Wallace across the road and having Laurie watch her while Annie drives off to get her boyfriend, Paul. Myers kills her in her car.

Similarly, Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob, arrive at the Wallace house expecting Annie and Paul to be there so all four of them can party there together. Finding themselves alone and not knowing that Annie’s just been murdered, Lynda and Bob make love and drink beer, them being no less self-centered than Annie.

Lynda is especially self-centered and narcissistic, wanting Bob to get her a beer from the fridge, then, after Myers has killed Bob and disguises himself as his victim with his glasses and a white sheet for a cheesy ghost costume, she flashes her breasts for ‘Bob.’ She expects him to mirror her narcissism back to her with a compliment on her beautiful body, and of course, Myers stays mute, because he personifies the non-verbal Real, while Lynda exemplifies the narcissistic, mirroring Imaginary.

There is a dangerous proximity between the trauma of the Real and the narcissism of the Imaginary, since the one dialectically phases into the other, as I see it. Narcissism is often a protective façade against the fragmentation that leads to psychotic breaks with reality. I suspect that six-year-old Michael was so neglected, so ignored by his family, that he traumatically found verbal communication to be pointless, and so he replaced it with ‘communicating’ through stabs of the knife, symbolically a kind of projective identification, in Bion‘s sense of primitive, pre-verbal communication, the stab wound being the yonic container (a receiving of Myers’s pain), and the knife being the phallic contained (the non-verbal expression and projection of his pain).

Since the Wallace house is where the narcissistic, self-centered behaviour occurs, this is also where the murders occur, for as I said above, traumatizing fragmentation (the Real) is dangerously close to narcissism (the Imaginary); it is only in the social, verbally-expressive realm of the Symbolic that mental health resides, hence Laurie is in the house across the street, the Doyle house, where responsible babysitting is going on. Unlike Annie and Lynda, Laurie is concerned for Others–not just one other person as a mirrored, narcissistic extension of herself. So when she hears Lynda dying on the phone, Laurie naturally wants to cross the street to find out what’s going on in the Wallace house.

She finds Annie’s corpse on the bed Lynda and Bob were making love in, with Judith’s headstone there, Myers’s way of telling Laurie that his sister is, if you will, the archetypal negligent caregiver. Jamie Lee Curtis demonstrates her scream-queen credentials here, and Laurie takes on the role of the final girl. Myers’s knife slash on her arm is, again, his non-verbal communication as projective identification, negative containment (Bion, pages 97-99), a kind of containment that does the opposite of soothing, resulting in a nameless dread. Six-year-old Myers, not having received the proper soothing of his anxieties because of negligent parenting, felt this nameless dread, an inexpressible fear of annihilation, and he has been trying to project that fear onto others in his murders.

All of Laurie’s and Dr. Loomis’s attempts to kill Myers fail because, apart from my interpretation that an evil spirit is animating his body regardless of how many bullet holes and stab wounds it has, evil never dies. Since Halloween is derived from Samhain, a festival when the souls of the dead come back to walk the Earth, it marks the beginning of winter, the darker half of the year, with the dying of the sun god, who will be reborn in midwinter.

Just as pagan myths of dying and resurrecting gods reflect such cycles as the changes of the seasons of the year, so does trauma have a way of being repressed and forgotten about temporarily, then returning, often in an unrecognized form. Myers killing his sister, being put away in the sanitarium, and “the night he came home” wearing a mask, can be seen to represent the original trauma, its repression, and its disguised return, just like the coming of fall, then winter, spring, summer,…and the return of the fall.

His obsessive, relentless killing can be seen as representative of Freud‘s notion of the death drive and the compulsion to repeat a traumatic experience. Hence, he personifies evil, which never dies.

…and an undying evil, as demonstrated in the inexplicable disappearance of Myers’s body on the lawn after having been shot point blank by Dr. Loomis, is what makes Halloween such a scary movie, even sans sang.

Analysis of ‘Pin’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pin thus represents that border where life and death meet.

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

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

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

…and here is where Pin comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘The Exterminating Angel’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Videodrome’

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 ‘The Howling’

The Howling is a 1981 horror film directed by Joe Dante, based on the 1977 novel of the same name by Gary Brandner. The film stars Dee Wallace, Patrick Macnee, Christopher Stone, Dennis Dugan, and Robert Picardo.

The film received generally positive reviews, with praise for the makeup special effects by Rob Bottin. It won the 1980 Saturn Award for Best Horror Film while still in development, and it was one of three major werewolf films of 1981, the other two being An American Werewolf in London and Wolfen.

Seven sequels have been made to The Howling, the first film’s success having helped Dante’s career so he could make Gremlins in 1984. A remake of The Howling is in development, with Andy Muschietti set to direct.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to Brandner’s novel. Here is a link to the script.

The differences between the novel and the film are huge. In fact, the film only ever-so-vaguely follows the plot of the novel. I’ll point out just a few of the differences for now.

Karen While (Wallace) is Karyn Beatty in the novel, and her husband is Roy Beatty, his film equivalent being Bill Neill (Stone), for we learn that White has kept her maiden name. Karyn is raped at home in the novel, whereas Karen is almost attacked by a werewolf in an adult bookstore’s movie booth in the film. In the novel, her psychiatrist is only briefly mentioned; in the film, psychiatrist Dr. George Waggner (Macnee) is a major character, who has her recuperate in his health resort, called “The Colony,” while in the novel, she recuperates in a town called Drago, in California. The nymphomaniac werewolf is Marcia Lura in the novel; in the film, she’s Marsha Quist (played by Elisabeth Brooks), sister of werewolf/serial killer Eddie Quist (Picardo). The rapist of the novel is non-werewolf Max Quist.

It’s interesting to analyze the nature of the changes of the novel’s beginning to those of the film’s, that is, in psychoanalytic terms. It’s as if the screenplay to the film were written by Karyn Beatty instead of by John Sayles and Terrence H. Winkless, as if an attempt by her to reframe her trauma in a way that’s less invasive of her body, replacing a direct rape with a more symbolic, dream-like attack.

In the novel, as stated above, Max Quist, an ex-con resentful of being an unacknowledged worker and with no werewolf powers, comes into Karyn’s apartment while her husband’s away and rapes her, even biting her hard on the thigh. The Beattys have a dog, significantly named Lady, that tries to intervene on Karyn’s behalf, but is kicked away by Max. The dog goes with Karyn and Roy to Drago, and it is killed there. Violence against a dog named Lady seems like a further projection of Karyn’s trauma elsewhere.

So what we have in the novel is a straightforward act of brutal violence causing Karyn’s trauma. In the film, this violence is transformed in many ways, suggesting in its distortions a diluting of that pain.

First of all, Karen White is a TV news reporter risking her life by drawing out her stalker, Eddie Quist, so the police can catch him. Instead of Quist raping her, he has her meet him in a sleazy porn movie booth in an adult book store, where he makes her watch a video of a young woman being bound and raped. Thus the trauma of Karyn is projected onto the woman in the porn video.

Instead of getting a…lupine?…bite from Quist, Karen looks behind her and sees his terrifying transformation into a lycanthrope…though immediately afterwards, she is amnesiac about it, her repression of the memory protecting her from the pain.

This comparison between novel and film leads to a discussion of one of the film’s themes: the contrast between the true self and the false self. As Dr. Waggner says in a news interview with a TV host, “Repression is the father of neurosis, of self-hatred.” He speaks of the unfortunate reality of denying “the beast, the animal, within us,” of replacing the true self with the false self.

This replacement, in the film adaptation, of the novel’s rape scene with Karen watching a video of a rape, a man transforming into a werewolf, and her no longer being able to remember the traumatic experience, is an example of replacing the truth with a kind of fantasy, a falsehood that hurts less. Such replacements of painful truth with comforting falsehood are also seen in characters in the film replacing the true self with the false one.

Another interesting observation can be made of how the true experience of Karyn Beatty’s rape is expressed via the written word, whereas the trauma of Karen White is given in visuals, in images. These two presentations of the traumatizing incident correspond respectively with Lacan‘s notions of the Symbolic and the Imaginary, the trauma itself corresponding to the Real.

Trauma corresponds to the Real because the Real cannot be symbolized, or articulated with words. It is through psychotherapy, or the “talking cure,” that the horrors of the ineffable, undifferentiated world of the Real can be transformed into the Symbolic, the realm of language, of the differentiated. Such a talking cure is attempted with Karen in group therapy sessions in The Colony. This therapy is an attempt to peel away repression, bit by bit, to find the truth.

In the novel, it is significant that Karyn Beatty escapes the town of Drago, which is all engulfed in flames, defeating the werewolves that inhabit the town. In the version of the story given in the written word (the Symbolic), she survives–she’s ‘cured,’ metaphorically speaking. In the film, the version with images and an examination of the narcissistic false self (the Imaginary), Karen White becomes a werewolf and is (presumably) killed with a silver bullet shot from the rifle Chris Halloran (Dugan) has been using on the werewolves.

If you’ll indulge a brief digression, Dear Reader, it is through the Imaginary that one establishes a sense of self, an ego; this comes about during the mirror stage, when an infant first sees his reflection and realizes that that person over there, in the specular image, is himself. He’s alienated from it, though: it’s himself, yet it’s over there, as if a totally different person. That image is also a unified, coherent one, as opposed to the awkward, clumsy, fragmented being the child feels himself to be. Is that really me over there? Is the ego real, or is it illusory?

The ideal-I as seen in the mirror reflection is an ideal that one feels compelled throughout life to measure up to; an example of this attempt to measure up is seen in the scene in the public washroom, when an anchorman (played by Jim McKrell) is standing before the mirror practicing how he’ll enunciate his introduction of a news story with the most mellifluous, rounded tones he can muster. It’s a comical scene, especially when Bill Neill walks in and the anchorman switches to his normal Southern accent to speak with him.

The Imaginary is fundamentally narcissistic; Lacan called it “Fraud.” Indeed, it is the false self that hides the beast…and the buffoon.

This scene in the washroom ties in well with the fact that Karen also works as a TV news reporter. Those of us who observe the media carefully have known for decades that the news frequently disseminates false or at least misleading information, intended to serve the interests of the corporate elite and the military-industrial-media complex. Images of people like Karen on the TV (i.e., the stoic anchor persona) are thus thematically fitting for the purposes of this film.

On two occasions when in front of the camera, Karen fails to present this fake persona expected in the news media. On the first occasion, her trauma causes her to see images of her painful memories of that night with Quist instead of seeing the camera in front of her; this causes her to freeze on air, making her unable to announce the news. The second time, at the end of the movie, she turns into a werewolf for everyone to see on TV.

This theme of the media as representative of fakery is developed, however indirectly, through the film’s use of many nods to classic old werewolf films, a cartoon with a wolf, and actors known for having appeared in old horror/sci fi films. These actors include Kevin McCarthy (who appeared in Invasion of the Body Snatchers) as the TV news station manager, John Carradine, and Kenneth Tobey (who was in The Thing from Another World, later remade as The Thing). Even Roger Corman (who made The Little Shop of Horrors) does a cameo, waiting for Karen to finish using a pay phone at the beginning of the movie. Recall how the aliens in Snatchers and The Thing are fake imitations of people. Recall also how fake the special effects of those old horror movies were, as compared to the effects in The Howling.

When Karen and Bill (or Karyn and Roy) go out to The Colony (or the town of Drago) for her to recuperate, she is disturbed at night to hear howling coming from the woods surrounding their cabin. She goes over to the bedroom window, looks out into the trees, and listens for the howling. This howling represents a projection of her trauma, her howling in pain, as it were, out into the woods. The notion of werewolves out there, as she eventually finds out is the source of the howling, is a transformation of the rape trauma, in her unconscious mind, into something unrecognizable as symbolic of a rape memory, since what is repressed returns to the conscious mind and hides in plain sight, unrecognized by us in our waking hours. The howling also represents the honest expression of feelings, the true self.

The film makes a strong link between werewolves and sexuality (I also did this in my novel, Wolfgang), as already indicated above. This howling in the woods reminds us of Freud‘s rather far-fetched interpretation of the dream of the “Wolf Man,” in which Freud’s patient saw six or seven wolves on tree branches outside the window of his home. Freud interpreted this dream as representing Sergei Pankejeff‘s witnessing, as a child, the primal scene–that is, his parents making love in ‘doggy-style.’ (I’m not endorsing Freud’s wild speculations here: I’m just using the fame of this interpretation to reinforce the link between wolves–and therefore werewolves–and sexuality.)

Another such link in the film is seen in Marsha Quist, a known nymphomaniac in The Colony who seduces Bill, the two of them turning into werewolves as they have sex in the woods. In the novel, Karyn immediately feels jealousy on meeting Marcia Luna, angered at the attractive woman’s constant attention to her husband. As in the film, Roy has a sexual relationship with Marcia, a werewolf like all of Drago’s residents.

Bill’s becoming a werewolf coincides with two other changes in his personality: first, going from being a faithful husband (initially resisting Marsha’s sexual advances) to cheating on Karen; second, going from being a vegetarian to eating meat. Again, the false self hides the true self through repression of unacceptable behaviour.

In the film, a character not in the novel, Terry Fisher (played by Belinda Balaski), also works at the TV station and is Chris’s girlfriend. She continues to investigate Eddie Quist, going into his home with Chris and discovering his aptitude at art. The killer has drawn many werewolf portraits and has posters of old werewolf movie ads on his walls. Terry quips that Eddie “could’ve designed the Marquis de Sade colouring book,” another link between werewolves and sexuality.

Terry later explores The Colony, finds Quist’s body missing in the morgue, learns from a bookseller (played by Dick Miller) that regular bullets don’t kill werewolves, and that Quist’s drawing of a lake is one in The Colony area. She’s found his other drawings there, too. Quist is alive!

Now, how does one become a werewolf? By being clawed, scratched, or bitten by another. This is what happens to Bill when walking through the woods back home after he resists Marsha’s initial sexual advances. Since the film links werewolves with sexuality–rape and, as we can see here, unwanted sexual advances in particular–the scratching or biting of someone by a werewolf, making him or her into a new werewolf, is thus symbolic of passing the sexual trauma onto a new victim.

The werewolf’s claws and teeth are phallic symbols, cutting yonic wounds into its victims, making the werewolf’s attack a symbolic rape. This symbolism is how I can see the film’s beginning trauma of Karen seeing Eddie Quist’s transformation in the porn movie booth, juxtaposed with her watching that porn rape scene, as a transformation of Karyn’s actual rape, with the wolf-like bite on her thigh, in the novel.

When Terry puts all the pieces together about The Colony, and is about to reveal its secrets, she is attacked by TC Quist (played by Don McLeod), the werewolf brother of Eddie and Marsha. Terry manages during the struggle to find an ax and hacks off the werewolf’s hairy, clawed hand, which she sees transform back into a human hand. Since the clawing of a victim, with phallic claws, is a symbolic rape, then the cutting off of a werewolf’s hand is a symbolic castration.

Later, she is killed by werewolf Eddie in Waggner’s office after phoning Chris and telling him about the werewolf secret in The Colony; when she’s being killed, the phone call being interrupted by Eddie means it hasn’t been hung up, so Chris listens in horror at his girlfriend’s screaming and death. (Later, Chris arrives in the office and confronts Eddie, who tells him Terry has “a sexy voice,” once again linking werewolves with predatory sexuality in The Howling.)

Karen goes over to Waggner’s office and finds Terry’s bloody body there, then she confronts resurrected Eddie, who transforms in front of her. She’s paralyzed with fear.

Eddie’s transformation into a werewolf is the highlight of the film, being an impressive example of pre-CGI special effects (though the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London is even better). Eddie is proud of his powers, pleased to demonstrate them to terrified Karen. He’s displaying his bestial true self, as opposed to his human false self.

One of the insights Terry and Chris get from the bookseller is that the movies’ notion of werewolves needing a full moon to transform is “Hollywood baloney” (reinforcing what I said above about this film’s theme about the media and falsehoods); actually, as shapeshifters, lycanthropes can transform anytime at will, as we see Eddie doing here.

Karen scalds Eddie’s face with acid and runs outside, but she is caught by the other residents of The Colony. Waggner appears among them, revealing his sympathy for them, but also pleading with them about the necessity of fitting in with society for the sake of keeping their secret safe.

The other werewolves have lost patience with the psychiatrist’s recommendation that they all hide their lupine true selves behind a human false self; Marsha in particular is adamantly opposed to this hiding, having earlier rebuked the doctor for giving her brother TC a copy of his book, The Gift, which rationalizes man’s bestial nature as a source of creativity. (Recall in this connection Eddie’s artistic aptitudes.)

Chris arrives with a rifle loaded with silver bullets he got from the bookstore, and after killing Eddie with it, he shoots and kills a few of the werewolves holding Karen (Waggner, too, gets shot, and–having just been scratched by a werewolf–he’s grateful no longer to have to continue the burden of treating the untreatable, or to have to be a werewolf himself), and Chris runs off with Karen to his car to get away, having also burned down a building filled with werewolves.

Even Sam Newfield, the sheriff of The Colony area (played by Slim Pickens), is a werewolf, and as Karen and Chris are getting away, they have to put a silver bullet or two in him, too. The sheriff, with his rifle, has shot up Chris’s car, including blowing a tire, and a few more werewolves are attacking, so he and Karen have to switch to Sam’s police car to get away.

Werewolf Bill, however, is one of their attackers, and he bites Karen from the back seat of the car, so she will be a werewolf, too. She knows she must warn the world, using her position as a newswoman to disseminate the message to as many people as possible. This means, contrary to the normal media practice of presenting a false self that is pleasing to one’s viewers (i.e., that image of stoic reporting that her male colleague was practicing before the mirror in the public bathroom), she must show her true self as a new werewolf…on live TV.

Chris, heartbroken, must now put a silver bullet in her.

The film ends in a bar where its patrons, having watched the news broadcast on the wall-mounted TV screen, debate whether what they’ve seen was real or the gimmickry of special effects–another manifestation of the film’s exploration of the theme of truth vs. fakery in the media.

Marsha’s managed to survive the fire in The Colony, and she’s in the bar, where a man hoping to get lucky with her has treated her to a hamburger cooked rare. She’s enticing him with her nymphomaniac false self, while waiting to reveal her true self to him in his bedroom.

While the credits roll, we see her burger cooking. It’s interesting to watch the slow transformation of the pink meat into a hamburger; this parallels the slow transformation of Eddie into a werewolf…or the slow process of psychotherapy revealing, bit by bit, repressed trauma. On top of all this, there’s the symbolism of the rising heat of sexual passion, and meat…flesh…to be eaten: more of the merging of the carnivore with the sexual predator.