Analysis of ‘The Birds’

The Birds is a 1963 natural horror film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock and written by Evan Hunter, based on the horror short story by Daphne du Maurier. The film stars Tippi Hedren and Rod Taylor, and costars Jessica Tandy, Veronica Cartwright, and Suzanne Pleshette.

The film is so completely different from the short story that the only two things they have in common are the title and the premise of birds violently attacking people, the attacks being interrupted by pauses, rests of several hours each. Everything else–the setting, characters, and the incidents–is completely reworked to the point of the film being an utterly different story from du Maurier’s version.

In 2016, The Birds was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.

Here are some quotes:

Melanie: Have you ever seen so many seagulls? What do you suppose it is?
Mrs. MacGruder: Well, there must be a storm at sea. That can drive them inland, you know.

Mitch: [deliberately mistaking Melanie for a sales clerk] I wonder if you could help me?
Melanie: Just what is it you’re looking for, sir?
Mitch: Lovebirds.
Melanie: Lovebirds, sir?
Mitch: Yes, I understand there are different varieties. Is that true?
Melanie: Oh yes, there are.
Mitch: Well, these are for my sister, for her birthday, see, and uh, as she’s only going to be eleven, I, I wouldn’t want a pair of birds that were too demonstrative.
Melanie: I understand completely.
Mitch: At the same time, I wouldn’t want them to be too aloof either.
Melanie: No, of course not.
Mitch: Do you happen to have a pair of birds that are just friendly?

Mitch: Doesn’t this make you feel awful… having all these poor little innocent creatures caged up like this?
Melanie: Well, we can’t just let them fly around the shop, you know.

Mitch: We met in court… I’ll rephrase it. I saw you in court… Don’t you remember one of your practical jokes that resulted in the smashing of a plate-glass window?
Melanie: I didn’t break that window. What are you, a policeman?
Mitch: No, but your little prank did. The judge should have put you behind bars. I merely believe in the law, Miss Daniels… I just thought you might like to know what it’s like to be on the other end of a gag. What do ya think of that?
Melanie: I think you’re a louse.
Mitch: I am.

Mitch: Well, small world…How do you know Annie?
Melanie: We went to school together – college…
Mitch: So you came up to see Annie, huh?
Melanie: Yes.
Mitch: I think you came up to see me.
Melanie: Now why would I want to see you of all people?
Mitch: I don’t know. You must have gone to a lot of trouble to find out who I was and where I lived.
Melanie: No, it was no trouble at all. I simply called my father’s newspaper. Besides, I was coming up anyway. I’ve already told you that.
Mitch: You really like me, huh?
Melanie: I loathe you. You have no manners, you’re arrogant, and conceited, and I wrote you a letter about it, in fact. But I tore it up.

“I’m neither poor nor innocent.” –Melanie

Annie: [after birds attack the children at a party] That makes three times.
Melanie: Mitch, this isn’t usual, is it? The gull when I was in the boat yesterday. The one at Annie’s last night, and now…
Mitch: Last night? What do you mean?
Melanie: A gull smashed into Annie’s front door. Mitch – what’s happening?

“I wish I were a stronger person. I lost my husband four years ago, you know. It’s terrible how you, you depend on someone else for strength and then suddenly all the strength is gone and you’re alone. I’d love to be able to relax sometime.” –Lydia

“Oh Daddy, there were hundreds of them… Just now, not fifteen minutes ago… at the school… the birds didn’t attack until the children were outside the school… crows, I think… Oh, I don’t know, Daddy, is there a difference between crows and blackbirds?… I think these were crows, hundreds of them… Yes, they attacked the children. Attacked them!” –Melanie, on the phone

“Birds have been on this planet, Miss Daniels, since Archaeopteryx, a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a…a war against humanity.” –Mrs. Bundy

“It’s the end of the world.” –drunk

“I think we’re in real trouble. I don’t know how this started or why, but I know it’s here and we’d be crazy to ignore it… The bird war, the bird attack, plague – call it what you like. They’re amassing out there someplace and they’ll be back. You can count on it.” –Mitch

“Look at the gas, that man’s lighting a cigar!” –Melanie, as she sees a man lighting his cigar as gasoline is leaking around him

“Why are they doing this? Why are they doing this? They said when you got here, the whole thing started. Who are you? What are you? Where did you come from? I think you’re the cause of all this. I think you’re evil. EVIL!” –mother in diner, to Melanie

Cathy: Mitch, can I bring the lovebirds in here?
Lydia: No!
Cathy: But Mom, they’re in a cage!
Lydia: They’re birds, aren’t they?
Mitch: Let’s leave them in the kitchen, huh, honey?

Cathy: Mitch, why are they doing this, the birds?
Mitch: We don’t know, honey.
Cathy: Why are they trying to kill people?
Mitch: I wish I could say.
Cathy: I-I’m sick, Melanie.

There is no apparent reason for birds of all kinds to be suddenly swooping down on and attacking people, pecking and clawing at them. I find the best way to find meaning in these attacks is to see them as symbolic of something else…a different attacker from the skies.

To determine what, or who, this other attacker could be, I recommend a reading of du Maurier’s short story. Hints can be found in such things as the different setting. In her story, the bird attacks occur not in California, but in England; they also occur not in the early 1960s, but just after WWII.

When one considers the destruction Nazi Germany’s bombings of England caused, as well as the trauma they caused the survivors, we can see how du Maurier’s The Birds can be seen as a near pun on the Blitz, and therefore also be symbolic of it.

So the birds, in her story and–by extension–Hitchcock’s film, can be seen to symbolize bomber planes. Nat Hocken, the farmer and protagonist of the short story, believes it’s the colder weather that’s making the birds so aggressive. Later on in the story, a farmer claims it’s “the Russians” who have somehow incited the birds to attack by poisoning them (page 9 from the above link). Mrs. Trigg, the wife of his boss, wonders if the cold weather is coming from Russia (page 4).

Given that du Maurier’s story takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War, and therefore at the beginning of the Cold War, we can now see what the colder weather and reference to Russians are hinting at: the attacking birds represent a paranoid fear of a Soviet invasion.

A few bird attacks on Nat, a WWII veteran, would trigger PTSD responses in him, making him fantasize about bird attacks happening all over England, symbolic of airstrikes. Since the story is essentially–though not exclusively–from his point of view (even though it isn’t a first-person narration), we can easily view the story as a hallucinatory fantasy in his mind.

With these insights from the short story, we can gain an understanding of what’s going on in the film. Hitchcock spoke of how the birds are getting revenge on man for taking nature for granted; instead of birds being caged, they force people to cage themselves in houses, restaurants, telephone booths, etc.

The changing of the setting to California (in the coastal town of Bodega Bay, about an hour-and-25-minute drive from San Francisco) is instructive in this regard of birds’ revenge on man. If their attacks symbolize aerial bombardments (kamikaze-like in the short story, with birds dying upon hitting the ground), we could see this revenge as symbolizing that of those countries the US had so far bombed: Japan and North Korea; also, there was the US-supported coup in Guatemala in 1954, which included air bombings of Guatemala City and the threat of a US invasion. The birds’ attacks thus can be said to symbolize a fear of other nations bombing the US in revenge for having been bombed.

This theme of revenge first appears right at about the beginning of the movie, when Mitch Brenner (Taylor) enters a pet store where birds are sold on the second floor, and pretends that he thinks Melanie Daniels (Hedren)–who has played a practical joke leading to a broken window and a legal case that he, a lawyer, knows of–works in the store. He plays this trick on her in retaliation for her practical joke, which caused such annoyance to those affected by it.

He asks her about buying a pair of lovebirds as a gift for his younger sister, eleven-year-old Cathy Brenner (Cartwright). Annoyed at the comeuppance she’s received, yet also finding him attractive, Melanie wants to spite Mitch by, on the one hand, delivering a pair of green lovebirds to his home personally, and on the other, writing a note to him that she hopes the birds would “help [his] personality”…though she tears up the letter.

It’s interesting in this connection to note that, for pretty much the remainder of the film, she is dressed in a distinctive green outfit. A green ‘bird’ is giving Mitch green birds. This ‘bird’ also played a practical joke resulting in a broken window, just like the many broken windows caused by the bird attacks, which have begun since her arrival, in that green outfit, in Bodega Bay. Indeed, a hysterical mother in a diner blames Melanie for bringing the bird attacks to the town.

So we shift from lovebirds to violent ones, suggesting a dialectical relationship between love and hostility. This dialectical tension is sublated in how Mitch and Melanie are themselves two lovebirds who, in spite of how annoyed they are with each other at first, are attracted to each other.

Film critic and historian Andrew Sarris noted how complacent and self-absorbed the main characters are: Mitch, Melanie, Annie, and Lydia. Such self-absorption and egotism suggest the effects of alienation in a capitalist society, one about to be attacked in symbolic revenge for the attacks of imperialism on other countries. One manifestation of contradiction in dialectics is that of attack vs. counterattack, or revenge; another such manifestation is action vs. passivity, or resting. In the short story, Nat speculates that the birds attack at high tide (thesis), and at low tide (antithesis), the birds rest (page 12 of the above link).

The first major bird attack and the climactic last one are on Melanie (the bird nips at Mitch’s fingers and ankle at the very end are so brief as not to count for much). This is her karma–birds attacking a bird, the dialectic of attack vs. counterattack.

Another thing to remember about Melanie is that she is a bourgeois. Her father owns a newspaper, and she drives into Bodega Bay wearing a luxurious fur coat over that green outfit. So as the deliverer of the green lovebirds to Mitch and Cathy, Melanie–as an embodiment of capitalism and a personification of the birds–is symbolically bringing the avian aerial bombardment on the town. This linking of capitalism with aerial bombing is brought to you courtesy of imperialism. The hysterical mother in the diner is right to blame Melanie for all the mayhem.

The US bombed Japan and North Korea. Due to racist immigration policies, only limited numbers of Asians had been allowed to live in California by the time of the filming of The Birds. Melanie tells Mitch her family is sponsoring a Korean boy, but her charity won’t come near to compensating for the imperialist destruction she personifies, or the racism of the government that supports her class interests: those bird attacks are symbolic of, in part, an Asian, avian revenge.

This 1963 film came out at the height of the Cold War, just a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came inches close to nuclear war. During the previous decade, there had been the McCarthyist Red Scare, the fear of which I dealt with in my analysis of The Manchurian Candidate.

The bird attacks can thus be seen to represent a repressed fear of a communist invasion, a revenge bombing for all the American imperialist bombings and coups that went on between the end of WWII and the early 60s. Now, what is repressed will return to consciousness, though in a new, unrecognizable form: thus, bomber planes resurface in the conscious mind in the form of birds.

This is the fear of a socialist revenge on capitalism, a repressed fear, since bourgeois Hitchcock would never have seen it as such in his own film; he’d instead speak of caged birds getting revenge on man, their cagers and polluters of the air. Recall the amateur orinthologist, Mrs. Bundy (played by Ethel Griffies), speaking of how peaceful birds usually are, and that it’s man who makes life unliveable for all. Those who have a historical materialist understanding of the world can easily translate “man” as ‘the capitalist.’

Now, just as capitalism (personified here in rich bitch Melanie Daniels) destroys everything around it (symbolized in her arrival in Bodega Bay with the lovebirds, followed soon after by the bird attacks), so will capitalism ultimately crumble under its own contradictions, as Marx predicted in Capital, Vol. 3, in his discussion of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (in the film, symbolized by the birds attacking Melanie, ‘the bird,’ at the end, almost killing her).

Another issue capitalism raises is alienation, shown symbolically in the film through the love/hate relationship of not only Mitch and Melanie, but also that of him and his mother (Tandy), who sabotaged his relationship with Annie Hayworth (Pleshette), his previous girlfriend. On top of this is Melanie’s estrangement from her mother, who ran off with another man.

To get back to Lydia, who disapproves also of her son’s budding relationship with Melanie and tries to sabotage it by telling him of a scandal involving Melanie falling naked into a fountain, his mother fears his commitment to a woman will result in him abandoning his mother. Mitch’s father died several years before the beginning of the film, so Lydia is afraid of having to carry on life alone.

This fear of loneliness, coupled with difficulties forming healthy relationships, is often a consequence of alienation under capitalism. Dialectically speaking, this clinging love of Lydia’s, which spoils Mitch’s love life, is another sublation of the film’s theme of the love/hate opposition, which is symbolized by the green lovebirds and Melanie in her green outfit on the one hand, and the attacking birds on the other.

One interesting contrast between the short story and the film is how, in the former, the first of the bird attacks happens on page two of the link provided above, but in the latter, we must wait about fifty minutes until a group of birds attacks children at Cathy’s birthday party. Prior to that attack, there’s only the one gull that hits Melanie on the head, the one that crashes into Annie’s front door, and the ominous hovering and resting of birds on several occasions throughout the film.

Because all that matters to imperialists is the controlling of other countries, the ruling class gives not a second of thought to how their bombs not only kill people, but also traumatize and disrupt the lives of the survivors. The lengthy process of developing the main characters, prior to the birds’ first major attacks, humanizes them for us in a way that the East Asian or, more recently, Middle Eastern victims of bombings are never humanized.

We see the traumatized reaction of Lydia when she sees her neighbour’s eyeless corpse, and we sympathize with her. We rarely contemplate the trauma of the surviving Japanese after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We imagine North Koreans to be neurotically servile to the ruling Kim family; we never consider how the North Koreans’ collective trauma, after the US bombed their whole country, drove them to look up to the strength of the Kims to ensure that such a bombing will never happen again.

We see the terror of the children attacked by the birds at Cathy’s party, then later as they run from their school. We seldom consider, for example, the Yemeni children killed in a school bus after being hit by an airstrike. The only way many of us in the West can contemplate such horrors is if they’re inflicted on us, but with the bombs replaced with birds. Recall how, in the diner scene, the bird attacks are sometimes referred to as a “war” being waged against man.

Speaking of the diner scene, a tense discussion of the bird attacks there brings up responses as varied as the denials of Mrs. Bundy, the hysterics of the mother of two children, and a drunk Irishman proclaiming doomsday. His insistence on it being “the end of the world” makes me think of Biblical allusions other than his to Ezekiel, though.

Recall how this all more or less started not only with Melanie’s buying a pair of lovebirds, but also, just before her entrance into the pet store, hearing a boy on the sidewalk whistling at her, all while we hear the cawing of a huge flock of black birds in the sky; the boy’s and birds’ sounds are similar enough to suggest that the whistling may not have been from him, but may have actually been one of the birds screeching. It’s as if the birds were the ones making the pass at her.

These associations symbolically suggest the sons of God in Genesis 6:1-4, who are sometimes identified as angels (i.e., winged ones!), looking down from heaven onto the daughters of men (e.g., Melanie) and wishing to mate with them. This unnatural love union led to the sinfulness of the world that led, in turn, to the Great Flood, another ending of the world. Here again we see the birds’ dialectical linking of love and violence. (Recall also how Nat, from the short story, theorized that the birds’ attacks coincided with the high tide, a rising of water that can be associated with the Flood.)

Another way the bird attacks suggest “the end of the world” is how they symbolize avenging angels, coming down to earth with Christ’s return and bringing about Armageddon (Matthew 16:27).

To return to the airstrike symbolism, a closer linking of the birds with bomber planes is suggested when–after a bird attacks a man at a gas station and causes him to drop the fuel dispenser of a gas pump, spilling gasoline all over the ground–a man parks his car by the spillage and, unaware of the gas, lights a cigar. His dropping of a match causes an explosion, killing him and causing a huge fire in the area. Bird-bombers, as it were, have caused explosions and a fire, however indirectly.

The disruption of people’s lives continues when we learn that Annie, Mitch’s original flame, has been killed by the birds, her corpse lying out by the stairs in front of her porch and traumatizing poor Cathy, who looks on from inside Annie’s house. We rarely think, however, of how bombings cause the same kind of suffering in those countries victimized by imperialism.

The self-absorption and narcissism we have seen in the main characters, especially in Melanie, have abated now that the terror of the birds has forced everyone to work together, help each other, and sympathize with each other. Since bourgeois Melanie–bringer of the lovebirds and, symbolically, the bird attacks–represents capitalism, her subsequent helpfulness should be seen to represent how capitalism sometimes tries to make accommodations to appease the working class, as was seen in the welfare state from 1945-1973. Nonetheless, accommodations to the labour aristocracy of the First World are never good enough to compensate for the wrongs done to the Third World.

Holed up in the Brenners’ house, Mitch, Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy are safe for the moment. Cathy would like to bring her lovebirds into the living room, but Lydia won’t tolerate even those birds, as harmless as they are in their cage. These two birds are the dialectical opposite of the violent ones, though, so there’s no need to fear them.

No one knows why the birds are trying to kill people; neither, I imagine, do many of the poor people in the humble, provincial villages of the Third World understand why drones fly over them and kill innocent civilians there. Especially ignorant of the reasons for this violence against them are their children…just like Cathy.

More bird attacks come, even after Mitch’s efforts to board up the windows. Melanie goes up to the attic, and she experiences the climactic bird attack. Just as she’s learned “what it’s like to be on the other end of a gag,” now she learns what it’s like to experience an extreme, life-threatening bird attack, just as eyeless Dan, Lydia’s neighbour, and Annie have. Luckily, though, she barely survives.

Imperialists sometimes treat their bombing atrocities as if they were as trivial as practical jokes, the way Hillary Clinton cackled at the brutal murder of Muammar Gaddafi. Sooner or later, though, all empires fall, as the American one is expected to do within the next ten to fifteen years or so. Just as birds attack Melanie, so will the ‘practical joker’ US/NATO one day get their comeuppance, perhaps in the form of a bombing.

If and when that happens, it truly will be the end of the world…the world of capitalism, that is, since many have speculated that the latest economic collapse could very well be the self-destruction of capitalism that Marx predicted, symbolized in the film by the near-fatal attack of birds on the green-suited bird.

After the attack on her, the birds are at rest. Now would be a good chance to get Melanie to a hospital in San Francisco; Mitch and the others would be putting themselves at great risk of being exposed in their car to another bird attack, but Melanie’s injuries are so severe that her life depends on getting her to a doctor.

As Mitch gets the car ready for Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy, he hears a radio newscast mentioning the possibility of involving the military. Naturally: the bird attacks symbolize a foreign aerial invasion. Indeed, as Melanie, Lydia, and Cathy get into the car, we see the tense enveloping of the area with resting birds. The sight of so many birds suggests the occupation of a foreign army…or air force. In this symbolic sense, Americans can get an inkling of what other countries must feel when they have US military bases in them.

So the ending of the film is an ambiguous one: how much longer will the bird attacks continue? The short story’s ending seems more pessimistic, as we find Nat smoking a cigarette–like a man condemned to a firing squad–as he awaits the next bird attack. He seems resigned to his fate. Many victims of US imperialism must feel the same resignation when confronted with endless air strikes.

The hope that Mitch et al must feel, as they drive Melanie to a San Francisco hospital, would symbolically reflect the Western hope of reviving from a vulnerability that other countries have felt, courtesy of the US/NATO alliance. As we witness the geopolitical shift from a unipolar world to a multipolar one, Westerners may find their hopes dwindling.

Analysis of ‘King Kong’

King Kong is a monster movie of which three versions have been made, in 1933, 1976, and 2005, the three that I’ll be focusing on. I’ll also make a brief reference or two to the giant ape’s other appearances in the franchise.

The 1933 film stars Robert Armstrong, Fay Wray, and Bruce Cabot, and was produced and directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The 1976 remake stars Jeff Bridges, Jessica Lange (in her first movie role), and Charles Grodin; it was produced by Dino De Laurentiis and directed by John Guillermin. The 2005 remake stars Jack Black, Naomi Watts, Adrien Brody, and Andy Serkis (as Kong in motion capture, and as a cook on the ship); it was co-written, produced, and directed by Peter Jackson.

The 1976 version is considered the weakest of the three, but it offers a few interesting variations on the plot, including an oil company instead of a moviemaking crew searching for Skull Island, and Kong takes the blonde beauty (Dwan, played by Lange, instead of Ann Darrow, played by Wray and Watts) up to the top of the World Trade Center instead of the Empire State Building. What’s interesting about these changes is how they develop the central theme of the story: exploitation, which I’ll elaborate on below.

Here are some quotes from all three films:

1933

And the Prophet said, “And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.” –Old Arabian Proverb in the opening scenes of the film.

“It’s money and adventure and fame. It’s the thrill of a lifetime and a long sea voyage that starts at six o’clock tomorrow morning.” –Denham, to Darrow

“You won’t find that island on any chart. That was made by the skipper of a Norwegian barque…A canoe full of natives from this island was blown out to sea. When the barque picked them up, there was only one alive. He died before they reached port, but not before the skipper had pieced together a description of the island and got a fairly good idea of where it lies.” –Denham, on Skull Island

“I think Denham’s off his nut taking you ashore today…Denham’s such a fool for risks, there’s no telling what he might ask you to do for this picture….He’s crazy enough to try anything. When I think what might have happened today. If anything had happened to you…I’m scared for you. I’m sort of, well I’m scared of you too. Ann, uh, I, uh, uh, say, I guess I love you…Say, Ann, I don’t suppose, uh, I mean, well you don’t feel anything like that about me, do you?” –Jack Driscoll, to Ann

Denham: Wait a minute. What about Kong?
Driscoll: Well, what about him?
Denham: We came here to get a moving picture, and we’ve found something worth more than all the movies in the world.
Captain: What?!
Denham: We’ve got those gas bombs. If we can capture him alive.
Driscoll: Why, you’re crazy! Besides that, he’s on a cliff where a whole army couldn’t get at him.
Denham: Yeah, if he stays there. But we’ve got something he wants [looking at Ann].
Driscoll: Yep, something he won’t get again.

Denham: Well, the whole world will pay to see this.
Captain: No chains will ever hold that.
Denham: We’ll give him more than chains. He’s always been King of his world. But we’ll teach him fear! We’re millionaires, boys, I’ll share it with all of you. Why, in a few months, it’ll be up in lights on Broadway: ‘Kong — the Eighth Wonder of the World!’

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here tonight to tell you a very strange story — a story so strange that no one will believe it — but, ladies and gentlemen, seeing is believing. And we — my partners and I — have brought back the living proof of our adventure, an adventure in which twelve of our party met horrible deaths. And now, ladies and gentlemen, before I tell you any more, I’m going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive — a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong, the Eighth Wonder of the World.” –Denham, to New York audience

“Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen. Those chains are made of chrome steel.” –Denham

Police Lieutenant: Well, Denham, the airplanes got him.
Denham: Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.

1976

“I’m Dwan. D-W-A-N, Dwan. That’s my name. You know, like Dawn, except that I switched two letters to make it more memorable.” –Dwan

“You know I had my horoscope done before I flew out to Hong Kong. And it said that I was going to cross over water and meet the biggest person in my life.” –Dwan

Fred Wilson: [As the “Petrox Explorer” comes in sight of Skull Island] Did you ever wonder how Hernando Cortez felt when he discovered the Lost Treasure of the Incas?
Jack Prescott: That wasn’t Cortez; it was Pizarro. And he died flat broke.

“You Goddamn chauvinist pig ape!” –Dwan

Dwan: How can I become a star because of… because of someone who was stolen off that gorgeous island and locked up in that lousy oil tank?
Fred Wilson: It’s not someone! It’s an animal, a beast who tried to rape you.
Dwan: That’s not true. He risked his life to save me.
Fred Wilson: He tried to rape you, honey. And before you cry a lot, you should ask the natives on that island what they thought loosing Kong.
Jack Prescott: Actually, they’ll miss him a lot.
Fred Wilson: Like leprosy.
Jack Prescott: No, you’re dead wrong. He was the terror, the mystery of their lives, and the magic. A year from now that will be an island full of burnt-out drunks. When we took Kong we kidnapped their god.

“Lights! Camera! Kong!” –Wilson

Jack Prescott: Even an environmental rapist like you wouldn’t be asshole enough to destroy a unique new species of animal.
Fred Wilson: Bet me.

2005

“What are they going to do, sue me? They can get in line! I’m not gonna let ’em kill my film!” –Denham

“Goddammit, Preston, all you had to do was look her in the eye and lie!” –Denham

“Defeat is always momentary.” –Denham

Carl Denham: Ann, I’m telling you. You’re perfect. Look at you, you’re the saddest girl I’ve ever met. You’re gonna make ’em weep, Ann. You’re gonna break their hearts.
Ann Darrow: See, that’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Denham. I make people laugh, that’s what I do. Good luck with your picture.

“Actors. They travel the world, but all they ever see is a mirror.” –Jack Driscoll

Jimmy: [Referring to Heart of Darkness] Why does Marlow keep going up the river? Why doesn’t he turn back?
Hayes: There’s a part of him that wants to, Jimmy. A part deep inside himself that sounds a warning. But there’s another part that needs to know. To defeat the thing which makes him afraid. “We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages of those ages that are gone leaving hardly a sign, and no memories. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there, there you could look at a thing monstrous and free.”
Jimmy: It’s not an adventure story, is it, Mr. Hayes?
Hayes: No, Jimmy. It’s not.

“There’s only one creature capable of leaving a footprint that size… the Abominable Snowman.” –Lumpy (Serkis)

[recognizing Jimmy, he confiscates the gun] Hayes: Jesus, Jimmy!
Jimmy: Hey, I need that!
Hayes: I’m not giving you a gun!
Jimmy: You were younger than me when they gave you one!
Hayes: I was in the army. I was trained. I had a drill sergeant!
Jimmy: I wanna help bring her back.
Hayes: [haltingly giving him the gun] Don’t make me regret it.

Jack Driscoll: I always knew you were nothing like the tough guy on the screen. I just never figured you for a coward.
Bruce Baxter: Hey, pal. Hey, wake up. Heroes don’t look like me, not in the real world. In the real world they got bad teeth, a bald spot and a beer gut. I’m just an actor with a gun, who’s lost his motivation. Be seein’ ya.

“That’s all there is. There isn’t any more.” –Ann Darrow, to Kong

Preston: He was right. About there still being some mystery left in this world… and we can all have a piece of it… for the price of an admission ticket.
Jack Driscoll: That’s the thing you come to learn about Carl. His unfailing ability to destroy the things he loves.

A lot of what is, or at least seems, implied in the 1933 film is made explicit in the 2005 remake. The film is set in what was the present, that is, the early 1930s, and therefore in the grip of the Great Depression. We are introduced to poor Ann Darrow (Wray), who is so hungry, she attempts to steal an apple; she’s also in old, rather shabby-looking clothes.

Moviemaker Carl Denham (Armstrong) doesn’t come off as overtly exploitative, since as one of the main characters, he’s more sympathetic; added to this, since people back in the 1930s were, on average, far less sensitive to the plight of animals in captivity, they were far less likely to judge Denham for wanting to capture Kong and put the giant ape on display for human entertainment. Nonetheless, he is an exploiter, even if the audience doesn’t think of him as much of one.

In the 2005 film, also set in the 1930s, the plight of the poor during the Great Depression is shoved in our faces right from the beginning. Darrow (Watts) is struggling as an out-of-work vaudeville performer, and Denham (Black) is a certified snake ready to take advantage of her desperation.

The 2005 remake also makes shrewd use of the old Al Jolson recording of “I’m Sitting On Top of the World,” which in the context of the film is an obvious reference to Kong on top of the Empire State Building, at the time the tallest building in the world. Because we hear the song during shots of the poor in New York City, its gaiety comes off as bittersweet, especially with the line, “Just like Humpty Dumpty, I’m going to fall.” Similarly, though Kong is regarded as a king on Skull Island, he’s a brutally exploited and ultimately victimized animal in the ‘civilized’ world, killed for being in a place he should never have been brought to.

Armstrong’s 1933 Denham is criticized only for being “reckless” and “crazy,” but he should be seen as every bit as exploitative as Black’s Denham of the 2005 version. He lures poor Ann onto the boat, knowing full well what potential danger he’s bringing her into, all just to give his audience what they want: a pretty girl as the love interest in his new movie.

Though he promises her “no funny business,” he also promises her “money and adventure and fame…the thrill of a lifetime,” with a big smile on his face, as if he were the director of a pornographic movie tricking a pretty young woman into participating in it by pretending he’s going to make her a Hollywood movie star. Even if the more innocent audiences of the 1930s couldn’t see it at the time, Denham, I insist, is an exploiter.

The Denham of the 2005 film is even more overtly exploitative, even tricking his screenwriter, Jack Driscoll (Brody, as opposed to the sailor in the 1933 film who is played by Cabot), into staying on the boat–with a promise to pay him–until it sets sail and he’s stuck for the ride to Skull Island.

When they get there, they discover a tribe of natives getting ready to sacrifice a girl to Kong. Here we see the natives exploiting one of their own to appease their giant simian god; but then they see Ann, with her golden hair, and decide they’d rather exploit her, since Kong will surely like her better.

Ann, back on the boat with the crew, is abducted by the natives and given to Kong. It’s interesting here to compare the different Kongs of the three movies, and even with those of the others of the franchise. He is usually a giant ape with humanoid characteristics, that is, standing more or less upright and with some of the features of human understanding–greater intelligence, as well as his love of, and willingness to risk his life to protect, Ann; the exception to this is the 2005 Kong, who is more or less just a gigantic silverback gorilla with no anthropomorphic features. So, his capture and exploitation by Denham can be seen to represent that of animals, as in a zoo, or it can symbolize the exploitation of primitive man, as seen in human zoos.

The encroachment of Denham and the crew onto Skull Island–first to exploit it in order to make, as he originally hopes, a hit movie, and then to capture Kong and get rich using the giant gorilla as an entertaining spectacle–is easily seen as symbolic of the capitalist exploitation of the Third World. The 1976 remake–with the Petrox Oil Company hoping initially to secure vast untapped deposits of oil on Skull Island, then when realizing there’s minimal commercial oil there, Fred Wilson (Grodin), the remake’s equivalent of Denham, decides to capture and capitalize on Kong instead–is all the more a comment on capitalist exploitation.

The wall separating the tribe from the jungle represents that last remaining vestige of civilization, as against the wild, chaotic, vicious world of might makes right and everyone for himself. Such desperate circumstances are what the Third World is left with after having been so over-exploited by the imperialist First World, so we see Kong surrounded by hostility, always having to hate, and always having to fight.

Kong’s encountering of Ann/Dwan, her beauty symbolic of her gentleness, makes him see for the first time that kindness and love can exist. He is touched by her. The 2005 Ann does her vaudeville routine to entertain him, and instead of scowling, the big ape actually laughs. She looks out at the sunset/sunrise with him, and says, “Beautiful,” to teach him how to appreciate it.

In the 1976 film, Dwan–an anagram of Dawn–is the dawn of an understanding for Kong that love and beauty do exist. Her calling him a “chauvinist pig ape,” saying “eat me” gets him to empathize with her vulnerability. Kong in all three films represents the stereotypical brutish male, and Ann/Dwan is the stereotypical woman as civilizing influence on the male. Beauty truly kills the beast.

A parallel situation can be found in the 1933 film, in the relationship between first mate Jack Driscoll and Ann. At first, he speaks contemptuously of women, regarding them as a nuisance; but her beauty and sweetness tame the cool macho man in him, so that by the time they reach Skull Island, he’s in love with her. After he rescues her and they return to New York, they’re engaged.

To return to Kong, though, he still has to contend with the hostile world around him. In the 1933 film (and the 2005 remake), we see him fight off a Tyrannosaur (or T-rex-like predatory dinosaurs) and a pterodactyl (or giant bats) in his efforts to defend Ann and himself; and in the 1976 film, Kong fights with a giant–and fake-looking–giant snake.

It’s interesting in this connection to discuss Toho‘s King Kong vs. Godzilla, with Kong fighting another dinosaur-like monster. Since Godzilla, or Gojira, is a kaiju-sized reptile woken and empowered by nuclear radiation, he is symbolic of the horrors and destructiveness of nuclear war.

Kong (as representative of the people of the Third World) fighting Godzilla thus can be seen to symbolize the people of oppressed nations fighting off the imperialist threat of aerial bombardments, nuclear or non-nuclear. For not only did Japan suffer a thorough American bombing from both nuclear and non-nuclear bombs, but so did North Korea, though only with non-nuclear bombs, prompting the DPRK to create a nuclear weapons program to ensure that such a bombing will never happen again.

Kong takes Ann up to a cliff where they will be safe from attack, at least for the moment. In his sexual curiosity, Kong can’t resist the temptation to see how beautiful Ann’s/Dwan’s body is without her clothes on, so he tries to peel some of them off. When the prudish Production Code was established a year after the 1933 film was made, scenes like this one, as well as many of the other violent scenes (Kong’s victims in his mouth, stomped on, or dropped to their deaths) were censored and removed later in the 1930s.

Some have accused King Kong of reinforcing racist attitudes, by suggesting that Kong represents the ‘brutish, uncivilized’ black male stereotype. This scene of him peeling off her clothes would thus seem to imply the ‘dangers’ of race-mixing. Now, the film’s creators insisted that they intended no allegorical meaning, let alone a racist one; I, however, would see Kong’s voyeuristic curiosity about Ann’s body as symbolic of how those in poor countries must wonder about the wealth of the West.

The scene of Kong fighting off the pterodactyl/giant bats on that cliff, as Driscoll rescues Ann, parallels the final scene of Kong fighting off airplanes on the top of the Empire State Building. Just as he literally dies at the end of the film, he metaphorically dies when Ann is taken away from him. This metaphorical death is emphasized in the 2005 remake, when we see Kong chained up on display in New York, with that despondent look on his face from having lost her.

This capturing of Kong, without the slightest regard for the ape’s feelings, this turning of a living being into a mere commodity so Denham can get rich, is the essence of capitalist exploitation. New markets have to be opened (displaying Kong) when others fail (Denham’s movie project; Petrox not finding any oil on Skull Island), in order to offset the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

This spectacle, symbolic of human zoos (for recall Kong’s anthropomorphism and superior intelligence by gorilla standards, as seen in all King Kong films other than Jackson’s), shows the one valid way we can compare him with black people: not as a racist caricature meant to promote xenophobia or to discourage interracial marriage, but as a pitiable victim of Western imperialism.

Here we can see an irony in naming the giant ape King Kong (in the 1976 film, he is even wearing a giant crown): as Denham says in his introduction to his New York audience: “He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive — a show to gratify your curiosity.” As a symbol of the conquered and oppressed people of the Third World, Kong has been degraded, lowered from his rightful place as ruler of his own destiny, to a merely entertaining spectacle for the white bourgeoisie.

While some might do a racist interpretation of Kong’s size, strength, and aggressiveness by seeing them as representative of the traits of blacks, something terrifying to white supremacists, I see something far more fundamentally threatening in these attributes of Kong. These can be attributed to the global proletariat, provided they all come together in solidarity and rise up against the ruling class. Together, we’re as big and as strong as Kong; but separate and alone, we’re small and weak.

Indeed, when Kong sees Ann again–by the stage in the 1933 film, and when he sees a tied-up lookalike of her in the 2005 remake–he is reminded of what he lacks, which gives rise to his desire to have her again. This drives him to break free from his chains and get her, an act symbolic of that proletarian revolution, since her beauty represents all the First World luxury the global poor lack.

Kong breaks out of the theatre and rampages through the streets of New York City, the centre of global capitalism. Indeed, when imperialism goes too far in oppressing the Third World, sometimes the oppressed fight back…and that’s what we see symbolized in Kong’s rampage.

The bourgeois producers of the 1933 film are scarcely sympathetic to Kong, so he is portrayed as bestial and terrifying; but much more sympathy is shown to him in the 1976 and 2005 remakes, so we see Dwan and Watts’s Ann in tears when the men in their flying machines shoot at the ape. Such growing compassion reflects the changing values of Western society towards a more loving and sensitive attitude to animals…and to the poor, of whom I see Kong as symbolic.

The World Trade Center had replaced the Empire State Building as the tallest in the world, hence the change in the 1976 remake. Kong’s ascent to the top of this pair of buildings with Dwan, especially when seen in light of my interpretation of him as representative of the people of the oppressed Third World (e.g., the Middle East), makes it irresistible for me to make associations of it with the 9/11 terrorist attacks (including when Kong makes a helicopter crash into the side of one of the buildings).

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that the 1976 remake is in any way prophetic of 9/11, as many conspiracy theorists have imagined with other examples of pop culture, including this fanciful one of Supertramp‘s Breakfast in America album cover. I only mean, through my associating, that Kong’s ascent, and subsequent battle with the fighter helicopters (as with his ascending of the Empire State Building with Ann, and subsequent confrontation with the fighter planes), symbolizes the kind of struggle the global proletariat has always had with US imperialism, the 9/11 attacks being the anti-imperialists’ greatest counterattack in recent memory.

So, Kong is “sitting on top of the world,” and “like Humpty Dumpty,” he is “going to fall.” If we see his rampage through downtown New York City as symbolic of a retaliation of the oppressed poor of the world, and Kong’s ascent to the top of the Empire State Building/World Trade Center as symbolic of a proletarian victory, this victory is a short-lived one, like those of the Paris Commune or the Spanish Revolution of 1936.

Those airplanes/helicopters shooting at Kong and killing him are thus symbolic of the forces of reaction, who fight to restore the original status quo of class and imperialist oppression. The raining of bullets that bloody Kong’s body represent such reactionary violence as the executions of 20,000 Communards, Franco‘s fascist repression of the Spanish revolutionaries, the IDF shooting at unarmed Palestinian protestors, the napalming of Vietnam (recall the flamethrowers used against Kong in the 1976 remake), and the imperialist invasions of such places as Afghanistan and Iraq, all in the name of the ‘War on Terror.’

Kong’s fall and death can be seen to represent the fall and destruction of so many states and societies that have dared to defy imperialism. Denham declares that “It was beauty killed the beast,” but we don’t see him punished for the mayhem he is responsible for having provoked. Similarly, far too few of the soldiers of imperialism have ever been adequately punished for their war crimes. Bush has even been rehabilitated by the public…for being seen as not as bad as Trump!

As people mourn the almost 3,000 deaths from 9/11, they should also condemn the imperialism that provoked it. Similarly, those whose loved ones have been killed by Kong should demand justice from reckless, exploitative Denham. At least his equivalent in the 1976 film, Fred Wilson, is crushed under Kong’s foot. That’s some justice, at least.

If my imperialist allegorizing of King Kong seems far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, consider the explanation of the original film’s meaning, as given by one of its producers/directors. Cooper said that his movie represented how primitive societies were doomed under modern civilization. My allegory is only a slight variation on that comment: the Third World has been, and continues to be, doomed by the First…unless something can be done about it.

Analysis of ‘The Manchurian Candidate’

I: Introduction and Quotes

The Manchurian Candidate is a 1962 political thriller directed by John Frankenheimer and written by George Axelrod, based on the novel by Richard Condon. It stars Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra, and Janet Leigh, with Angela Lansbury, James Gregory, Henry Silva, Khigh Dhiegh, John McGiver, Leslie Parrish, and Douglas Henderson.

The story is about a communist conspiracy to use a sleeper agent, Raymond Shaw (Harvey), to assassinate the American president so his chosen vice-president, Senator John Iselin (Gregory)–a McCarthyite red-baiter in public, but secretly a communist–will become the new president, using the assassination to gain emergency, dictatorial powers, thus making the US into a socialist state. Put another way–and as a leftist myself, I must be blunt here–this film, as entertaining and thrilling as it is–is simply a piece of Cold War, anticommunist propaganda.

So, Dear Reader, you might ask why I would choose to write up an analysis of a film to whose ideology I’m so opposed? Because, apart from my ability to distance myself emotionally and ideologically from such a film in order to appreciate its artistic merits (good acting and writing, etc.), I find it interesting to do a kind of psychological study of the story, to unearth the unconscious motives of the writers (Axelrod and Condon). Since, apart from the McCarthyist paranoia of the time, there were very real capitalist conspiracies aimed at subverting and undoing the socialist states, to restore capitalism to them, I shall endeavour to prove that the writers were projecting their own conspiracy-mindedness onto the USSR and Maoist China, while little Freudian slips popping out here and there reveal who the real conspirators were and are.

Here are some quotes:

[Repeated line] “Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.” –said by Major Ben Marco and Cpl. Allen Melvin (James Edwards)

“Allow me to introduce our American visitors. I must ask you to forgive their somewhat lackadaisical manners, but I have conditioned them – or brain-washed them, which I understand is the new American word. They believe that they are waiting out a storm in the lobby of a small hotel in New Jersey where a meeting of the ladies’ garden club is in progress.” –Dr. Yen Lo

Chairlady: You will notice that I have told them they may smoke. I’ve allowed my people to have a little fun in the selection of bizarre tobacco substitutes… Are you enjoying your cigarette, Ed?
Ed Movole: Yes ma’am.
Dr. Yen Lo: Yak dung!… hope tastes good – like a cigarette should!

“The Queen of Diamonds is reminiscent in many ways of Raymond’s dearly loved and hated mother and is the second key to clear the mechanism for any other assignment.” –Dr. Yen Lo

[repeated line, to Raymond] “Why don’t you pass the time with a game of solitaire?” –Mrs. Iselin, etc.

“His brain has not only been washed, as they say, it’s been dry-cleaned.” –Dr. Yen Lo

Dr. Yen Lo: Attractive plant you have here.
Zilkov (Albert Paulsen): Thank you, doctor. It’s actually a rest home for wealthy alcoholics. We were able to purchase it three years ago. Except for this floor and the floor above it, which is sealed off for security purposes, the rest functions quite normally. In fact it’s one of the few Soviet operations in America that actually showed a profit at the end of the last fiscal year.
Dr. Yen Lo: Profit? Fiscal year? Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Beware, my dear Zilkov, fires of capitalism are highly infectious. Soon you’ll be lending money out at interest. [Chuckles] You must try, Comrade Zilkov, to cultivate a sense of humor. There’s nothing like a good laugh now and then to lighten the burdens of the day. [To Raymond] Tell me, Raymond, do you remember murdering Mavole and Lembeck?

“I have here a list of the names of 207 persons who are known by the Secretary of Defense as being members of the Communist Party… I demand an answer, Mr. Secretary. There will be no covering up, sir, no covering up. You are not going to get your hands on this list. And I deeply regret having to say…” –Senator Iselin

Mrs. Iselin: Would it really make it easier for you if we settled on just one number?
Sen. Iselin: Yeah. Just one, real, simple number that’d be easy for me to remember.[Mrs. Iselin watches Sen. Iselin pour Heinz Tomato Ketchup (with its “57 Varieties” slogan on its label) onto his dinner plate]
[Cut to Senate chamber]
Sen. Iselin: There are exactly 57 card-carrying members of the Communist Party in the Department of Defense at this time!

“Why don’t you go and take yourself a cab and go up to Central Park and go jump in the lake?” –Bartender, overheard by Raymond, who had just primed himself to receive a command by dealing the Queen of Diamonds

“I keep telling you not to think. You’re very, very good at a great many things, but thinking, hon’, just simply isn’t one of them. You just keep shouting “Point of Order, Point of Order” into the television cameras and I will handle the rest.” –Mrs. Iselin, to Senator Iselin

“What was Raymond doing with his hands?… How did the old ladies turn into Russians?… What were you doing there?” –Marco, to Chunjin, while they’re fighting

“My mother, Ben, is a terrible woman. A terrible, terrible woman… You know, Ben, it’s a terrible thing to hate your mother. But I didn’t always hate her. When I was a child, I only kind of disliked her. But after what she did to Jocie and me, that’s when I began to hate her… Jocie Jordan – Senator Jordan’s daughter… Thomas Jordan’s daughter and Johnny Iselin’s step-son… Years later, I realized, Ben, that I am not very loveable… Some people are loveable and some people are not loveable. I am not loveable. Oh, but I was very loveable with Jocie. Ben, you can’t believe how loveable I was.” –Raymond Shaw

“I despise John Iselin and everything that Iselin-ism has come to stand for. I think if John Iselin were a paid Soviet agent, he could not do more to harm this country than he’s doing now.” –Senator Thomas Jordan

“I’m gonna beat that vile, slandering, son-of-a-numbskull to a bloody pulp.” –Shaw, of Iselin

“So the red Queen is our baby. Well, take a look at this, kid… and while you’re looking, listen. This is me, Marco talking. Fifty-two red Queens and me are telling you – you know what we’re telling you? – it’s over. The links, the beautifully-conditioned links are smashed. They’re smashed as of now because we say so, because we say they ought to be smashed. We’re bustin’ up the joint, we’re tearin’ out all the wires, we’re bustin’ it up so good all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men will never put ol’ Raymond back together again. You don’t work anymore. That’s an order. Anybody invites you to a game of solitaire – you tell ’em: ‘Sorry, buster, the ball-game is over!'” –Marco, to Shaw

“You are to shoot the Presidential nominee through the head. And Johnny will rise gallantly to his feet and lift Ben Arthur’s body in his arms, stand in front of the microphones and begin to speak. The speech is short, but it’s the most rousing speech I’ve ever read. It’s been worked on here and in Russia on and off for over eight years. I shall force someone to take the body away from him. And Johnny will leave those microphones and those cameras with blood all over him, fighting off anyone who tries to help him, defending America even if it means his own death, rallying a nation of television-viewers into hysteria to sweep us up into the White House with powers that will make martial law seem like anarchy. Now this is very important. I want the nominee to be dead about two minutes after he begins his acceptance speech, depending on his reading time under pressure. You are to hit him right at the point that he finishes the phrase, ‘nor would I ask of any fellow American in defense of his freedom that which I would not gladly give myself – my life before my liberty.’ Is that absolutely clear?” –Mrs. Iselin, to Shaw

“I know you will never entirely comprehend this, Raymond, but you must believe I did not know it would be you. I served them. I fought for them. I’m on the point of winning for them the greatest foothold they would ever have in this country. And they paid me back by taking your soul away from you. I told them to build me an assassin. I wanted a killer from a world filled with killers and they chose you because they thought it would bind me closer to them. [She places the sides of his face in her outstretched hands.] But now, we have come almost to the end. One last step. And then when I take power, they will be pulled down and ground into dirt for what they did to you. And what they did in so contemptuously under-estimating me.” –Mrs. Iselin, to Shaw

“You couldn’t have stopped them, the army couldn’t have stopped them. So I had to.” –Shaw, to Marco, after killing his mother and Senator Iselin

“Made to commit acts too unspeakable to be cited here by an enemy who had captured his mind and his soul, he freed himself at last and in the end, heroically and unhesitatingly gave his life to save his country. Raymond Shaw… Hell… Hell.” –Marco

II: A Brief but Necessary Digression

American paranoia about foreign governments trying to undo American “democracy” is not limited to communist conspiracies, of course, though in recent years such paranoia has been linked with communism. For the past four years, we’ve heard nonsense about Trump being a supposed puppet of Putin and the KGB (which hasn’t even existed since the dissolution of the Soviet Union!); now, Trump’s supporters are claiming that Biden is a puppet of Xi Jinping…a Manchurian candidate for our times, as ridiculous and unfounded an idea as the Russophobic one.

What is never acknowledged in any of this paranoia and red-baiting is that the US and its capitalist and fascist allies, past and present, have conspired to undo socialist governments all over the world. The rise of fascism and Nazism in the 1920s and 30s, bankrolled by capitalists, thwarted attempts at socialist revolution in such places as Italy and Spain, and helped Hitler rise to power.

Elsewhere, corrupt Nikolai Yezhov, head of the NKVD and traitor, helped the imperialists in their attempt to tear apart the USSR from within, necessitating Stalin‘s purge. Trotsky, though paying lip-service to antifascism, was willing to work with fascists in his attempts to overthrow Stalin, who as General Secretary was so far from being an actual dictator that he attempted to resign from the position four times, but he couldn’t because the Central Committee knew he was doing such a good job, and because the Russian people loved him. Decades of treasonous acts in the USSR slowly helped weaken the system until its final dissolution in 1991.

Elsewhere and more recently, Juan Guaido is a kind of ‘Manchurian candidate’ for imperialists in Venezuela, as Añez was in Bolivia. Then there are the pressures being put on China now, from such collective ‘Manchurian candidates’ as the imperialist collaborators in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

During the Cold War, the CIA manipulated the media through such diverse methods as Operation Mockingbird, the diverting of left-leaning intellectuals away from Marxism-Leninism towards Trotskyism, postmodernism, abstract expressionist art, etc., and through the production of such anticommunist movies as The Manchurian Candidate.

III: Nothing Is As It Seems

The point I was trying to make in the last section is that what we’ve been taught was true during and since the Cold War (including this current cold war) has typically been far from the truth. This sense of deception pervades the film, too…in ways both intended and unintended.

The world is tricked into believing that Staff Sergeant Raymond Shaw rescued his squad from the enemy during the Korean War. Two of his men were killed during the rescue…or so the story goes. Actually, Shaw killed the two men himself. We are also tricked into believing that his mother and stepfather, the Iselins, are ultra-patriotic, far right-wing fanatical anticommunists. Actually, it seems they’re working for the USSR and Maoist China, in full knowledge that Shaw is their sleeper agent.

I’m arguing that we can carry the film’s deception even further. The fear of communist ‘totalitarianism’ is, as I said above, a projection of the Western imperialist ambition to rule the world and impose predatory capitalism on all countries, whether they wish it or not. So, the narrative of a communist takeover attempt on the US is itself a deception. There are occasions even in the film itself that suggest that the narrators are, if only unconsciously and in a piecemeal fashion, willing to reveal this deception.

IV: The Korean War

To put the opening scene–of the American soldiers with the South Korean prostitutes in the brothel–in its proper context, we have to understand the true context of the origin of the South Korean state. It was never a democracy to be contrasted with the ‘totalitarian’ North. South Korea was always an American military occupation, part of the Cold War effort to contain communism.

The two Koreas are more than willing to have their nation reunited, but the West would want the North first to embrace capitalism, even if only in the way that Vietnam did. Continued military exercises between the American military and their South Korean collaborators have continued to build tension, justifying the DPRK’s nuclear weapons program, since they’ll never allow the US to repeat their having bombed every inch of the North during the Korean War.

The procuring of South Korean prostitutes, something these conservative, modest people would never have normally allowed, for American soldiers was one of the many ways that the US forced their way on the Korean people. Now we see who is really trying to take over another country…and we see it right at the beginning of The Manchurian Candidate, the film’s first Freudian slip.

Chunjin (Silva) appears to be a collaborator with the Americans until their ambush by the communists. Later in the film–once we’ve understood him to have been working with the communists–he’s become Shaw’s personal servant, and here we see Chunjin as the stereotypical Asian: meek and subservient. (It’s also interesting to point out here that the two main Asian characters in the film–Chunjin and Dr. Yen Lo–aren’t played by Asian actors, but by American ones in Yellowface.) In his service to Shaw, we see no connection with the communist conspiracy; he doesn’t do anything to advance the Iselins’ cause. It’s as if he were just working for a bourgeois, just for the employment. This mundane employment of him is another Freudian slip.

V: Sleeping With the Enemy

The scene with the demonstration of Shaw’s abilities as a killer–that is, the first of the nightmare scenes–begins as a seminar of sorts on the topic of flowers, held by a group of daintily dressed old ladies. What strikes me about the ladies we see, be they the white ones of Marco’s dream or the black ones of the dream of Cpl. Melvin (Edwards), is how bourgeois they look, in stark contrast to the Soviets and Maoists who, we understand, are really in attendance. And bourgeois is bourgeois, regardless of sex or skin colour.

We’re to understand that these recurring nightmares are, as it were, video replays of the exact same incident that occurred with the communists; even the soldiers’ impression that they’re actually with the ladies discussing flowers, as a result of brainwashing, is a repeat of their experience as captives in Manchuria during the Korean War. Since when are dreams ever detail-for-detail repeats of past experiences from beginning to end? The only aspect of the dreams that seems dream-like is Shaw playing solitaire, but with no cards in his hands.

I would say instead that these dreams are just dreams, symbolic of a more general experience of being indoctrinated and transformed into mindless, remorseless killers–the unthinking American soldier who just obeys orders. The traumatic element of waking up screaming from a nightmare is just symbolic of soldiers’ PTSD. As far as the communists are concerned, their giving of orders to kill people, without mercy or pity, is a projection of ruthless imperialists onto their enemy. In any case, according to the Communist Interrogation, Indoctrination, and Exploitation of Prisoners of War (pages 17 and 51), there is no evidence that ‘brainwashing’ results in the kinds of permanent radical changes in personality and loyalty of those subjected to it, as seen in The Manchurian Candidate.

As I see it, the ladies, symbolic of the imperialist bourgeoisie, are the ones giving the orders to kill. We are led to believe that they are the illusion, and that the communists are the real indoctrinators; I’d say it’s the other way around. Recall that the triggering of Shaw to obey orders unquestioningly is–upon playing a game of solitaire (a card game played alone, this solitude being symbolic of alienation), caused by the uncovering of the Queen of Diamonds–symbolic respectively of both maternal authority and capitalism.

That it’s also called the red Queen may, on the surface, suggest the red of socialism. It may also be the red of the Republican Party, of which the Iselins are more than likely members. And the maternal authority of the red Queen links well with Shaw’s domineering mother.

It’s important also to link the notions of sleeping, dreaming, brainwashing, and the unconscious. These soldiers are unaware of what they’re doing; they’re being hypnotized into a state of unquestioning obedience. In a larger sense, this is what happens to soldiers in general, regardless of their political affiliation or what country they’re loyal to: they’re transformed into unthinking, killing machines–unthinking, unconscious, unaware automatons.

And while we’re on the topic of the unconscious, Jung noted a tendency, called enantiodromia, in which an extreme conscious urge can provoke its dialectical opposite in the unconscious. This notion in turn leads us to a discussion of the dialectical unity of opposites. One tendency will phase into its diametrical opposite if pushed to an extreme, an idea I’ve symbolized in previous posts with the ouroboros, the serpent’s biting head and bitten tail representing those meeting extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which is symbolized by the coiled length of the serpent’s body.

So, in the unconscious, in this dream of a switching back and forth between ladies discussing flowers and communists discussing the brainwashed American soldiers, we can switch from the notion of the former discussion being the illusion, and the latter being the real event, to the notion of the former being real and the latter being the illusion. We switch from one extreme opposite to the other, through Jung’s enantiodromia.

In other words, in a dream in which the writers of this story would have us believe that ladies discussing plants is really communists discussing their plot involving Shaw as their sleeper agent/assassin, I would argue that it’s the communist conspiracy that is only apparent, and that the bourgeois ladies, symbolic of imperialism, are the real conspirators whose schemes are projected onto the Soviets and Maoists. The ladies’ inclusion in the dream, however symbolic it may be, is therefore the key to understanding who the real manipulators are.

VI: A Few Capitalist Freudian Slips

One Freudian slip, in my interpretation, occurs when the chairwoman of the flower ladies talks about indulging the American soldiers’ smoking of cigarettes; then she turns into Dr. Yen Lo (Dhiegh), who jokes that this indulgence “tastes good, like a cigarette should,” a reference to a commercial slogan, something inherently capitalist. What seems to be a communist joking about capitalism should be seen as a capitalist promoting her economic ideology.

Later in the film, when Shaw is in a rest home the Soviets have purchased, supposedly healing from an injury from a hit-and-run incident, he has actually had the brainwashing mechanism activated, and he finds himself part of a conversation Yen Lo is having with the Soviet Zilkov (Albert Paulsen) over whom Shaw should kill to test if his brainwashing is still functional. In his brainwashed state, Shaw can be described as being in a dream, unconscious; therefore the sight of conversing communists can be deemed an illusion, an unconscious projection of American, imperialist plotters.

So when Zilkov tells Yen Lo that the purchasing of the rest home has yielded a profit, and the latter light-heartedly speaks of the evils of the profit motive, we can see this as yet another Freudian slip revealing capitalist, rather than communist, plotters (at least symbolically speaking); for communists would never speak of worker exploitation in a spirit of levity. To show further what a capitalist in communist clothing Yen Lo is, we learn that he leaves to go shopping at Macy’s [!].

VII: Who are the Oppressors, and Who are the Liberators?

It is assumed throughout the movie, as it was throughout the Cold War and up until this day by most people, that the Soviets and Maoists have just wanted power for its own sake. No reference is given anywhere in the film to all of the achievements of the communists in their efforts to eliminate famines (contrary to the lies that communists deliberately starved people), illiteracy, unemployment, homelessness, discrimination against women, etc. There’s no reference to their efforts at establishing universal healthcare, free education, the reduction of poverty, or the transformation of backward, peasant societies into modernized, industrialized superpowers in a matter of a few decades. Since the end of the Soviet era, we find a consistently large number of East European people nostalgic for the old socialist states, as well as having a love of Stalin.

On the other side of the coin, the US is portrayed as a bastion of freedom and democracy rather than a nation founded on the slavery of blacks, the genocide of the American aboriginals, and a class system that keeps the poor poor in spite of the lies of the “American Dream.” On the one hand, we have an African-American psychiatrist in the film (played by Joe Adams), but on the other, the supposedly leftist Mrs. Iselin mocks Chunjin’s name in the typically racist bourgeois fashion.

Hence, my charge that the accusation of a tyrannical nature in the communist characters is really a projection onto them from the real tyrants, the capitalists. An epidemic of homelessness can be seen in such cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, London, and Dublin. Such forms of hostile architecture as spikes put on the ground and bars on benches, to prevent the homeless from resting on private property, and laws against feeding them, are clear indications of the cruelties of capitalism; yet millions are still deluded that capitalism is freedom, and that socialism is oppression.

The liberal bias of this film would have us believe that the extreme right-wing thinking publicly displayed by the Iselins–a reaction formation against their, as we understand, private communism–is no more uncomfortable an extreme than socialism is, and in fact is also virtually identical with it. This is that old, pernicious horseshoe theory, as unfair to communism as it is inaccurate.

VIII: Shaw’s Relationship with his Mother

It is clear from the outset that Shaw is a sick man. His brainwashing, being made to follow orders that would be repellant to his nature, can be seen as symbolic of a kind of psychotic break with reality; for if one’s sense of reality were intact, one would never put a bullet in the head of one’s beloved wife or her father, and one would never ride in a taxi to Central Park and jump in the lake.

(Recall the link above [Part V] that concluded that there’s no evidence of brainwashing having a permanent effect on the psyche; in fact, the original Chinese use of brainwashing—xinao, had a positive meaning, that of purifying the mind of unwholesome attitudes and beliefs, which the Maoists used with the intent to rid people of reactionary thinking…though not with the sense of forcefulness and manipulation that the anticommunist propagandists have accused the Maoists of.)

Shaw’s being triggered to obey on the sight of the Queen of Diamonds–associated with his “dearly loved and hated mother,” as Yen Lo says–shows how powerful Mrs. Iselin’s influence is on Raymond. His being made to play solitaire, as I mentioned above, is symbolic of his loneliness, for as we know, “Poor friendless, friendless Raymond” is “not loveable.” In Condon’s novel, Raymond’s father divorced Raymond’s mother (then committed suicide) long before the beginning of the story (when he was a twelve-year-old boy), so for many years, it is as if he never existed for Raymond at all.

Lacan‘s theory of psychosis, of which delusional paranoia is a manifestation, is based on something he called foreclosure, which is a disavowal of, and a refusal to acknowledge, the existence of one’s father. Shaw is so repudiating of his father that he won’t even acknowledge his stepfather, Senator Iselin, when Chunjin makes the faux pas of referring to Iselin as Shaw’s father.

According to Lacanian theory, the father is crucial in bringing a child out of the dyadic relationship with the mother (part of the narcissistic, mirror-like Imaginary Order) and into the broader society (the Non! du père forbids the child to indulge in an Oedipal, incestuous relationship with Mother, making him enter the Symbolic Order, a world of language, social customs, laws, culture, etc.). Any child who fails to make this transition from one-on-one with Mother to a wider relationship with friends is going to be in trouble. Such trouble is what we see in friendless Shaw.

Something that is only implied in the film (Mrs. Iselin giving Shaw a long kiss on the lips) is made explicit in the novel: her committing incest with him. Though partly motivated by sexual perversity (she had powerful Oedipal feelings for the father who sexually abused her as a child, and she transfers these feelings onto Shaw towards the end of the story because he reminds her of her father at this time), she seduces her son, in all likelihood, as an extension of her long-existing narcissistic wish to control him.

So the trauma of having an incestuous relationship with his mother has compounded the difficulties he has in his dyadic relationship with her, this trap that won’t allow him to have healthy relationships with other people. This makes it easier for her to control him.

Now, her total control over him raises a significant question: if she and Senator Iselin are secretly communists, how come Shaw doesn’t know anything about it (until the end of the movie), or even suspect it? Perhaps the novel, which I haven’t read, has a rationalization for keeping him in the dark for so long; but I don’t buy it, whatever it is. With Mother and son being so close [!] for so many years, something had to have slipped out at some point, exposing her hidden ideology.

We can suspend our disbelief that his brainwashing has made him unaware that he’s a sleeper agent (for this assassination mission is classified information), but not for his ignorance of his mother’s ‘communism.’ For if her right-wing blustering is just a charade, why does she do it with him in private places, too?

Her maternal dominance would be enough to make him not only keep her secret, but make him a secret ‘commie,’ too. Her dominance pervades his life in more than her physical presence: it’s symbolized in the Queen of Diamonds (symbol of a capitalist mother, in my interpretation), in the old ladies’ discussing flowers, and in his transference of his mother onto Jocelyn Jordan (Parrish), his sweetheart when she wears the card as a costume at the party meant to reunite her with him.

It’s interesting to contrast his relationship with his mother with that of Jocelyn. His mother is the whore, the bitch; Jocelyn is the sweet, nice girl, the angel. A similar submissiveness can be seen in Eugenie Rose (Leigh) and her relationship with Marco. This Madonna/Whore dichotomy is typical of the right-wing ideology of the writers, who would project the whore aspect onto communism, rather than admit that their sexism is a part of capitalism.

IX: The Assassination

It’s understood that, according to Dr. Yen Lo, the key to triggering Shaw’s obedience (as well as freeing him from it, as Marco will realize) lies in the Queen of Diamonds, symbol of his (as I’d have it) capitalist mother’s dominance. Marco presents a forced deck of all Queens of Diamonds to Shaw’s face in the hopes of freeing him from the brainwashing.

We don’t know if Marco’s plan works (Shaw is supposed to call him before the assassination of the president, but he doesn’t) until the very end, when Shaw, instead of pointing the rifle at the president, points it at the Iselins and kills them.

The plan has been to kill the president, followed by a short but rousing speech by Senator Iselin, giving him sympathy and emergency, dictatorial powers: those of a communist, or of a fascist?

If the Iselins really are communists, then the film’s lampooning of paranoid McCarthyism through clownish Senator Iselin is self-defeating, since the very premise of the film and novel is that there indeed were communists who had infiltrated American politics. The Manchurian Candidate intends both to satirize and to justify Joseph McCarthy, an odd thing to do.

On the other hand, contrast the obvious opulence of the Iselins (private jet, Mrs. Iselin’s pretty clothes, their beautiful home) with the far more modest possessions of even the top-ranking Soviets and Maoists, whose privileges over those of the proletariat were small compared to the privileges of the bourgeoisie over the poor in capitalist countries. Neither Mao nor Stalin ever wore finery or had scores of luxuries, but Mrs. Iselin does.

She leads me to another point: she says to her son that she’s worked and fought for the communists, and that once she and Johnny Iselin have taken power after the president’s assassination, she will get revenge on those very communists who have taken Raymond’s soul away from him, they who have also underestimated her. How has she, who wants revenge on them, worked for them? As Yezhov did? That is, pretending to be a communist while secretly working to undo them?

Such duplicity on her part makes perfect sense, given the nature of the film’s themes. At first, the Iselins seem like McCarthyist cartoon characters; then they seem–in a shocking plot twist–to be the very communists they accuse other American politicians of being; and finally, upon blaming the assassination of the president on the communists, the Iselins assume emergency, dictatorial powers and–in my interpretation–reveal themselves to be outright fascists!

Since the liberal writers of this story think, as many today do, too, that there is little if any difference between fascists and communists, it should matter little to them if the Iselins are on the far right or the far left. But to leftists like me, who know of the huge sacrifice that Stalin’s Red Army made in defeating the Nazis and saving the world from fascism (for the time being, at least), losing about 27 million Soviet lives in the process, the difference between fascism and communism is like that between night and day. Indeed, the only unity to be found between these opposing extremes is a dialectical one, that is, a struggle between the two, of the one passing into its opposite once the former has been defeated, like going past the ouroboros’ biting teeth over to its bitten tail.

When I write of the projection of conspiratorial intent from the capitalist West onto the socialist East, as I sense is in the creators of the novel and movie, I understand the use of this defence mechanism, to deflect guilt away from the writers, to be unconscious. The writers weren’t consciously aware of how they were denying their own guilt in slandering socialism with the attribution of imperialist vices. Ego psychology explains how much of ego defence is unconscious, and thus more effective when undetected (see also Mitchell and Black, page 26), since much of the ego itself is unconscious and preconscious.

This unconscious state is perfectly symbolized by the way Raymond doesn’t know of the crimes he’s committing. He imagines someone else has shot his wife and father-in-law, just as we assume that communists are responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, rather than capitalists.

The Toxic Family of Imperialism

I: Introduction

Much has been written about the troubles of living in a toxic family, by writers including myself. One parent, if not both, is a narcissist who bullies and manipulates the sons and daughters into playing roles that satisfy the narcissistic emotional needs of the parent(s), who fancy themselves to be the very personification of parental virtue.

The idea is to make the children into extensions of the parents, to receive projections of the (perceived to be) best and worst aspects of the parents’ personalities. One child may be pressured into being an idealized version of the mother and/or father (the golden child), while another child (the scapegoat) may be bullied into introjecting all of the aspects of the parents that they hate about themselves. Other children tend to be emotionally neglected (the lost child).

What exists in the microcosm, as it were, of human relationships also exists in their macrocosm, the world of geopolitics, which is what I’m focusing on here. I’ve discussed elsewhere the way capitalism brings out the narcissist in people, and I’ve also discussed how they manipulate the public to love and hate whichever countries they want to be loved or hated, something I’ve called ‘political gaslighting,’ a deliberate misrepresenting of the facts about those countries…a.k.a. propaganda.

I’d like to expand on these ideas here, while using the toxic family as a handy metaphor to describe the hegemony of US/NATO imperialism, and its deleterious effects on the rest of the world.

II: The Narcissistic Imperialist Parent Countries

Just as the narcissistic parent of a toxic family perpetuates the myth of being a loving, altruistic parent who is only concerned with the well-being of his or her children–a moral model to the community–so do the Western imperialist countries (the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the EU) imagine their rule over the world is for the benefit of everybody. They euphemistically call themselves “the international community,” rather than the plunderers of the Third World.

They fancy that they’re promoting ‘freedom and democracy,’ yet the US has by far the highest incarceration rate in the world, jailing more people than the Gulag (which even the CIA secretly acknowledged wasn’t so bad), many of the incarcerated being ‘guilty’ of smoking or selling a plant (on top of this is the use of these prisoners for what is essentially slave labour in private prisons). Then there’s the Australian military helping their police to enforce the wearing of masks and self-isolation, all because of a virus that is nowhere near as deadly as it’s made out to be.

Similarly, the IMF and World Bank claim to be helping the Third World by giving them loans, which of course the poor countries cannot pay back, leaving them in perpetual debt and giving the Western powers a convenient rationale to continue exploiting them.

Trump‘s bailing out of the super-rich in early 2020, yet another transfer of wealth upward when a downward transfer is what’s so especially needed, has been given the obscene name of CARES.

The NED is a sham NGO that carries out the nefarious regime-change plots of the CIA, destabilizing and overthrowing governments around the world that don’t bow to American interests.

And they call it democracy.

III: The Golden Child Countries

All those countries that have found favour with the Anglo-American empire include, of course, the NATO members, many of whom used to be Warsaw Pact members, but have since the 1990s been so invidiously absorbed by the capitalist West.

The stark contrast between these last-mentioned countries and the scapegoated ones is clearly shown in the buildup of NATO troops along the Russian border. The mainstream media portrays these East European countries as the victims in need of protection, and Russia as the aggressor, when anyone with eyes to see knows that the Anglo-American NATO alliance is mobbing Russia.

A similar situation is seen between, on the one side, the ‘golden child’ areas of East Asia such as Hong Kong and Taiwan, and on the other side, scapegoated China, where it’s assumed that the latter is bullying and oppressing the former two, when in fact these former two are fed imperialist propaganda from the US, which uses Hong Kong and Taiwan as sticks with which to beat China.

Mike Pompeo, fond of issuing threats to any scapegoated country that defies the American empire, and even joking about having lied while in the CIA, speaks warmly of his golden child island, Taiwan, whose government has for years been obsequious to the empire, gleefully imbibing all the anti-China propaganda out there without an atom of criticism. I know this because I’ve lived here in Taiwan since the summer of 1996, and the locals bash China all the time.

Little thought is given to the fact that all of this hostility to China only pushes us closer and closer to a disastrous war, which could escalate into WWIII if Russia and Iran are involved, and which could in turn go nuclear.

IV: The Scapegoat Countries

Woe to any country that dares defy the Anglo-American empire! I’ve already mentioned Russia and China, but of course there are many others: Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, and now Belarus.

In the toxic family, the scapegoat is the child who dares to blow the whistle and expose the family’s dysfunction, which must be kept a secret to prevent embarrassing the narcissistic parents, who otherwise would fly into rages. The same applies to the world of politics, but on a much larger scale.

The countries of the world are expected to bow before the empire. If they do, as such golden child countries as those in NATO do, they won’t fear the dangers of invasion, economic sanctions, and demonizing in the media. But if they dare chart their own paths, aspire to self-determination, or–egad!–adopt ideologies even distantly redolent of socialism…

The US was happy when Russia was weak in the 1990s, when unpopular Boris Yeltsin beat back attempts to restore communism in 1993, and when the US helped him get reelected. The West felt no discomfort when the Russian economy fell apart and millions were plunged into ruin; Russia was even allowed to be a part of the G8. But when Putin made Russia great again, so to speak, the Western powers grew indignant.

Similarly, when China was the factory of the world, supplying cheap labour to foreign businesses, all was well, in the opinion of the West. But now that China is about to overtake the US economically…

There are those countries that are scapegoated now, and there were those scapegoated countries of the past, particularly those of the past one hundred years or so. These include the much-maligned USSR, Mao‘s China, Ho Chi Minh‘s Vietnam, the former Yugoslavia, East Germany, and the rest of the Soviet Bloc. Space doesn’t permit me to go into detail about these countries, so if you’re skeptical, Dear Reader, of my defence of them, please check out the links provided.

More recent casualties of imperialist smear campaigns and coups (attempted or successful) include Bolivia and Venezuela, where Morales and Maduro are portrayed in the bourgeois media as dictators, even though they’ve held perfectly democratic elections, they are loved by most of their people, and the right-wing opposition (including its violence and sabotage of these countries’ economies) is backed by the US, the OAS, and the super-rich (who covet the countries’ oil and lithium). The same kind of imperialist aggression is seen in the Hong Kong protestors being backed by the US and UK, and Taiwan receiving American weaponry with which to threaten China.

As far as the faults of these scapegoated governments were and are concerned, these faults, though they shouldn’t be denied, should be understood and dealt with in the same way a scapegoat’s faults should be in the context of a toxic family. Their right to be safe from abuse mustn’t be dependent on their perfection or near-perfection.

There’s much to criticize in the current governments of Russia, China, Vietnam, Venezuela, Syria, and Iran, just as there was in the Libyan, Bolivian, Iraqi, and Soviet governments. But none of this gives US/NATO imperialism the right to impose their way of doing things on these criticized states, just as the toxic family has no right to impose their way on the scapegoat, just because he or she has a list of irritating faults.

Whatever is to be corrected in the scapegoated countries is to be done by the people of those respective countries, not to be imposed from outside. Similarly, even the voices of the Western left, often smug in their disdain for states whose socialism isn’t deemed sufficient, should not be in any way aiding the toxic countries’ wish to overthrow these states, as a Trotskyist might want to do.

Just as the toxic family isn’t helping the scapegoat, neither are the Western powers helping the targeted countries.

V: The Lost Child Countries

These are the countries whose needs aren’t acknowledged, and are left to fester in poverty and misery. The media has far too little to say about the suffering of the people of these countries. They’re just as controlled, exploited, and manipulated by the toxic countries as are the ‘golden’ and scapegoated countries; but their masters don’t show appreciation for their subservience. Still, the ‘lost children’ are far less defiant to their masters, so they aren’t so demonized in the media.

They’re just treated as if they don’t exist.

This is the Third World.

A huge foreign, especially American, military presence has been in Africa for some time now (the rationale being counterterrorism, though the obvious solution to terrorism is an end to imperialism), but it gets little media coverage. Yemenis are starving and suffering a cholera epidemic thanks to a war waged on them by Saudi Arabia (with weapons sold to the Saudis by the US, Canada, the UK, France, etc.), but these horrors don’t get enough acknowledgement in the media.

The oppression of the Palestinians, an ongoing genocide that after decades only worsens, isn’t discussed in the mainstream media to anywhere near the proportion that it should be.

VI: Conclusion

So, what is to be done?

I ended my post, The Narcissism of Capital, with a recommendation of going NO CONTACT with these sociopathic leaders, but I didn’t mean that to be taken literally. I just meant that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be influenced by them anymore. Much more will have to be done than just ignoring them, if we’re to save ourselves and our planet.

When the Western powers speak of the need for regime change in the scapegoated countries, they are like the toxic family who project their faults onto the scapegoated children. The toxic countries narcissistically fancy themselves to be the guardians of freedom and human rights, yet someone like Assange is persecuted for simply exposing their crimes, as all journalists should be free to do.

The toxic countries project the guilt of their human rights abuses onto the scapegoated countries, while being allies and business partners with other corrupt human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia (more ‘golden child’ countries). Since the toxic countries demand regime change for those countries onto which they project their faults, then we can say, with a clear conscience, that it’s high time for some ‘regime change,’ if you will, for the toxic countries. It’s time for revolution.

Taking the power from the toxic countries doesn’t mean we, the revolutionaries, are ‘no better’ than they are, as one idiot commented on my conclusion in this post; only if we replaced the toxic regimes with equally toxic ones would we not be better. We must replace them with workers’ states, effecting a transition from bourgeois rule to real democracy.

If words like ‘communism,’ ‘Marxism,’ and ‘socialism’ make you uncomfortable, Dear Reader, then call the new system ‘daffodils’ instead. There, that doesn’t sound so ‘totalitarian,’ does it?

The way things are going now, whether we end up with a Trump or a Biden win, it can’t get much more totalitarian than it is these days.

Analysis of ‘Deliverance’

Deliverance is the 1970 debut novel by American poet James Dickey. It was made into a 1972 film by director John Boorman, starring Jon Voight, Burt Reynolds, Ned Beatty, and Ronny Cox.

Four middle-aged men–landlord/outdoorsman Lewis Medlock (Reynolds), graphic artist Ed Gentry (Voight), salesman Bobby Trippe (Beatty), and soft drink company executive Drew Ballinger (Cox)–spend a weekend canoeing up the fictional Cahulawassee River in the northwest Georgia wilderness…only their imagined fun-filled weekend turns into a nightmarish fight to survive.

Deliverance is considered one of the best English-language novels of the 20th century, and Boorman’s film adaptation–with a screenplay by Dickey–has also been highly praised, earning three Academy Award nominations (Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing) and five Golden Globe Award nominations (Best Motion Picture–Drama, Best Director, Best Actor [Voight], Best Original Song, and Best Screenplay).

Here are some quotes from the film:

“Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you can find anything…A couple more months, she’ll all be gone…from Aintry on up. One big dead lake.” –Lewis

Griner: Canoe trip?
Lewis: That’s right, a canoe trip.
Griner: What the hell you wanna go fuck around with that river for?
Lewis: Because it’s there.
Griner: It’s there all right. You get in there and can’t get out, you’re gonna wish it wasn’t.

Lewis: The first explorers saw this country, saw it just like us.
Drew: I can imagine how they felt.
Bobby: [about the rapids] Yeah, we beat it, didn’t we? Did we beat that?
Lewis: You don’t beat it. You never beat the river, chubby.

Lewis: Machines are gonna fail and the system’s gonna fail…then, survival. Who has the ability to survive? That’s the game – survive.
Ed: Well, the system’s done all right by me.
Lewis: Oh yeah. You gotta nice job, you gotta a nice house, a nice wife, a nice kid.
Ed: You make that sound rather shitty, Lewis.
Lewis: Why do you go on these trips with me, Ed?
Ed: I like my life, Lewis.
Lewis: Yeah, but why do you go on these trips with me?
Ed: You know, sometimes I wonder about that.

Bobby: It’s true Lewis, what you said. There’s something in the woods and the water that we have lost in the city.
Lewis: We didn’t lose it. We sold it.
Bobby: Well, I’ll say one thing for the system. System did produce the air mattress, or as is better known among we camping types, the instant broad.

Mountain Man: What’s the matter, boy? I bet you can squeal. I bet you can squeal like a pig. Let’s squeal. Squeal now. Squeal. [Bobby’s ear is pulled]
Bobby: Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
Mountain Man: Squeal. Squeal louder. Louder. Louder, louder. Louder! Louder! Louder! Get down now, boy. There, get them britches down. That’s that. You can do better than that, boy. You can do better than that. Come on, squeal. Squeal.

Mountain Man: Whatcha wanna do with him?
Toothless Man: [grinning] He got a real pretty mouth, ain’t he?
Mountain Man: That’s the truth.
Toothless Man: [to Ed] You’re gonna do some prayin’ for me, boy. And you better pray good.

Lewis: We killed a man, Drew. Shot him in the back – a mountain man, a cracker. It gives us somethin’ to consider.
Drew: All right, consider it, we’re listenin’.
Lewis: Shit, all these people are related. I’d be god-damned if I’m gonna come back up here and stand trial with this man’s aunt and his uncle, maybe his momma and his daddy sittin’ in the jury box. What do you think, Bobby? [Bobby rushes at the corpse, but is restrained] How about you, Ed?
Ed: I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Drew: Now you listen, Lewis. I don’t know what you got in mind, but if you try to conceal this body, you’re settin’ yourself up for a murder charge. Now that much law I do know! This ain’t one of your fuckin’ games. You killed somebody. There he is!
Lewis: I see him, Drew. That’s right, I killed somebody. But you’re wrong if you don’t see this as a game…Dammit, we can get out of this thing without any questions asked. We get connected up with that body and the law, this thing gonna be hangin’ over us the rest of our lives. We gotta get rid of that guy!…Anywhere, everywhere, nowhere.
Drew: How do you know that other guy hasn’t already gone for the police?
Lewis: And what in the hell is he gonna tell ’em, Drew, what he did to Bobby?
Drew: Now why couldn’t he go get some other mountain men? Now why isn’t he gonna do that? You look around you, Lewis. He could be out there anywhere, watchin’ us right now. We ain’t gonna be so god-damned hard to follow draggin’ a corpse.
Lewis: You let me worry about that, Drew. You let me take care of that. You know what’s gonna be here? Right here? A lake – as far as you can see hundreds of feet deep. Hundreds of feet deep. Did you ever look out over a lake, think about something buried underneath it? Buried underneath it. Man, that’s about as buried as you can get.
Drew: Well, I am tellin’ you, Lewis, I don’t want any part of it.
Lewis: Well, you are part of it!
Drew: IT IS A MATTER OF THE LAW!
Lewis: The law? Ha! The law?! What law?! Where’s the law, Drew? Huh? You believe in democracy, don’t ya?
Drew: Yes, I do.
Lewis: Well then, we’ll take a vote. I’ll stand by it and so will you.

Ed: What are we gonna do, Lewis? You’re the guy with the answers. What the hell do we do now?
Lewis: Now you get to play the game.

“Drew was a good husband to his wife Linda and you were a wonderful father to your boys, Drew – Jimmie and Billie Ray. And if we come through this, I promise to do all I can for ’em. He was the best of us.” –Ed

Sheriff: Don’t ever do nothin’ like this again. Don’t come back up here.
Bobby: You don’t have to worry about that, Sheriff.
Sheriff: I’d kinda like to see this town die peaceful.

The film begins with voiceovers of Lewis and the other three men discussing their plan to go canoeing up the Cahulawassee River while they still have the chance (i.e., before it gets dammed up), with visuals of the construction workers beginning work on the dam. The novel, however, begins not only with Ed, as narrator, and the other three discussing their weekend plans, but also with his experience as the co-owner of a graphic art business/advertising agency, Emerson-Gentry.

He describes a photography session with a model wearing nothing but panties with the brand name of “Kitt’n Britches.” She is made to hold a cat; he gets turned on watching her holding one of her breasts in her hand while posing for the photo shoot. This scene gives us a sense of how he, as the co-owner of this business, is a capitalist exploiter enjoying his job ogling a pretty, seminude model. He isn’t completely comfortable with treating her like an object, though.

Indeed, one gets a sense that Ed is a sensitive liberal, with mixed feelings about the shoot: “I sat on the edge of a table and undid my tie. Inside the bright hardship of the lights was a peculiar blue, wholly painful, unmistakably man-made, unblinkable thing that I hated. It reminded me of prisons and interrogations, and that thought jumped straight at me. That was one side of it, all right, and the other was pornography. I thought of those films you see at fraternity parties and in officers’ clubs where you realize with terror that when the girl drops the towel the camera is not going to drop with it discreetly, as in old Hollywood films, following the bare feet until they hide behind a screen but is going to stay and when the towel falls, move in; that it is going to destroy someone’s womanhood by raping her secrecy; that there is going to be nothing left.” (pages 20-21)

All the same, towards the end of the novel, after he has returned from the ordeal of the canoeing trip, Ed–a married man with a son–takes the model out to dinner a couple of times (page 277).

His dishonesty to his wife, Martha, combined with his having lied to the Aintry cops about the deaths on and near the river, gives off the impression that Ed is an unreliable narrator (I’m not alone in this opinion: check Germane Jackson’s comment at the bottom of this link.). There is a sense that this story is much more wish-fulfillment on Ed’s part than a straightforward narrative. He wants to portray himself as a rugged hero, his nightmarish battle with nature a proving of his manhood.

This last point leads to one of the main themes of the novel: masculinity and its fragility. Lewis is Ed’s ideal of manhood, metaphorically a mirror to his narcissism. Now, while Drew’s loyalty to the law (his last name, Ballinger, sounds like a pun on barrister) suggests to Ed a sense of moral virtue (Drew is later deemed “the best of [them],” after his death), he hasn’t the manly strength Ed admires so much in Lewis. This lack of manliness is especially apparent in Bobby, the one who gets raped by the mountain man. Bobby’s surname, Trippe, is apt, for it suggests his awkwardness and ineffectuality.

Even Lewis’s supposed masculine perfection is compromised, however, when he breaks his leg, forcing Ed to be the hero. In this predicament we see Ed’s wish-fulfillment of having a chance to be like Lewis: his arduous climbing up the cliff and killing the toothless man (or so he thinks) are like a rite of passage for him. Without this test of manhood, Ed’s just a mild-mannered “city boy.” His surname, Gentry, suggests this softness.

Ed’s admiration for Lewis borders on, if it doesn’t lapse into, the homoerotic, with a passage in which Ed describes Lewis’s muscular, naked body with awe: “Lewis…was waist deep with water crumpling and flopping at his belly. I looked at him, for I have never seen him with his clothes off.
“Everything he had done for himself for years paid off as he stood there in his tracks, in the water. I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes. I had never seen such a male body in my life, even in the pictures in the weight-lifting magazines, for most of those fellows are short, and Lewis was about an even six feet. I’d say he weighed about 190. The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and when he moved, the veins in the moving part would surface. If you looked at him that way, he seems made out of well-matched red-brown chunks wrapped in blue wire. You could even see the veins in his gut, and I knew I could not even begin to conceive how many sit-ups and leg-raises–and how much dieting–had gone into bringing them into view.” (pages 102-103)

Since Ed’s wish-fulfilling narrative is unreliable, we can see the rape of Bobby as, in part, the projection of an unconscious wish on Ed’s part to be done by Lewis. Recall also that the arrow Lewis shoots into the back of the mountain man has not only saved Ed from having to perform fellatio on the toothless man, but also avenges Bobby’s rape, since Lewis’s phallic arrow rapes, if you will, the mountain man.

One’s sense of masculinity is assured in our society by winning in competitions of one sort or another. This competitiveness ranges everywhere from Ed’s life-and-death struggle to kill the toothless man to Drew’s innocuous duet with Lonnie on the guitar and banjo, respectively.

In the novel, the two musicians begin by playing “Wildwood Flower” (pages 59-60). In the film, of course, it’s the famous–and aptly named–“Duelling Banjos.” They smile at each other as they play, while all the other men around, local and visitor alike, enjoy the impromptu performance. One of the locals even dances to the tune; but when the competing musicians finish, and Drew wants to shake hands with Lonnie, the latter coldly turns his head away.

Part of the sense of competition is a belief in the supposed superiority of oneself over one’s rival. Accordingly, the four visitors tend to have a condescending attitude to the impoverished locals, who in return are gruff with them. Since I consider Ed to be an unreliable narrator (In Voight’s portrayal of him in the film, as well), his encounters of the inbred among the locals could be his imagination, another way for him to see himself as superior to those around him…except for Lewis.

Ed muses, “There is always something wrong with people in the country…In the comparatively few times I had ever been in the rural South, I had been struck by the number of missing fingers. Offhand, I had counted around twenty, at least. There had also been several people with some form of crippling or twisting illness, and some blind or one-eyed. No adequate medical treatment, maybe. But there was something else. You’d think that farming was a healthy life, with fresh air and fresh food and plenty of exercise, but I never saw a farmer who didn’t have something wrong with him, and most of the time obviously wrong; I never saw one who was physically powerful, either. Certainly there were none like Lewis.” (pages 55-56)

These four visitors are men with money, generally owners of businesses and private property, thus making them at least petite bourgeois; their social status contrasts them with the poor, working-class locals in this rural area near the river. To the locals, it will feel as if the four men are intruding on their territory, comparable to Western imperialists coming into and taking over the Third World. After all, competition over who gets to control land, resources, and the means of production is what capitalism is all about; and between the building of the dam (page 123) and these four intruders, the rural locals have a lot to be annoyed about.

The four men imagine they aren’t doing anything wrong because they don’t know what it’s like to live on a barely subsistence level: the rural locals do know that experience, and they resent richer people coming into their area and thinking they can do whatever they please there.

Since Ed is telling the story, he is going to portray himself and his three friends in the best possible light, and portray the locals in the most unflattering way possible, too. For this reason, we should take his narration with a generous grain of salt, and seriously consider what possible details he’s leaving out: the goodness of the locals, and the wrongs that he and his friends have quite possibly, if not probably, done to the locals.

Part of how Ed’s narration is distorting the facts is how he’s projecting his and his friends’ faults and wrongdoing onto the rural people and their setting. In the film, while the four men are camping at night, Lewis suddenly wanders off because he thinks he’s heard something (i.e., is somebody stalking them?). In the novel, Ed thinks he hears a man howling before going to sleep in his tent. Then he dreams about the model in the Kitt’n Britches panties being clawed in the buttocks by the cat. Then he wakes up, turns on a flashlight, and sees an owl with its talons on the tent…is this meant to be an omen, or just him projecting his own ill will onto his environment? By his own admission, “There was nothing, after all, so dangerous about an owl.” (pages 86-88)

Ed shares such fears with us in order to make himself and his friends into the victims, to conceal the fact that they’re actually the victimizers, covering up their murders of the mountain man and toothless man while trying to win the reader’s sympathy.

Interspersed sporadically throughout the novel, oblique and metaphorical references to war and imperialist concepts can be found by the careful reader. Examples include Ed calling his employees his “captives” and his “prisoners” (page 17); there’s the above-mentioned reference to “prisons and interrogations” and to porno films watched in “officers’ clubs” (page 20); when he and Lewis drive off from Ed’s home to go on the canoeing trip, he speaks of himself and his friend as seeming like “advance commandos of some invading force” (page 35); when he reaches the wilderness and gets out of the car, he looks in the rear window and sees himself as a “guerrilla, hunter” (page 69); when the four men have pitched their tents, Ed feels “a good deal better,” for they have “colonized the place” (page 83); he and his friends would “found [a] kingdom” (page 103); according to Lewis, the locals consider anyone outside the rural area to be unwanted “furriners” (pages 123-124); Ed confesses, “I was a killer” (page 173); later, he muses how “It was strange to be a murderer” (page 232); he speaks of the river “finding a way to serve” him, including collages he’s made, one of which hangs in an employee’s cubicle, “full of sinuous forms threading among the headlines of war” (page 276); finally, Lewis makes a reference to “Those gooks” (page 278).

All of these quotes taken together suggest that this 1970 novel, taking place mostly in the wilderness and involving the killing of two local men, as well as the apparent shooting of Drew, could be seen as an allegory of the American whitewashing of such imperialist wars as those of Korea and Vietnam. The above-mentioned quotes can also be seen as Freudian slips, meaning that Ed has repressed possible traumatic war experiences, making them resurface in the unrecognizable form of a weekend canoeing…except the quotes give away what’s really happened.

In this reimagined scenario, Lewis as the outdoorsman, survivalist, and Ed’s macho ideal, is the squad commander, barking orders at Bobby in their shared canoe. Ed is second-in-command, a former officer in one or two wars, I suspect (hence his reference above to “officers’ clubs” watching porno films), as Lewis was. Bobby and Drew are the weaker, less-experienced NCOs.

The Georgia wilderness symbolizes the jungles of Vietnam and wilderness of pre-industrialized Korea. The river can symbolize either a path our four ‘troops’ are walking on; or the Mekong, once controlled by the French; or it could be a river like the Nung River that Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen) would go on in Apocalypse Now; or it could be compared to the river that Marlow‘s steamboat goes on in Heart of Darkness. The weekend canoe trip, then, is symbolically an imperialist intrusion into an impoverished land whose people would free themselves from colonialism, if only they could.

Ed doesn’t tell the story anywhere near like my interpretation, though, because he’d rather portray himself and his friends as the victims, and depict the two men they have murdered as the victimizers. Western propaganda similarly portrayed North Korea and North Vietnam as the communist aggressors, and the American military as the heroes attempting to bring ‘freedom and democracy’ to the Koreans and Vietnamese. We’ve all heard these lies before, as with the Gulf of Tonkin incident and endless propaganda against the DPRK.

Hollywood has made movie after movie about the suffering of American soldiers in Vietnam, while giving short shrift to the suffering of the Vietnamese; also, they tend to make the Americans into the heroes and stereotype the Vietnamese as villains, prostitutes, backward peasant farmers, etc., though some films are better, or worse, than others in this regard. Similarly, though M.A.S.H. vilified Koreans far less, their experience is no less marginalized or stereotyped in the movie and TV show. This misrepresentation and marginalizing can be seen to be paralleled in Ed’s negative portrayal of the locals, and in his unreliable narration of the rape and sniper passages in the novel and film.

Anyone who has done the research knows that the US escalated the Vietnam war, rationalizing American military aggression with the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident, then committed such atrocities as the My Lai massacre, napalm attacks scarring such locals as Phan Thị Kim Phúc, as well as the troops’ widespread raping of Vietnamese women. The rape of Bobby and the near-sexual assault of Ed, apart from being the homoerotic projections I described above regarding Ed’s feelings about Lewis, can also be seen as projections of Ed’s own guilt, symbolic of the guilt of American soldiers in such places as Korea and Vietnam.

For here is the core of Ed’s trauma, as I see it: it isn’t so much what the rural locals (in my allegory, the North Koreans and the Vietcong) may have done to him, but the guilt of what he and those with him did to them. The only way he can cope with his guilt is to repress the memories, to transform them into an unrecognizable fake memory (his and Lewis’s crimes reimagined as acts of self-defence), and to project his own guilt onto the locals (i.e., those inhabiting the Georgian wilderness symbolizing the Koreans and the Vietnamese as victims of US imperialism, as I’d have it.)

And instead of being a villain who murdered locals, Ed can fancy himself and Lewis as heroes, avenging a rape, and climbing a steep cliff and saving his friends from the toothless sniper…if that’s even the man Ed has killed!

Ed’s ogling of the Kitt’n Britches model during the photo shoot, and especially his dream of the cat clawing at her ass, can be seen as symbolic of rapes and prostitution in Korea and Vietnam, censored by his superego to make them less anxiety-provoking. The fact that he thinks of her on several occasions while in the Georgian wilderness, which as I mentioned above is symbolic of the jungles of Vietnam, even further solidifies the symbolic link between her and the sexual exploitation of Korean and Vietnamese women and girls by US troops.

By now, Dear Reader, you may be skeptical of my imposing of US imperialism onto this story. There is, after all, not a shred of proof anywhere in the novel or the film that Ed, Lewis, Bobby, and Drew are vets of the Korean or Vietnam wars. But consider the alternative. The novel was published in 1970; the film came out in 1972. The story takes place more or less in the present (i.e., at that time), or maybe a year or two before. There is no indication of it happening at a far earlier time, so we can only assume it takes place some time between 1970 and 1972.

In the novel, the four men are middle-aged. In the film, though, they are considerably younger, between 33 and 36, going by the actors’ ages at the time (Voight’s having been 33), or perhaps a few years older. Some of the motivation for having younger actors may have been because moviegoers prefer to sympathize with younger, better-looking people; but Ned Beatty’s character doesn’t need to be younger, and nor does Ronny Cox’s. Burt Reynolds’s character is 38 or 39 years of age (page 6), only a few years older than Reynolds was at the time. If we imagine the film’s characters to be in their late 30s, then all four of them may have been drafted into the Korean War, twenty years earlier.

My point about the novel as allegorical of a whitewashed imperialist war experience isn’t dependent on whether or not these four men actually served in the Korean or Vietnam wars, but their involvement in them isn’t to be ruled out, either, just because it isn’t mentioned in the novel. Lewis, at the age of 18 or 19, would have been drafted into the Korean War in 1950, ’51, or ’52; and Ed (in his late 40s in the novel), Bobby, and Drew must have been drafted, at ages between their late 20s and 30, in 1950, because in that year, all men between 18-and-a-half and 35 would have had to sign up.

The men may also have joined voluntarily for service in the Vietnam War (at least two thirds of those who served were volunteers). They’re too straight (15b definition) and bourgeois to be the draft card burning type (their higher socio-economic status, education, and ages in the mid-Sixties would have presumably made them officers). For men of their age, the patriotic American, anti-commie type would have been standard enough of an attitude to make them likely to have volunteered.

Even though it’s never mentioned, I’d say they must have done tours of duty in Korea. Though they were too old to have been drafted into serving in Vietnam, they would have been the right age for Korea. At least Ed would have served in Korea, since Lewis (his macho ideal), Bobby, and Drew may be figments of Ed’s imagination, transformations in his unconscious mind of old army buddies. If Lewis isn’t an imaginary character, his rugged, outdoorsman, macho personality would likely have made him want to sign up for Vietnam.

Ed’s never mentioning having done any service in the Korean War, then–apart from it having been too distant a memory to preoccupy him consciously–can easily be attributed to repression, while those indirect and metaphorical references to war, colonialism, and imperialism can be seen as fragments of Korean (or possibly also Vietnam) War memories slipping out. Given the year that the story is set in, and that the four men were young enough and sufficiently able-bodied in the early 50s to have served in Korea, I’d say that, if anything, it’s harder to believe that they haven’t served than that they have.

The trauma of Ed’s guilt and his fight to survive the ambushes of the wartime enemy are enough to force him to bury the pain in his unconscious and to have it reappear in a much less painful form–a weekend canoe trip gone horribly wrong, with him killing only one man instead of many Koreans (and possibly Vietnamese), with his and Lewis’s two killings remembered as acts in self-defence, as “justifiable homicide” rather than as a string of wartime atrocities.

And instead of Ed witnessing–and allowing–the multiple rapes and prostitution of Korean (and possibly also Vietnamese) women, his unconscious transforms these into one rape of one of his buddies and an attempted sexual assault on himself, a projection of his guilt turning the victimizers into the victims.

And instead of Ed and his fellow officers (Lewis, Bobby, and Drew, by chance?) raping and/or enjoying the sexual services of a number of Korean (and maybe Vietnamese) prostitutes, Ed can imagine it was really just him ogling a model wearing nothing but panties (recall the mountain man in the film saying to Bobby, “Them panties, take ’em off,” and “get them britches down”) during a photo session that reminds him of being in an officers’ club watching a porno (page 20); then later, he dates her behind his wife’s back.

Instead of being guilty of terrible crimes, it turns out that Ed was just a little naughty. That’s not so bad, is it? This is his “deliverance” from a much more terrible trauma. Even when he makes love to his wife, Martha, he fantasizes about the model and her “gold eye” (page 28). Fantasizing about making love to her, instead of raping her, is his “deliverance” from guilt, for “it promised other things, another life.”

Ed’s difficult climb up the cliff is described in sexual language: “…I would begin to try to inch upward again, moving with the most intimate motions of my body, motions I had never dared use with Martha, or with any other human woman. Fear and a kind of enormous moon-blazing sexuality lifted me, millimeter by millimeter. And yet I held madly to the human. I looked for a slice of gold like the model’s in the river: some kind of freckle, something lovable, in the huge serpent-shape of light.” (page 176)

Later, Ed says, “It was painful, but I was going. I was crawling, but it was no longer necessary to make love to the cliff, to fuck it for an extra inch or two in the moonlight…If I was discreet, I could offer it a kick or two, even, and get away with it.” (page 177) This aggressively sexual language, once again with a reference to the model (previous paragraph), is another example of the symbolically imperialistic rape of the land the visitors have imposed on the locals.

Yet Ed is mostly preoccupied with describing the difficulty of the climb, especially for a man with aches and pains all over his body, as for example, here: “My feet slanted painfully in one direction or another. Guided by what kind of guesswork I could not say, I kept scrambling and stumbling upward like a creature born on the cliff and coming home. Often a hand or foot would slide and then catch on something I knew, without knowing, would be there, and I would go on up. There was nothing it could do against me, in the end; there was nothing it could do that I could not match, and, in the twinkling of some kind of eye-beat. I was going.” (page 177) His description of his battle with nature is thus more of him twisting things around and making himself the victim, and his surroundings the victimizer of sorts. It’s also him glorifying himself as a conquering hero, overcoming the cliff, and worthy of Lewis’s admiration.

When Ed shoots his arrow into the hunter he believes to be the toothless man, he falls from the tree he’s been hiding in and stabs another arrow into his side (pages 192-193). His aim of the arrow is shaky in the extreme, as you can see in Voight’s aim in the movie; his aim was just as shaky as when he shot at and missed the deer (page 97). This shakiness is to give us a sense of the “I kill’d not thee with half so good a will,” that Ed is somehow an unwilling murderer, to win our sympathy.

Ed describes himself as coming to be at one with the man he’s about to kill: “I had thought so long and hard about him that to this day I still believe I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me; an indifference not only to the other man’s body scrambling and kicking on the ground with an arrow through it, but also to mine. If Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods, and it was strange to think of it.” (page 180).

Ed stabbing himself with the second arrow when hitting the man with the first reinforces this sense of oneness with his victim. Later, Ed gets mad at Bobby, and says in the narration: “I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby, you incompetent asshole, you soft city country-club man,” (page 201) this urge to point the gun at Bobby being once again Ed’s identification with the toothless man. Since, right or wrong, he imagines his victim to be the toothless man who was about to make him suck his cock, Ed is again projecting his own violent attitude onto his victim. As with Lewis shooting an arrow into Bobby’s rapist, Ed is raping his victim with his own phallic arrow.

As with the mountain man put in the ground (which will later be under water once the dam has been built–page 275), this new victim has to be buried in the water. These two burials symbolize guilt repressed into the unconscious. That repressed guilt, however, resurfaces in an unrecognized form; in the first of these cases, it’s the rapids that throw the men out of their canoes, destroying one of them and breaking Lewis’s leg. In the second case, recall the very end of the film.

Lewis insists that Drew has been shot. Ed isn’t so sure of this, especially when he finds Drew’s body and sees the bloody injury on his head. Is it the grazing of a bullet, or is it from his head having cracked against a rock? (page 217) He says he’s never seen a gunshot wound; maybe as an officer, he was behind a desk the whole time in Korea, or maybe he wasn’t all that close to the enemy he was shooting at…or maybe he’s lying again.

Since Drew was outvoted in the decision to bury the mountain man, he may have fallen out of his canoe not from having been shot, but from emotional exhaustion at having done something his conscience could not bear. Certainly that’s how it looks when we see Cox’s face before he falls out of the canoe in the movie; we don’t see his body jerk from having been shot.

If Drew hasn’t been shot, then Lewis’s insistence that he has–coupled with Ed’s determination to kill a hunter who, possibly if not probably, isn’t the toothless man–is yet another example of these men projecting their guilt outwards; the same way American imperialists in Korea and Vietnam were projecting their quest for world dominance onto those ‘commie reds.’

Lewis’s preoccupation with survivalism fits well in the context of my allegory, since he imagines all of civilization crumbling, necessitating man’s survival in the wild; the succumbing of civilization to nature here symbolizes the the capitalist West succumbing to communism. Cold War fears were like that back then. “Machines are gonna fail and the system’s gonna fail…then, survival. Who has the ability to survive? That’s the game – survive,” Lewis says in the film. As we know, though, it is nature that succumbs to civilization when the dam is built…and we all know who won the Cold War.

As Ed, Bobby, and Lewis are coming out of the wilderness and approaching a populated area, Ed must construct a plausible story and make sure that Bobby’s and Lewis’s accounts of it don’t contradict each other’s or Ed’s. As he says of his and Lewis’s crimes to Bobby, “we’ve got to make it unhappen.” (page 210)

This lying is, of course, necessary to avoid getting charged with murder by the local sheriff (in the film, played by Dickey), whose deputy, Queen, already suspects Ed of wrongdoing. Similarly, the US has avoided being held responsible for its war crimes by whitewashing history and portraying itself as “exceptional” and ‘defending the free world.’

Now, lying to the police about the supposed innocence of him and his friends isn’t enough to ease Ed’s mind; to assuage his conscience, he must alter the whole narrative and make himself and his friends seem as innocent as possible. This is why I believe he is an unreliable narrator.

He cannot deny that he and Lewis have committed deliberate murders; to claim to have killed men they haven’t would go against the tendencious bias of the narrative. So instead of denying murderous intent, they must rationalize the murders as acts of self-defence.

Though in the film, Ed has “got a real pretty mouth,” according to the toothless man, who happens to be ogling then 33-year-old, handsome Jon Voight, in the novel, Ed is supposed to be in his late forties, at an age far less likely to have “a real pretty mouth.” Similarly, the mountain man would have to have more than unusually perverted tastes to want to sodomize an obese, middle-aged man who “squeal[s] like a pig.”

When people are proven liars, anything they say is suspect; everything they say after having been found out as liars is doubted until strong evidence is provided that they’re telling the truth. It would be far more believable to imagine the mountain man and toothless man wanting to beat up and/or kill Ed and Bobby (for their insulting remarks about making whiskey–page 109) than it is to believe they’d want to rape them.

To be sure, it’s far from impossible to believe Ed’s and Bobby’s attackers really rape them; it just isn’t all that likely, and given Ed’s propensity to lie, that makes sexual assault all the less likely. What’s more, since he and Bobby look down on the locals as inbred ‘white trash,’ the way racist US troops looked down on East Asians as filthy, uncivilized ‘gooks,’ Ed’s portraying of them as loathsome rapist perverts is a perfect way to scorn and vilify the mountain man and toothless man, thus making it easier to kill them.

Here’s another point: of what relevance to the main narrative on the river is Ed’s preoccupation with a model wearing nothing but pretty panties? With so many references to her while in the wilderness, what’s the point of her involvement in the story other than to reinforce our sense of Ed’s sexual obsessions, manifested also in his description of Lewis’s body and in his ‘making love’ with the cliff? This is why I suspect that the rape of Bobby and near sexual assault on Ed are just projections of Ed’s own aggressive sexual feelings.

One of the tag lines of the film is, “What did happen on the Cahulawassee River?” I’d say that that’s a good question. We, the readers, and we who saw the movie, don’t really know what happened: we only know Ed’s version of the story. We know he killed a man, one who may well not have been his attacker. We know Lewis killed a man. We have reasonable doubts as to whether or not these homicides were justified.

Ed has to change their story when he learns that the cops have found the busted canoe, or parts of it, further back down the river from where Ed and Bobby have claimed that it crashed (page 245). This means more lying.

Ed claims that his fascination with the half-naked model is because of a “gold-glowing mote” in her eye (page 22), rather than with the contents of her Kitt’n Britches. We’re supposed to buy this. He takes her out to dinner a few times (page 277), then loses interest in her (Remember, he’s a married man with a son.). Really? He never took her to bed? He’s clearly trying to make his lust seem as harmless as possible. The connotations of his surname, Gentry, seem to have less to do with him (a capitalist) being a gentleman than they do with the notion of gentry as an upper social class.

Indeed, the fragile masculine ego, with its incessant need to compete with and outdo other men–in sex, in fighting, and in skillfulness in general–is bound up with competitive capitalism and class conflict, especially in its modern, late stage, imperialist form. This is partially why I link the Korean and Vietnam Wars to this novel. War is the ultimate struggle of man against man, and of man against nature, as seen in Deliverance.

By the end of the novel, the dam is up, and the river is now Lake Cahula (page 277). Drew and the men he and Lewis have killed are “going deeper and deeper, piling fathoms and hundreds of tons of pressure and darkness on themselves, falling farther and farther out of sight, farther and farther from any influence on the living.” (page 275) Ed can sleep better now. The bodies are further and further buried under the water, symbol of the unconscious.

Yet as I said above, whatever gets repressed always resurfaces. Dickey ends his novel peacefully, with Ed’s loss of interest in the model (an interest that was tied up with the river [!]), with him still practicing archery with Lewis, with Bobby moving to Hawaii, and with real estate people and college-age kids showing an interest in the Cahula Lake area as a place to live (page 278).

The film, however, ends with Ed waking up from a nightmare in which the hand of the toothless man surfaces from the water, a clear return of the repressed. In the novel, Ed can’t sleep because he’s looking out his bedroom window, wondering if a car is going to arrive on his driveway with a warrant for his arrest (page 273).

Even in the novel’s peaceful ending, the careful reader can sense a continued intrusiveness on the Cahula Lake area. Real estate people want to seize the area for private property. Young high school grads are thinking of living there. Lewis, in discussing Zen and archery, says, “Those gooks are right.” (page 278), an oblique reference, in my opinion, to the imperialists’ racist attitude to the people of the East Asian countries they’ve bombed, napalmed, and raped.

Our memories of the atrocities committed in the Korean and Vietnam wars are similarly fading into oblivion, thanks to whitewashing and repression. But it all comes back, however indirectly, in new forms…as it has over the years in continuing threats to the DPRK and China. We’ll just have to wait and hope for a deliverance from those threats.

James Dickey, Deliverance, New York, Delta Trade Paperbacks, 1970

Analysis of ‘The Boys from Brazil’

The Boys from Brazil is a 1978 thriller film directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and written by Heywood Gould, based on Ira Levin‘s novel of the same name. It stars Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier, with James Mason, Lilli Palmer, Uta Hagen, Steve Guttenberg, John Rubinstein, Anne Meara, Denholm Elliott, Walter Gotell, Michael Gough, Rosemary Harris, John Dehner, and Jeremy Black.

Dr. Josef Mengele (Peck) is trying to revive Hitler by cloning him 94 times and paralleling Hitler’s life by, at this point in it, having all the clones’ adoptive fathers killed when the clones (played by Black) are around thirteen/fourteen years old. Nazi hunter Ezra Lieberman (Olivier) has learned of the planned assassinations and is trying to piece together what Mengele is doing.

While the film had a generally positive reception, with praise for Peck’s and Olivier’s performances, some critics have considered the plot to be dubious, even ludicrous, and the acting to be inane and overwrought, with bad imitations of accents. I consider this film worth analyzing, though, because it can be seen as an allegory on the danger of a revival of the far right, which has been happening in recent years in many parts of the world. Hence, though this film’s praise has been far from universal, it is an extremely relevant one for our times.

Here are some quotes:

Barry Kohler: Okay, I’m running it down now. It will only take a second.
Ezra Lieberman: Take your time, old men don’t go back to sleep once they’ve been awakened.

“[Mengele was] the chief doctor of Auschwitz, who killed two and a half million people, experimented on children – Jewish and non-Jewish – using twins mostly, injecting blue dyes into their eyes to make them acceptable Aryans… amputating limbs and organs from thousands without anesthetics.” –Lieberman, speaking to Sidney Beynon about why he is searching for Josef Mengele

Sidney Beynon: Have you any idea how many men in their mid-60s die every day?
Ezra Lieberman: I try not to think about it.

“Would you like me to tell you who really killed him? God. To set free a stupid little farm girl after twenty-two years of unhappiness. Do Nazis answer prayers, Herr Lieberman? No, that is God’s business and I have thanked Him every night since He pushed Emil under that car. He could have done it sooner, but I thank Him anyway.” –Mrs. Doring (Rosemary Harris), to Lieberman

Lofquist: Good God man, you are an officer of the SS! Have you forgotten? ‘My honour is loyalty.’ Those words were supposed to be engraved on your soul.
Mundt (Walter Gotell): It isn’t Lundberg…[throws Lofquist off the dam, watches him fall to his death]…and it doesn’t have to be Saturday.

“Are you, my SD Chief of Security, telling me that a project twenty years and millions of dollars in the making will be dropped because of this insignificant impotent old Jew?” –Mengele, to Seibert

“You’re not a guard now, madame! You are a prisoner! I may leave here today empty handed. But you… are not going anywhere.” –Lieberman, to Frieda Maloney

“He betrayed me, he betrayed you, he betrayed the Aryan race!” –Mengele, of Mundt

Gertrud: [Mengele has just knocked Mundt to the floor] Get a doctor!
Dr. Josef Mengele: I *am* a doctor, idiot.
Gertrud: Don’t you come near him!
Dr. Josef Mengele: Shut up, you ugly bitch.

Eduard Seibert: [after discovery of Mengele’s plan by Lieberman] The operation has been terminated.
Dr. Josef Mengele: Terminated… by whose authority?
Eduard Seibert: General Rausch… and the Colonels.
Dr. Josef Mengele: [enraged] I told you… I told you from the beginning! Kill him! Kill him! It would have been so easy!

Eduard Seibert: Your operation has been cancelled.
Dr. Josef Mengele: No, *your* operation has been cancelled! Mine continues. [raising his hand] Heil Hitler.

Professor Bruckner: Cloning. What if I were to tell you that I could take a scraping of skin from your finger and create another Ezra Lieberman?
Ezra Lieberman: I would tell you not to waste your time on my finger.

[Bruckner begins listing the boys’ common features on a chalkboard] Professor Bruckner: Now, Mengele would certainly know that every social and environmental detail would have to be reproduced. Thus, if the parents were divorced when the boy was ten, this would have to be arranged…
Ezra Lieberman: [in horrified realization] Dr. Bruckner… the one who is cloned, the donor, he has to be alive, doesn’t he?
Professor Bruckner: Not necessarily. Individual cells, taken from a donor, can be preserved indefinitely. With a sample of Mozart’s blood, and the women, someone with the skill and equipment could breed a few hundred baby Mozarts. My God… if it’s really been done, what I’d give to see one of those boys. [turns around and sees the room is empty] Herr Lieberman?

“Not Mozart. Not Picasso. Not a genius who will enrich the world. But a lonely little boy with a domineering father, a customs officer who was 52 when he was born. And an affectionate doting mother who was 29. The father died when he was 65 when the boy was nearly 14… Adolf Hitler.” –Lieberman, to Bruckner

Ezra Lieberman: Did you kill Wheelock?
Dr. Josef Mengele: [sarcastically] No, he’s in the kitchen mixing us some cocktails!

“Do you know what I saw on the television in my motel room at one o’clock this morning? Films of Hitler! They are showing films about the war! The movement! People are fascinated! The time is ripe! Adolf Hitler is alive!” [Takes photo album and places it on his lap] “This album is full of pictures of him. Bobby Wheelock and ninety-three other boys are exact genetic duplicates of him, bred entirely from his cells. He allowed me to take half a liter of his blood and a cutting of skin from his ribs.” [laughs] “We were in a Biblical frame of mind on the twenty-third of May 1943, at the Berghof. He had denied himself children because he knew that no son could flourish in the shadow of so godlike a father! But when he heard what was theoretically possible, that I could create one day not his son, not even a carbon-copy but another original, he was thrilled by the idea! The right Hitler for the right future! A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, the 1990s, 2000s!” –Mengele, to Lieberman

Dr. Josef Mengele: You are a clever boy. Are you not? You do not do well at school, but it’s because you are too clever. Too busy, thinking your own thoughts. But you are much smarter than your teachers, hah?
Bobby Wheelock: My teachers are nowhere.
Dr. Josef Mengele: You are going to be the world’s greatest photographer, are you not? Have you ever felt superior to those around you? Like a prince among peasants?
Bobby Wheelock: I feel different from everyone sometimes.
Dr. Josef Mengele: You are infinitely different. Infinitely superior. You are born of the noblest blood in the world. You have it within you to fulfill ambitions one thousand times greater than those at which you presently dream, and you shall fulfill them, Bobby. You shall. You are the living duplicate of the greatest man in history. [raising his hand in a heil motion] Adolf Hitler.
Bobby Wheelock: Oh man, you’re weird.

Dr. Josef Mengele: Bobby!
Bobby Wheelock: [screaming] You freaked out maniac! [to dogs] Bite!

David Bennett: We have the right and we have the duty.
Ezra Lieberman: To do what? To kill children?

The movie begins in Paraguay where Barry Kohler (Guttenberg)–a former member of the militant Young Jewish Defenders, but who now works alone, like Lieberman–has been tracking down members of the far-right Comrades organization. Through the help of a Paraguayan boy named Ismael (played by Raul Faustino Saldanha), Kohler is able to plant a bug to record a meeting of these ex-Nazis, chaired by Mengele in his mansion.

What is significant about having so much of this story associated with South America (Hitler clone babies born in Brazil, these Nazis in Paraguay) goes far beyond the obvious fact that many ex-Nazi war criminals went there to hide and avoid being brought to justice. Fascism is the logical extreme of capitalism and imperialism; and South America, as “the backyard of the US,” has been dominated by the US for decades and decades.

Any attempt by South, Central, and other Latin American countries to liberate themselves from the yoke of US imperialism, through democratically electing leftist governments, is thwarted either by CIA-influenced coups (Chile in 1973, Bolivia in 2019, Guatemala in 1954, to give a few examples) that install right-wing dictatorships, or it is sabotaged through starvation sanctions (Venezuela). So a movie with Nazis in the land of Operation Condor is chillingly fitting.

Kohler and Ismael are discovered for having bugged the room where the meeting is held. As Mengele is walking before a lineup of the Latino servants (including Ismael) while holding the removed bug, it is interesting to see the stark contrast between the Nazis, as domineering members of the white bourgeoisie, and the swarthy servants, as the intimidated proletariat.

Oh, the difference between the First and Third Worlds. Mengele is aptly wearing a white suit.

Kohler and Ismael are killed, but Mengele, before giving the order to kill the boy, gives him an avuncular smile–another chilling contrast.

Gregory Peck researched his role thoroughly, for he shows the same affected charm to children that Mengele was known to have shown. Back when Mengele was doing his sadistic medical experiments on Jewish and Romani children in the Nazi concentration camps, he was called the “Angel of Death.”

He charmed the little kids (typically twins), giving them candy, etc., before doing such sick things to them as injecting blue dye into their eyes (to make them “acceptable Aryans”), amputating limbs, removing organs, or sewing kids together–without anaesthetic–to make them into conjoined twins. One story of him doing this last, cruel operation on a pair of Roma children, who later died of gangrene after days of being in agony, is especially heart-breaking.

Lieberman has received the tip from Kohler about the planned murders of those 94 men (Europeans, Canadians, and Americans, mostly civil servants), and he begins his investigation. The problem is, Lieberman is no longer listened to or taken seriously. Such a change in fortune is symbolic of mainstream liberal society’s growing apathy to the dangers of fascism. Sidney Beynon (Elliott) finds Lieberman annoying, and tries to avoid him.

Similarly, over the past ten years, there has been minimal outrage over the US’s replacing Yanukovych‘s Ukrainian government with one tolerating neo-Nazis, or over far-right politician Marine LePen‘s near victory in France, or the fascist rumblings in Poland, Greece (though suffering a setback, Golden Dawn could rise again), Austria, or Spain…to say nothing of Bolsonaro in Brazil, Añez in Bolivia, or, of course, Trump, with his concentration camps for immigrant kids, his apologist attitude towards the right-wing militias attacking BLM protestors, and the federal officers shoving Portland, Oregon protestors into vans to be taken God knows where.

As Lieberman interviews the widows (Harris, Meara) of the men killed so far, certain patterns emerge: the murdered fathers are in their mid-sixties, while the mothers are much younger. Each family has a son about 13 or 14 years old…and the boys look exactly alike! Even their personalities are similar: gruff, rude, belligerent…the hallmarks of a spoiled child. The fathers are similarly gruff and harsh-tempered, and the mothers generally dote on their boys.

When Lieberman learns that the boys are adopted, that’s when he starts to put it all together. Furthermore, the adoption arrangements were done by Frieda Maloney (Hagen), an ex-Nazi who, as a guard in a camp, “strangled young girls with their own hair, bayonetted infants,” and who is now incarcerated. He goes to the prison holding her and interviews her there, tolerating her antisemitic taunts as best he can.

Through this interview, he learns where and when a victim will soon be hunted down: a man named Henry Wheelock (Dehner) in Pennsylvania, owner of a number of Doberman pinschers trained to attack and kill anyone who might threaten his life.

Meanwhile, General Rausch and the colonels leading the Comrades organization are getting nervous about what Lieberman is finding out, so they finally terminate Mengele’s operation, infuriating him and making him carry on alone. The lack of commitment of Colonel Eduard Seibert (Mason) and the others to the Nazi cause parallels, on the other side of the political spectrum, Lieberman’s lack of commitment to the antifascist cause at the end of the film, when he refuses to give David Bennett (Rubinstein) the list of names and addresses of all the Hitler clones so the Young Jewish Defenders can kill them.

Lieberman learns about cloning through an expert on the subject, Professor Bruckner (Bruno Ganz, who incidentally also played Hitler, decades later, in Downfall). Though many critics considered the film’s portrayal of the cloning of a man to be scientifically ludicrous, I think we should focus instead on what the cloning symbolizes.

While fascism today obviously isn’t and cannot be the same as it was back in the 1920s and 1930s, the same basic ingredients for its resurgence today are here as they were back then. Fascism is an ideology promoted and allowed to grow by the ruling class whenever their power and privileges are threatened by a working class uprising.

Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, et al all rose to power as a response to failed socialist revolutions in their respective countries. Similarly, in today’s world, left-wing anger towards the excesses of neoliberalism has resulted in right-wing reactions like Trump, Bolsonaro, Añez, etc. They’re not exactly the same as the old Nazi reactions of the 1930s, of course, but neither are the Hitler clones exactly the same (in personality) as Hitler.

Bobby Wheelock, the closest approximation the movie offers to Hitler, is a photographer, not a painter. Though his father, Henry, has a gruff personality comparable to that of Alois Hitler, and Henry has racist attitudes of his own (he claims that it’s “the niggers” that Americans need to worry about, not the Nazis [!]), Bobby clearly loves his adoptive father, and avenges his murder by sicking his Dobermans on Mengele (ironically making ‘Hitler’ the hero of the film). When Alois died, however, little Adolf wasn’t exactly heartbroken, for now he could freely pursue his dream of becoming an artist and be spoiled by his mother, Klara.

A number of details about Hitler’s life don’t seem to have been paralleled in the clones. Little Adolf had a younger brother, Edmund, whose death had a profound effect on the future Führer. While Edmund was alive, little Adolf was a happy, confident boy who did well at school; after Edmund died, little Adolf grew bitter and morose, and his academic performance declined, leading ultimately to his quitting high school at about 16, his underachievement as a young man, and the frustration he must have felt from his failures.

Furthermore, Alois Hitler was a patriotic Austrian, loyal to the Habsburg Monarchy; whereas Adolf cultivated German nationalism, which I suspect was, at least unconsciously, meant as a big “screw you” to the father who had beat him and tried to dominate his life. I suspect that the Anschluß gave Hitler glee from the thought of dominating the country Alois had so loved.

None of these historical issues are dealt with in the film. (If they are dealt with in Levin’s novel, which I haven’t read, anyone who has read it can enlighten me in the comments below–I’d appreciate that.) It seems odd that families capable of having their own kids (i.e., ‘Edmund’ equivalents) would be eager to adopt, even to the point of being rejected by adoption agencies until the Comrades organization offered them babies. And how would every adoptive father’s nationalism be guaranteed?

Still, with all these differences from the life of the actual Hitler, the clones still seem dangerously close to their original, especially Bobby Wheelock, who in an added final scene (with a similar ending in Levin’s novel), admires his photos of the bloody Nazi and Jewish visitors to his house, and gazes with awe at Mengele’s jaguar-claw bracelet.

The scene before that one, with Lieberman in hospital and Bennett visiting him, disappointed a number of critics. Bennett and the Young Jewish Defenders want to find and kill the boys, while Lieberman takes on the wishy-washy liberal attitude that killing innocent children makes the killers no better than Nazis.

The point is that the Hitler clones are too dangerous to be left alive, free to develop, grow to adulthood, and be whatever kind of men they will be. The cruelty of killing teenage boys must be weighed against the cruelty of allowing 94 potential fascists to rise up and, quite possibly, take over the world, then kill millions of Jewish, Roma, and other children.

The logic of killing the Hitler clones is understood in a symbolic, not a literal, sense. The clones symbolize the resurgence of fascism, something we’re seeing today, as I pointed out above, and something Levin was prophesying. That the boys are clones is symbolic of how like-minded far right-wing thinkers are: embracing capitalism, hating foreigners, pushing for state authoritarianism and ultra-traditionalism, promoting patriotic historical narratives, using violence to achieve their ends, and not thinking independently.

In contrast, the ideological differences between different leftist groups (anarchists, Marxist-Leninists, Trotskyists, etc.) are huge…hence, our difficulties in uniting against the right. Moderate conservatives, and even some liberals, find reason to unite with (or at least wink at) fascism if their class privileges are threatened; hence, the current revival of fascism that Levin’s novel and this film are warning us about.

What many fail to appreciate is that fascism never really died…it just went underground, as the Comrades organization represents in the movie. The Nuremberg trials were more of a show than anything else. Many ex-Nazis not only went unpunished, but were given jobs in the American and West German governments, the rationalization being that they were needed to help fight the communists during the Cold War. Small wonder East Germans built the Berlin Wall, calling it the Anti-fascist Protection Rampart.

So, when Mengele says that his clones are “A Hitler tailor-made for the 1980s, the 1990s, 2000s,” we should understand what he means in an allegorical sense. The novel and film should be seen as a prophecy for our times. When Mengele tells Lieberman he was in his motel watching TV programs about Hitler, and that “People are fascinated!” and “The time is ripe,” this should be understood as a foretelling of the contemporary resurgence of fascism.

If Peck’s Mengele and the other Nazis in the film seem absurd to you, consider how absurd fascist ideology is in general. ‘If your life is hard, don’t blame the rich–blame foreigners for taking away your jobs! Blame the Jews: after all, capitalism is bad only when they practice it! Fight imperialist wars to strengthen the Motherland–get your aggression and hatred out of your system in that way!’ Far too many people take these idiotic ideas seriously, so the film’s over-the-top acting is fitting.

On the other hand, there’s the liberal who either trivializes the fascist threat, or ignorantly equates fascism with communism: this is the thanks the Red Army gets for having done most of the work defeating the Nazis, losing about 27 million Soviet lives.

This is why studying history is so important.

Analysis of ‘A Shock to the System’

A Shock to the System is a 1990 American black comedy crime thriller written for the screen by Andrew Klavan and directed by Jan Egleson, based on the 1984 novel by British author Simon Brett. The film stars Michael Caine and Elizabeth McGovern, with Peter Riegert, Will Patton, John McMartin, and Swoosie Kurtz.

The film’s delightfully quirky soundtrack was composed by Gary Chang, with its string quartet pizzicatos, marimba, etc. The tagline, “Climbing the corporate ladder can be murder,” is apt, for it encapsulates perfectly the predatory capitalism that is satirized in the film.

Here are some quotes:

It all began one night when the lights went out. –Graham Marshall, voiceover, opening line

Beggar #1: Hey buddy, gimme a buck, willya? What do you make, a million a year?
George Brewster: [handing beggar a pittance] City’s getting to be like Calcutta.

“The whole point of these takeovers is to sell off the assets, and put old farts like me out to pasture. I can hear the fat lady singing, Graham. I can hear her singing.” –Brewster

“Space invaders, Graham. The new people – all gadgets and the bottom line. Stop them early, or they’ll run right over you! ‘We can be more efficient than such-and-such a program…’ Blah blah blah, it’s all bullshit, Graham, soup to nuts. It’s code for mass firings and low quality. Just melt the market dry, and get out. I mean, if our system wasn’t any good, why did they take us over in the first place? Christ!” –Brewster

Robert Benham: Gentlemen, gentlemen… you don’t understand! We are the young, the proud! We shouldn’t be ashamed of success! We should say, “Yes, I *have* a boat. I *have* a country home. I *have* a girlfriend named ‘Tara’!” Say it with me, brothers.
Executive #3: I do have a Mercedes.
Executive #2: I have a condo with a pool.
Executive #1: I have a personal sports trainer.
Graham Marshall: I have a wife, a mortgage, and two dogs.

“What the hell is going on out there, George? Did somebody die or lose money or something?” –Graham

Graham Marshall: I didn’t get the job, Leslie. The promotion… I didn’t get it.
Leslie Marshall: No, of course you got it, Graham. You always get it.
Graham Marshall: I’m sorry. I know what it meant to you.
Leslie Marshall: No, you don’t, Graham. I really don’t think you do know how much it meant to me!
Graham Marshall: [voice-over] That’s when he realized she… was a witch.

“I think it’s rotten, Mr. Marshall. The only reason you didn’t get that job is ’cause they didn’t give it to you!” –Melanie O’Conner (played by Jenny Wright)

He was perfect. She was perfect. The house was perfect. The boat was perfect. The American dream. –Graham, voiceover, speaking of Benham, his country home, his boat, and his beautiful girlfriend, Tara

“My father had it all figured out. He was a London bus driver. And when I was a boy, he used to take me over the river to Mayfair, where the rich people lived. And he used to say to me, ‘Son – there is no heaven. Here is the closest you will ever get. Life, here, is sweet. Life, back over there, is hard. So live over here, son!'” –Graham, to Stella

The world, as they say, had become his oyster. Now he was going to pry it open. –Graham, voiceover

Graham Marshall: I will try and put this as politely as possible, Henry… what the fuck are you doing in my office?
Henry Park: Bob says I’m supposed to help out with the reorganization report.
Graham Marshall: Uh huh. Let me rephrase the question. — [shouts] –What the fuck are you doing in my office?
Henry Park: Bob just thought it was crazy not to have a computer in here.
Graham Marshall: It’s not the *computer*, it’s you and your goddamn desk!

Graham Marshall: [shouting] Why don’t you bring Henry Park in here, huh? Why don’t you bring Melanie in to make sure the phone gets answered? Hell, we could bring in the whole goddamn New York Knicks, just to make sure your trash hits the basket! How’s that?
Robert Benham: If I thought I needed an assistant to do my job…
Graham Marshall: Meaning what? That I don’t do *my* job? Then why don’t you have me removed, Bobby Boy?
Robert Benham: Because you’re too senior in the company to be fired for anything less than gross insubordination.
Graham Marshall: So you’ve decided to have me removed piece by piece. A privilege here, a responsibility there – never enough to fight over, just a subtle drain of power, right? [Menacing] Well, let me tell you something, Bobster. You don’t know the first fucking thing about power. I have more power in this hand than *all* you fucking know!

“Abra kadabra. Shalakazam. Bye-bye, baby. Boom.” –Graham, repeated line

He felt like one of those gods who appeared to maidens in human form. He knew he’d been great. Ah, Stella… such a sweet girl, really. He’d have to be sure to reward her for being in the right place at the right time. –Graham, voiceover

Lieutenant Laker: He was your superior, wasn’t he?
Graham Marshall: No, he was my boss.

“You know, sudden death hasn’t been all bad to you.” –Laker

“Whoa, let’s not all panic – you, you, and you panic; the rest stay calm.” –Graham

There was only one tiresome detail. Jones. He just wouldn’t let go of that corner office. [sputtering Cessna flies by] Abracadabra, Shalakazam. Bye bye, baby. –Graham, voiceover, last lines

Graham Marshall (Caine) is an executive in an advertising company in New York City, and he’s expecting a promotion. This promotion will be a great relief to him financially, since his expenses (his mortgage, and his wife’s extravagant spending–that is, her exercise machine, their dogs, etc.) are like a ball and chain around his leg.

Little does he know that the top dogs of his company have no intention of giving him that promotion (he’s seen as too soft, like George Brewster [McMartin]); still, they take him out to lunch and regale him as if they don’t know anything about who will really get the promotion–a cocky yuppie by the name of Robert “Bobby” Benham (Riegert).

Upon hearing the disappointing news, Graham goes about for the rest of the day with a black cloud over his head. Normally, he’d give generously to the many homeless men who appear numerous times throughout the movie; fatefully, he doesn’t feel generous on this particular night.

The homeless, for obvious reasons, have much better reasons to be discontented than Graham has, but this means nothing to him at the moment. On this particular occasion, the homeless man, facing Graham at a train station, has chosen the wrong man to be irritable with, and Graham pushes him, causing him to fall on the train tracks, just as a train is coming by, killing him.

Graham is like the liberal who, as long as all is going reasonably well for him, will show generosity to the poor; but when things go wrong for him, he becomes mean-spirited, and even violent. Don’t mess with his class privileges (i.e., that promotion he has earned and should have gotten), and he’ll be good to you. When, however, the liberal doesn’t get what he wants…for example, his preferred presidential candidate elected, he’ll bang the war drums as loudly as a conservative will.

It’s fitting that, though Brett wrote the novel in 1984, the film should have been made in 1990, when the Soviet Union was soon to be dissolved and Bill Clinton would be president in a couple of years. Granted, Reagan and Bush Sr. did plenty of damage to the working and middle classes in the 80s; but it was the Democrat shift to the right in the 90s, spearheaded by the Clintons and causing such damage as NAFTA, the gutting of welfare, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the manipulation of the 1996 Russian election to keep Boris Yeltsin in power, and the “humanitarian war” in the former Yugoslavia in 1999, that the shit really hit the fan.

Now, Graham’s killing of the homeless man (symbolic of bourgeois liberals’ wars on the poor and imperialism in general, as noted in the above two paragraphs) is, of course, accidental and shocking for him. He goes home shaking and terrified, even thinking he has torn a hole in his shirt–the unconscious wish-fulfillment of a mild punishment to assuage his guilt. But…he has gotten away with the killing. He can do it again.

As Virgil (played by James Gandolfini) observed in True Romance, “Now the first time you kill somebody, that’s the hardest.” It only gets easier after that, and Graham finds himself especially easing into the “murders and executions” that Patrick Bateman of American Psycho indulged in. Such is the nature of capitalism, especially in its late stage, imperialistic, monopoly form.

On his way home transferring from train to train that night, Graham sees a man emerging from the steam from a train. For a split second, he imagines it’s the homeless man he’s pushed onto the tracks, but he’s really a worker in the train system. For our purposes, it actually makes little difference whether the man is a member of the lumpenproletariat or the proletariat: poor is poor in the eyes of capitalists like Graham; he steps on both types, though in different ways.

To add to Graham’s frustrations, he is henpecked by his conservative wife, Leslie (Kurtz), who makes demands on him to be an ever bigger wallet. This doesn’t give him any special right to plot to kill her, of course, but the pressure she puts on him to earn more is the last thing he needs after having been passed over for a promotion. Because of her attitude, he imagines her to be “a witch,” draining him of his power.

In his narcissistic imagination, Graham fancies himself a sorcerer, able to bend any circumstance to his will, including the seduction of women. His killing of Leslie–tricking her into electrocuting herself in the basement by yanking on the string of a lightbulb with one hand while holding onto a slimy, wet pipe for balance with her other–will free his magical powers of the control of the “witch.”

Light is a recurring motif in this film, coming in the forms of the basement light bulb, electrocution (Graham’s near death from it at the film’s beginning, as well as Leslie’s actual death from it), lit matches, and cigarette lighters. These lights are representative of social and economic power, Graham’s wish to have it, and his envy of other people’s use of it, especially at his expense.

Beyond his fancying of himself as a sorcerer, he also imagines himself to be like Zeus in his seduction of maidens (i.e., Stella Henderson, played by McGovern, as well as his potential seduction of Melanie O’Conner [played by Jenny Wright, who also, incidentally, played a groupie in Pink Floyd–The Wall]). The electrocutions thus can be likened to Zeus’ lightning. In zapping Leslie, ‘Zeus’ was getting rid of his nagging ‘Hera.’

Benham requiring Graham to light his cigars, just as mild-mannered George Brewster has done (even to the point of buying Graham the lighter with which he’d light Brewster’s cigars), is like Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus to give to man. A great sorcerer/god like Graham should not have his fire taken from him for the use of mere mortals like Benham!

So, to reach the only truly existing heaven in Graham’s world, the corporate Mount Olympus, he must crawl from the darkness of his humbler beginnings (“a wife, a mortgage, and two dogs”) and up into the light. I once again must quote Satan’s words from Milton‘s Paradise Lost: “long is the way/And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.” (Book II, lines 432-433) Graham, Satan of capitalism, must use the fire of lit matches to blow up Benham’s boat to reach the top of Olympus.

To repeat another relevant quote: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929, as Graham does to Benham and, at the end of the film, to Jones [played by Sam Schacht]). This wiping out of executives is also comparable to the usurpations of Greek myth. Benham’s replacement of Brewster is like Cronus‘ taking of the heavenly throne from Uranus. Graham’s violent killing of Benham and Henry Park (played by Philip Moon) parallels Zeus’ defeat of Cronus after the ten-year Titanomachy. And Graham’s killing of Jones in his Cessna is like Zeus defeating such adversaries as the Giants and Typhon, further consolidating his Olympian power.

It’s especially fitting that Brewster should be compared to Uranus, who was castrated by Cronus. The whole reason that Brewster is replaced is because he is weak. As a ‘kinder, gentler capitalist’ who wants to save his employees’ jobs and not ‘trim the fat’ from the company, he is seen as ineffectual, not conducive to the growth of the business empire. Brewster, in this sense, is the Jimmy Carter of capitalist leaders, not fighting any wars during his…brief…term.

Graham, however, is potent both sexually and as an executive, rather like that Democrat of the 1990s. He may have seemed like a softie, like Brewster, but when Graham has his chance, he shows his true colours. His imitating of Brewster’s voice on the phone, as part of his scheme to kill Benham, is symbolic of how bourgeois liberals like the Clintons, Obama, and Biden pretend to be gentle and progressive, when really they’re as right-wing as Reagan, Trump, and the Bushes.

People like Lt. Laker (Patton) of the Connecticut police, as representatives of the government, sometimes try to soften the effects of capitalism by bringing to justice those who abuse the system, men like Graham; but they fail far more often than they succeed. Laker is in this sense like Brewster, representative of those who would smooth over the sharp edges of capitalism, but who fail because its cruelties are inherent in the system. Only a revolutionary death blow to capitalism will end its cruelties…and who has the willpower to do that?

We hear Caine’s voice as the narrator of the story, meaning Graham is telling it; but all the way through the narration, except at the end, we hear Caine refer to Graham in the third person. Only when he has succeeded in thwarting Laker’s attempts to build a case against him, does Graham’s voiceover finally speak in the first person.

This switch from third to first person represents the switch from his initial alienation from himself, from his species-essence, to his feeling of comfort with his identity, his oneness with it, at the end of the film. For though Graham is a capitalist, he also has bosses over him, and the only way to end worker alienation is to remove one’s bosses.

Too bad that he, as a boss himself, is now causing the same estrangement for those under him, for people like Stella, who is shocked in the end to learn he’s a murderer. And though he promotes her, his sending of her to the company’s Los Angeles office, causing their geographical separation, is symbolic of that alienation.

The film’s ending differs greatly from that of Brett’s novel, but the changes the film makes are good ones. Brett had Graham’s mother-in-law, Lillian (played by Barbara Baxley), scheme to have him charged with murder for a crime he hasn’t committed, in revenge for the killing of her daughter, Leslie. In the novel, Graham originally makes an attempt to poison Leslie’s whiskey bottle, but the drink turns blue, so he abandons the attempt. However, Lillian discovers the poisoned whiskey, and in a fit of mental instability publicly kills herself by drinking it, having those who see her drink it know that he poisoned it.

There are two problems with Brett’s ending: first, the notion that Lillian goes crazy and publicly poisons herself just to get revenge on Graham, ironically causing him to be convicted of a crime he hasn’t committed (as opposed to his previous getting away with crimes he is guilty of), strains credibility and comes off as “awfully contrived,” as one critic noted (Graham’s getting away with killing Leslie, Benham, Park, and Jones is already stretching things as it is).

Second, the film’s ending, with the bad guy prevailing, works better as black comedy. Besides, Graham’s success also works better as an allegory of capitalism, for indeed, the capitalists and imperialists have been getting away with crime after crime against the poor, and with war crime after war crime against all the countries that the US and NATO have bombed.

Bill Clinton not only got away with the bombing of the former Yugoslavia and the demonizing of Slobodan Milošević, but he also has a statue of himself in Kosovo, where there’s a huge NATO/US military base! Not only did George W. Bush get away with the illegal invasion of Iraq, killing about one million Iraqis, but he has also recently been rehabilitated by such liberals as Ellen DeGeneres, merely because he isn’t Trump! Though Obama continued, extended, and expanded Bush’s wars, use of drones, surveillance (i.e., the Patriot Act), etc., he is lionized by liberals as being an exemplary president, undeservedly awarded a Nobel Peace Prize…and every day of his administration was at war somewhere, including the bombing of seven countries in 2016.

I wonder how Trump will be rehabilitated in the 2030s.

These men, like Graham, all got away with their crimes. That’s the magic of capitalist imperialism, the supremacy of Zeus.

Abra-cadabra, shalakazam, bye-bye, baby…boom!

Political Distractions

Of all the methods that the ruling class uses to keep the people in their control, the use of political distractions is among their most cunning. The vast majority of the population is, of course, angry about the corruption in the political systems of the world…but how should we understand the true nature, the origin, of this corruption? The ruling class’s deft use of distractions is what causes far too many people to misinterpret the nature and source of these problems.

Typically, these misinterpretations involve a mixture of some truth with many falsehoods. For example, we all know that there’s a kind of unholy alliance between corporations and the state: it’s a natural, logical state of affairs that in capitalism, the more successful businesses will centralize and concentrate their capital; then in the bloodthirsty world of competition, they’ll step on and crush the smaller businesses to ensure their ascendancy. Using the state to enact laws favouring the big businesses at the expense of the smaller ones is par for the course.

A misinterpretation of this process occurs, however, among the right-wing libertarians, who–unable to admit that their precious capitalism is the problem–imagine that this merging of government and corporations isn’t “real capitalism” (i.e., the no true Scotsman fallacy), but rather “crony capitalism,” or “corporatism” (that infelicitous word whose incorrect usage is a misinterpretation of Mussolini‘s meaning, and which should, if anything, be replaced by “corporatocracy”…which, incidentally, is capitalism brought to its logical conclusion!).

If there’s private property (factories, office buildings, apartment buildings, farmland, etc., owned by bosses, as opposed to being collectively run by workers…No, communists don’t want everyone to share his toothbrush or smartphone with everyone else!), that’s capitalism. If commodities are produced for profit, rather than to provide for everyone, that’s capitalism. If capital is accumulated (hence, the word capitalism), that’s capitalism. How extensive, minimal, or non-existent (this third being an impossibility) government regulation happens to be in an economy is completely irrelevant.

Right-wing libertarians believe the current system isn’t “true capitalism” because they can’t bring themselves to face the reality that capitalism has been an epic, spectacular failure…and it’s obvious even to them that the current state of political and economic affairs has been only a failure. But rather than face the facts, they’d rather be distracted by a belief in other, spurious causes.

Another group, one that to a great extent overlaps with the right-wing libertarians, is the conspiracy theorists who believe in such nonsense as the NWO: apparently, the ‘old world order’ wasn’t all that bad. They imagine a one-world government will be the ultimate dystopia, as if one cannot be as brutally oppressed by many governments. They imagine the Illuminati still exists, it supposedly having descended from the Bavarian one that helped end feudalism: this, incidentally, was a good thing. Then, there’s the whole chemtrails thing. And finally, we have to throw some bigotry into the pot, so there are the Masonic and Jewish conspiracies, too.

Though secret societies certainly have existed, one doesn’t need to believe in them, let alone those that apparently worship the devil, to understand that there’s a lot of wrongdoing in the world. One doesn’t need to believe the Devil exists to believe evil exists; nor does one have to limit one’s understanding of aggression and destructiveness to the instincts or to the ideas of the behaviourists–as Erich Fromm argued in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Our malignant aggression comes from our failure to transcend our nature through creativity, from our failure to feel a oneness with others, and a failure to feel a sense of accomplishment.

Fromm states that “the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. Although not directly serving physical survival they are as strong–and often even stronger–than instincts. They form the basis for man’s interest in life, his enthusiasm, his excitement; they are the stuff from which not only his dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama–all that makes life worth living. Man cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup; he suffers severely when he is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if he has all the security he wants. Man seeks for drama and excitement; when he cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, he creates for himself the drama of destruction.” (Fromm, page 29)

The conspiracy theorists seem to think it’s bad only when Jews, Freemasons, government workers, or businesses favoured by the state get rich, but if any other capitalist does well, then it’s OK. Their scapegoating of anyone outside of their circumscribed fantasy world of the “free market” is yet another political distraction from the real source of the world’s problems: capitalism.

Of course, the political right are far from the only people distracted by nonsense. Next, we must discuss the liberals, who often pose as left-leaning, but are really centrist or even right-leaning when the pressure is on to protect their privileged place in society. These are the people who think that, as long as Trump (or whoever the leader of the GOP happens to be at a given time) is booted out of the White House, and as long as a Democrat is elected, all will be well. (The same applies to the Tory vs. Liberal/NDP parties in Canada, Tory vs. Labour in the UK, etc.)

Things have gotten so bad in the US that liberals there think that voting in Biden is acceptable, even desirable. Who is more right-wing, I wonder: him, or Trump? Granted, I agree that, after his caging of “illegals,” the fascist antics he’s brought about in Portland, Oregon, and his wish to suspend the 2020 election that he’s increasingly unlikely to win, Trump has become intolerable by even neoliberal capitalist standards; but placing hope in Biden is yet another distraction from the real problem. Why can’t we try revolution instead?

Similarly among liberals, the whole Russiagate farce was yet another distraction from facing up to the Clintons’ corruption. I discussed here why there was, and is, little substantive difference between Trump and Hillary Clinton. That’s what I meant above by why ‘left-leaning’ liberals are centrists or right-leaning in disguise. The same can be understood with regard to Bernie Sanders, AOC, Elizabeth Warren, etc. They aren’t socialists: they just lure progressives over to vote for the Democratic Party.

And now, we have the greatest political distraction of all, one that has addled the right, centre, and many on the left: the coronavirus. Most of the world’s population has been distracted from dangers far greater than a virus that, when you catch it, you usually show few, if any, symptoms, and those who die of it are less than 1% (We need to be careful only with the elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions, not the general population.). Lockdowns are causing millions to be thrown out of work, and out of their homes, in all likelihood.

Millions of people worldwide are either being thrown into poverty or from there to extreme poverty because of the coronavirus scare. Tens of thousands of people die of seasonal flu every year, but only this virus has gripped the world’s attention–and by an interesting coincidence, this is when the global economy has crashed, millions of dollars have transferred upwards to the already obscenely rich, and the administration of “anti-establishment president” Trump has, like those of Bush and Obama, bailed out the big financial institutions.

Millions of people in Third World countries die of malnutrition every year, especially children under five. We have, for a long time, had a perfect “vaccine” for hunger…food! The wealth of billionaires like Gates, Bezos, and Musk could easily feed these people, but they are never adequately fed. Gates‘s ever-so-dubious vaccine research–a real money-maker for him, but for Covid sufferers, virtually needless, and for other patients, possibly dangerous–is the priority. And no, I’m not an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ I just don’t trust him. That computer, not medical, man is practically running the WHO, so we shouldn’t be too sure about that organization’s objectivity.

The virus has, for the most part, declined, but the capitalist class is going to milk COVID-19 for all it’s worth. Small wonder we keep hearing warnings of the “next wave” of the coronavirus. Constantly wearing masks does virtually nothing to protect oneself or others from the virus, but wearing them for excessively lengthy periods of time can cause some other very serious health problems. (Granted, not bad enough to develop hypoxia or hypercapnia, but still, bad enough problems. In any case, if you’ve read enough of my posts, you should know by now, Dear Reader, how much I distrust the MSM, so their attempts at ‘debunking’ criticisms of the ‘rona narrative don’t impress me.).

The global capitalist class has every motive in the world to keep this coronavirus hysteria going. They’ll have ever more and more money to make, not just from Gates’s putative vaccine project, but also from the killing that e-commerce is making at the expense of physical stores (think of Bezos‘s soaring fortunes: as Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” [Marx, page 929]), and from the benefits the ruling class hopes to get from a cashless society (the result of customers being too scared to touch ‘tainted’ money).

You don’t have to be a flaming right-winger or conspiracy nut to doubt the coronavirus narrative. Nowhere in this post have I said we’re inching closer to a ‘one-world-government NWO.’ Nowhere have I said the Freemasons or the Rothchilds are behind this. Nowhere have I said the government has made “real capitalism” impure. Nowhere have I said the coronavirus isn’t real. Nowhere have I said that the lizard-people are behind this. And I’m not opposed to vaccines in general.

I don’t base my coronavirus research on YouTube videos made by cranks; I base it on the research of doctors, virologists, and epidemiologists who don’t conform to the MSM narrative (when CNN and the like sell the coronavirus scare without rest, that’s when I get skeptical). The right-wing conspiracy theories, as I said at the beginning of this post, are as much a political distraction as the b.s. mainstream liberal narrative is.

The capitalist class wants to keep the social distancing and lockdowns going on in order to increase our sense of alienation, and to keep the working class distracted from organizing and planning revolutions. They know that we are getting increasingly fed up with neoliberal capitalism…and any and all forms of capitalism. The capitalists are destroying the planet. They’re stealing from us and making us more and more desperate. They’re secretly scared that we’ll rise up one day. Hence, the virus is, for them, a Godsend. Keep us too scared of getting sick, and keep us from revolting.

Just because the Trumpist right talks about ‘prematurely’ ending the lockdowns and getting people back to work, doesn’t mean people like me are supportive of him and his ilk. Their wish to end the lockdowns, etc. only means that they’re right in a ‘broken clocks’ sense. Where the Trumpists are dead wrong is in their refusal to put any money into a decent healthcare system, what would truly stop the spread of COVID-19, as well as properly deal with all the other health problems Americans have.

People forget that the ruling class has several competing factions, not just one agenda. We must do a lot more than just get rid of Trump, or just get rid of the Democratic Party. It isn’t a matter of choosing conservative vs. liberal. That divisive thinking is just controlled opposition. We need to get rid of both sides. We need a revolution. Then we need to build socialism, which means providing guaranteed employment, housing, and healthcare, all the required solutions to our current problems. We don’t need masks; we need Marxism. We need socialism, not social distancing.

Nothing will do a better job of ending pandemics than universal healthcare. Nothing will do a better job of overthrowing the elite than a socialist revolution.

Analysis of ‘Parasite’

Parasite ( 기생충, or Gisaengchung) is a 2019 South Korean satirical film directed by Bong Joon-ho and written by him and Han Jin-won. It stars Song Kang-ho, Lee Sun-kyun, Cho Yeo-jeong, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Jang Hye-jin, and Lee Jung-eun. The Kims (played by Song, Jang, Choi, and Park) are a poor family who live in a semi-basement apartment (banjiha); they cheat their way into getting jobs working for a bourgeois family, the Parks (played by Lee, Cho, Jung Ji-so, and Jung Hyeon-jun), the Kim employees pretending they aren’t related but much more qualified than they really are.

This is the first South Korean film (and the first non-English language film) to win the Oscar for Best Picture. It’s a scathing critique of capitalism and class conflict, a critique more and more urgently needed in today’s world.

Here are some quotes, translated into English:

Ki-jung: [about Moon-gwang] She may look like a sheep, but inside, she’s a fox. Sometimes she acts like she owns the house.
Ki-woo: Right. Of all the people in that house, she’s lived there the longest. She was housekeeper to the architect Namgoong, but then she went on to work for this family. When the architect moved out, he introduced this woman to Park’s family, telling them, “This is a great housekeeper, you should hire her”.
Chung-sook: So she survived a change of ownership.
Ki-woo: She won’t give up such a good job easily.
Ki-jung: To extract a woman like that, we need to prepare well.
Ki-woo: Right, we need a plan. [cut to a scene with Ki-woo and Da-hye]
Da-hye: I want to eat peaches. I like peaches best.
Ki-woo: Why not ask for some?
Da-hye: No peaches at our house. It’s a forbidden fruit. [cut back to the Kims]
Ki-woo: [about Moon-gwang] So according to what Da-hye told me, she’s got a pretty serious allergy to peaches. You know that fuzz on the peach skin? If she’s anywhere near it, she gets a full body rash, has trouble breathing, asthma, a total meltdown! [Moon-gwang falls sick after Ki-woo puts peach fuzz on her]

Ki-taek: They are rich but still nice.
Chung-sook: They are nice because they are rich.

Ki-taek: Rich people are naive. No resentments. No creases on them.
Chung-sook: It all gets ironed out. Money is an iron. Those creases all get smoothed out by money.

“If I had all this I would be kinder.” –Chung-sook

“What are you, a family of charlatans?” –Moon-gwang

“Don’t fucking call me sis, you filthy bitch!” –Moon-gwang, to Chung-sook

[to his son] “You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. Look around you. Did you think these people made a plan to sleep in the sports hall with you? But here we are now, sleeping together on the floor. So, there’s no need for a plan. You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?” –Ki-taek

“Respect!” –Geun-se

“Dad, today I made a plan – a fundamental plan. I’m going to earn money, a lot of it. University, a career, marriage, those are all fine, but first I’ll earn money. When I have money, I’ll buy the house. On the day we move in, Mom and I will be in the yard. Because the sunshine is so nice there. All you’ll need to do is walk up the stairs. Take care until then. So long.” –Ki-woo, in a letter to Ki-taek (last lines)

The Kims’ smelly banjiha has a Wi-Fi connection so bad, they have to use their cellphones by the toilet. A drunk habitually pisses just outside their window, and Ki-taek, the father of the family, is annoyed by the “stink bugs,” one of which he flicks away with his finger. He welcomes the awful fumes of a pesticide spray from outside to get rid of the bugs.

Min-hyuk, a university student and friend of Ki-woo’s, gives the family a scholar’s rock as a gift to promise wealth for the Kims. He also tells Ki-woo about a job teaching English to Da-hye, a teenage girl in the rich Park family. Yeon-gyo, the lady of the Park house, is rather “simple” and so should be easily deceived that Ki-woo, as Min-hyuk’s replacement teacher, is more qualified than he really is.

After getting the job, he convinces Yeon-gyo to hire his sister, Ki-jung, as an art teacher and “therapist” for Yeon-gyo’s traumatized little boy, Da-song, pretending that Ki-woo’s sister, “Jessica,” is barely even an acquaintance.

Eventually, Ki-taek gets a job as the Parks’ driver, after Ki-jung has the Parks fire their previous driver, Yoon, based on a false accusation of having engaged in lewd behaviour in the car; and Chung-sook gets a job as the housekeeper, after an elaborate plan involving deceiving Yeon-gyo into believing the Parks’ original housekeeper, Moon-gwang (played by Lee Jung-eun), secretly has tuberculosis. All of the Kims, of course, pretend they aren’t related.

As such, the Kims are a kind of collective parasite on the bourgeois family, enjoying good salaries and eating nice food, all based on false pretences. Later, we learn that Moon-gwang was also a parasite, using her job to feed her husband, Oh Geun-se (played by Park Myung-hoon), who’s living in a basement bunker under the Parks’ beautiful house to hide from creditors.

Calling these poor, needy families parasites is ironic, given the capitalist context. We Marxists know that it is the capitalist who is the real parasite, draining the energy and life out of his workers to make profits. The workers put value into the commodities they produce, but the capitalist sucks out that value like a leech, stealing it in the form of surplus value, and getting rich off of workers’ blood, sweat, and tears. The capitalist’s exploitation of labour is the true parasitic behaviour, so when the Kims and Moon-gwang engage in parasitism, it can be seen as a matter of karmic retribution.

This film shows us the true, proletarian South Korea, not the country saturated in bourgeois values as seen in such popular South Korean TV shows as Crash Landing on You (which, incidentally, includes Jang Hye-jin and Park Myung-hoon among the supporting actors), with its attractive cast in beautiful clothes living in luxurious settings (the more austere North Korean scenes excepted).

The ironic labelling of poor South Koreans as parasites inspires me to see a few vague associations of the film’s plot with John Milton‘s Paradise Lost. I’m not saying Bong intended it; nor am I imagining there to be exact, point-for-point correspondences between the characters and chronology of the film and epic poem–far from it. Still, there are some connections interesting enough to explore.

The banjiha and underground bunker can be seen to represent hell, the hell of the working class. This makes the workers the devils, though I’m calling them “devils” with the utmost irony, for this story must be seen from the point of view of a ‘capitalist morality.’ The Park family represent Adam and Eve, who are easily beguiled by the serpentine “devils,” who trick them into employing all of them. The beautiful house is the Garden of Eden, a capitalist paradise designed by an architect, Mr. Namgoong (“God”), who has left to live in Paris.

As in Paradise Lost (Note how, fortuitously, Parasite is almost an anagram of ‘Paradise’!), the movie can be said to have begun in medias res, with our working-class ‘devils’ already plunged into the hell of the urban poor, having nothing but their labour to sell to survive.

Before this casting away (i.e., the pre-industrialized Korea of the early to mid-twentieth century), most Koreans had lived a simple peasant farmer life, living off the land, a kind of rural ‘heaven,’ even though they were ruled over and oppressed by landlords, the Japanese, and the bourgeois. To put it ever so mildly, this was far from an ideal life, but we’re comparing Koreans to the rebel angels here, and as Satan says in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven.” (Book I, line 263) Better that the Korean proletariat reign in a communist ‘hell’ (as understood in bourgeois propaganda) than serve in a capitalist ‘heaven’ (also as understood in bourgeois propaganda).

Looked at in this context, we can understand the Korean attempt to establish socialism, to improve Koreans’ lives by overthrowing the bourgeoisie, which was then thwarted in the Korean War and in the establishment of South Korea as a capitalist state. Such a thwarting can be compared to the war in heaven between Satan’s rebel angels, the devils resisting God’s tyranny, and God’s loyal angels.

North Korea may have succeeded in the creation of a socialist state, but we’re concerned here with the South Korean working class, who lost in their attempt to create a proletarian dictatorship because of the prevailing hegemony of US imperialism. Hence, the miserable lot of the Kims is comparable to that of fallen Satan and his demons. And just as Satan learns of the Garden of Eden, Adam, and Eve, so does Ki-woo learn of the Park family’s job opportunity…and just as Satan plans to sabotage paradise on Earth, so do the Kims plan to infiltrate the Parks’ Edenic home.

Most of the Kims’ tricking and beguiling is done to Yeon-gyo, the Eve of the family; and as we know, the serpent (Satan in disguise) tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. The difficult and tricky process of getting employment for all of the Kims reminds us of when Satan says, “long is the way/And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” (Book II, lines 432-433)

Religion is used to justify such authoritarian ways of doing things as feudalism and capitalism; accordingly, it is assumed that God in Paradise Lost is all-good–hence Milton’s claim to “justify the ways of God to men.” (Book I, line 26) So is it also assumed that capitalists’ successes are admirable achievements, a result of God’s grace, rather than the exploitation of the poor.

Still, Milton’s God shows hints of a more despotic rule. God says, “…man will…/easily transgress the sole command,/Sole pledge of his obedience: so will fall,/He and his faithless progeny: whose fault?/Whose but his own? ingrate, he had of me/All he could have; I made him just and right,/Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall.” (Book III, lines 93, 94-99) What God says here about Adam and Eve can be equally applied to the rebel angels, who were also free to obey or disobey Him. Note His bitter comments about how man is “faithless” and an “ingrate.” Such an attitude is hardly in keeping with a loving, merciful God. He faults any who don’t do His bidding, never Himself.

Such an attitude can also be seen in the capitalist, who imagines that the proletariat are “free” to be employed in any job they like, or to quit any they don’t like. Such a simplistic judgement fails to address the reality workers face when they struggle to find work, competing with the reserve army of labour that’s trying to get the same jobs. Since workers don’t own the means of production, and can live only by selling their own labour, it’s absurd to describe them meaningfully as free.

We fall because, with the limitations we have in knowledge and moral strength, what else can we do? I discuss the weakness of the argument of Christian free will in this post (scroll down to about the middle). We wouldn’t fall, no matter how much free will we had to do wrong, if we had the moral strength and the wisdom to know that making the morally wrong choice would destroy us. Capitalists, just like Christian authoritarians, justify their power over us by claiming we have a freedom we lack.

Workers’ foul body odour is a recurring motif in Parasite. Mr. Park finds Mr. Kim’s smell difficult to endure, and Da-song notes how all the Kims have the same smell. Geun-se also has the odour. Related to the smell of the stink bugs, these ‘poor devils’ have the smell of hell. Now, even though the Kims do do their share of bad things, we viewers sympathize with the Kims (and with Moon-gwang and Geun-se); just as Satan, the hero of Paradise Lost, has at least some sympathy from Milton’s readers, even though he is evil.

Moon-gwang’s allergy to peaches makes them “forbidden fruit” in the Parks’ house. The Kims’ exploitation of her weakness, misrepresenting it as tuberculosis to the ever-gullible Yeon-gyo, causes Moon-gwang to be dismissed. Since she has been feeding her husband, Geun-se, in the bunker, and she has now been kicked out of the Parks’ Edenic house, Moon-gwang is, in this sense, a second Eve who has lost paradise. It’s interesting in this connection that Mr. Park, already missing her cooking, has a craving for some ribs [!].

The use of the “forbidden fruit,” leading to Moon-gwang’s dismissal, begins a chain of events ultimately leading to the Kims’ expulsion from the house, too. While the Parks are out camping, the Kims get drunk in the house, a sensual indulgence comparable to Adam and Eve eating of the Tree of Knowledge. (In this sense, the Kims can be seen as doubles of Adam and Eve, too; for after all, the naked lovers, as fellow rebels to God, can easily be seen as doubles of the devils.)

When Moon-gwang returns to the house in a desperate attempt to procure food for starving Geun-se, she tries to appeal to Chung-sook’s sense of compassion for and solidarity with the needy; but Chung-sook would rather identify with the Parks, and so she tries to call the police on Moon-gwang and Geun-se. In this sense, class-collaborating Chung-sook is a devil.

Of course, when Moon-gwang and Geun-se realize that the Kims are a family rather than the unrelated employees they’ve been pretending to be, she grows equally hostile to them. She records video of them on her cellphone, the sound having recorded Ki-woo calling Ki-taek ‘Dad,’ and she threatens to send the video to the Parks. Now the lack of working-class solidarity is a two-way street.

Moon-gwang and Geun-se compare the ‘send’ command on her cellphone to a nuclear warhead from North Korea. She tauntingly speaks in mock reverence of the Supreme Leader, Kim Jong-un, as if ready ‘to launch the warhead.’ This juxtaposition of no mutual solidarity among workers with feigned loyalty to the DPRK could be seen as a sardonic comment on infighting among leftists, including those who profess to be staunch Marxist-Leninists.

The Kims manage to get the phone away from Moon-gwang and Geun-se; the Kims also confine them in the bunker. Meanwhile, rain and flooding have caused the Parks to give up on their camping plans and come home. The Kims must clean up quickly and hide everyone except for Chung-sook.

With the Parks back home that night, little Da-song wants to play ‘Indian’ and camp in his American-made teepee on the lawn outside. This is an indication of how far the South Korean bourgeoisie has been enmeshed in American cultural imperialism: they copy the white man’s appropriation of other cultures.

As Mr. Park and Yeon-gyo wait on the living room sofa for Da-song to finish his camping game, they–not knowing that Ki-taek, Ki-woo, and Ki-jung are hiding under the coffee tables–engage in some sexual fondling. We can see a parallel here with a scene in Paradise Lost, when Adam and Eve have lustful sex after having eaten the forbidden fruit. (Book IX, lines 1034-1045)

Eventually, Ki-taek, Ki-woo, and Ki-jung sneak out of the house and walk home that night in the rain. When they discover that not only the rain but also the sewer water is flooding their banjiha (as well as every other banjiha in their neighbourhood), we see in this incident a parallel with the Great Flood as predicted in Book XI of Paradise Lost (lines 719-867).

The cause of the Great Flood, as scholars have pointed out (Mays, page 88), was the prohibited mixing of the divine and human worlds, as shown when the “sons of God” mated with the “daughters of men” (Genesis 6:1-4; note also in Milton, Book XI, lines 683-697, “those ill-mated marriages” [line 684]). Similarly, Ki-woo, one of the ‘fallen angels’ of the working class, has been fooling around with Da-hye, the daughter of the Park family, her parents being the ‘Adam and Eve’ of the movie.

As Mr. Park frequently says, he can’t stand it when employees “cross the line,” or move outside of the circumscribed realm of their class. This notion of “crossing the line” can be paralleled with the prohibition against mixing the divine and human worlds, where ‘divine’ represents the bourgeoisie, and ‘human’ represents the proletariat…or if you prefer, the capitalistically righteous sons of God (the Seth-like Parks) are mingling with the sinfully proletarian daughters of men (the Cain-like Kims).

My interpretation of the primeval history of Genesis (scroll down to Part X) is that the mixing of the divine and human worlds, understood as sinful, is a reflection of the wish of the priestly class, representing God, to separate themselves from the lay population; by keeping separate through self-sanctification, the priests could better assert their authority and power. The same goes for the capitalist class: if the proletariat “crosses the line,” the bourgeoisie’s power is threatened.

Mr. Park says that Mr. Kim’s body odour “crosses the line,” since the breathing in of that odour is, symbolically, an introjection of Mr. Kim’s life essence, as it were. It’s one thing for the bourgeoisie to have to interact with the proletariat; it’s another one altogether if these two classes, meant to be separate in essence from each other, are exchanging projections and introjections of each other’s energies, which feels tantamount to erasing the boundaries between classes, “crossing the line.”

Ki-taek’s resentment over his hated smell builds over the course of the movie. It starts with his dislike of the stink bugs at the beginning of the film, and with the letting in of the pesticide fumes. Then there’s Mr. Park’s distaste of the smell, along with Chung-sook’s comparing him to a cockroach (associated with stink bugs, and thus the smell) during the Kims’ drunken party, provoking Kim-taek’s grabbing her by the shirt and threatening to hit her. Later, as he’s driving Yeon-gyo in the back seat, he notices her putting her hand to her nose.

This smell of hell reminds him, over and over again, of his low origins; no matter how hard he and his family try to rise socially, they’ll always have that shameful, infernal stink.

Added to his resentment is the stress he feels over what he and the other Kims have done to Moon-gwang and Geun-se. In their drunkenness that night, the Kims have shown no solidarity with the husband and concussed wife trapped and tied up in the underground bunker; but the next day, there is some residual sense of sympathy, responsibility, and remorse over how they’ve treated Moon-gwang and Geun-se. Similarly, during that night of drunkenness, Ki-taek shows some sympathy for the original driver, Yoon, whose job he has stolen.

The next day, the Kims want to help Moon-gwang and Geun-se, but it’s too late: she’s died from her head injury, accidentally caused by Chung-sook’s having shoved her down the stairs to the bunker the night before; and Geun-se wants revenge. Ki-taek has tied Geun-se’s hands up, and so his only way to communicate with the outside world is by pushing a large button at eye-level on a wall using Morse Code. This means that Geun-se has to hit the button many times with his forehead, causing a bloody mark there.

Since he commits the first deliberate murder in the movie (after the attempted murder of Ki-woo by hitting the boy twice on the head with the scholar’s rock, Geun-se takes a kitchen knife and stabs Ki-jung outside at Yeon-gyo’s impromptu party), that bloody mark on his head can be associated with the mark of Cain, whose murder of Abel is mentioned in Book XI of Paradise Lost (lines 429-460)

So Geun-se can be seen as doubling as an underground devil and as Cain. To make the association clearer, recall Hamlet saying that Cain “did the first murder” (Act V, scene i), and recall also John 8:44, when Jesus said that the devil “was a murderer from the beginning.” Remember that human sinners are like devils on earth, since both sinner and devil are rebels against God.

Just before the violence, Mr. Park would have Ki-taek help him indulge in more disrespectful appropriation of Native American culture by having himself and his driver wear the feathered headdresses and brandish tomahawks, so Da-song can come out of his teepee and have some fun. Ki-taek’s mounting stress–not only from his worries over what’s happened in the bunker, but also from the culturally imperialist absurdity of playing “Indian” with his capitalist employers–is showing in the frown on his face.

But seeing his daughter stabbed, his wife fighting off Geun-se, and Da-hye carrying injured Ki-woo away, is pushing Ki-taek to the limit of endurance. Da-song, believing Geun-se to be a ghost from the underworld (and as I’ve argued above, that’s what he is symbolically), whom he’s seen, and been traumatized by, before, faints at the sight of the killer.

Mr. Park and Yeon-gyo are desperate to rush the boy to the hospital, and he demands Ki-taek’s help; but their driver is naturally far more preoccupied with the injuries done to his own family, still a secret kept from the Parks. He tosses the car keys over to Mr. Park, but must also help dying Ki-jung. Here we can see the conflict between capitalism and the family, which can only meaningfully coexist for the bourgeoisie.

As Karl Marx said in The Communist Manifesto, “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution.” (II: Proletarians and Communists)

Chung-sook manages to stop Geun-se by stabbing him in the side with a skewer. Dying Geun-se looks up and sees Mr. Park, whom he regards as almost god-like for providing him, however unwittingly, with a home and food, and shouts, “Respect!” Ki-taek has earlier shown a similar, almost religious reverence to Park, saying, “Let’s offer a prayer of gratitude to the great Mr. Park.” Ki-taek has also spoken of the “bounteous Wi-Fi,” earlier in the film; thus do we see how the ‘poor devils’ are sinful idolaters of the bourgeoisie and the products that capitalists sell to us.

Mr. Park gives thanks to this class collaborationist ass-kissing in a predictably capitalist way: by putting his hand to his nose. Ooh, that smell! This latest affront to working-class dignity is too much for Ki-taek to bear, so he, in a wildly impulsive move, grabs Geun-se’s knife and stabs Mr. Park. Fittingly, we see a stink bug crawling on dying Geun-se’s body. Also fittingly, the headdress falls off Ki-taek’s head just before the stabbing, representing his rejection of capitalist cultural imperialism, and its abusive appropriation of the cultures of conquered peoples.

This killing of Mr. Park, the Adam of the story, recalls Genesis 3:19, God’s pronunciation of the death sentence on Adam, also found in Paradise Lost, Book X, lines 206-208. Here we see how the capitalist (Adam), too, is killed by capitalism (God); for its contradictions, as Marx prophesied in Volume 3 of Capital, would cause it to destroy itself, through the agent of the revolutionary proletariat.

Indeed, Ki-taek is finally demonstrating a little worker solidarity, acknowledging Park as his class enemy. Finally, violence against the bourgeoisie has been achieved…but it’s far from enough to help the proletariat. One must build socialism after the overthrow of the ruling class (as the DPRK did), and the Kims never achieve this. So, just as Satan boasts to the other devils of having succeeded in taking control of the world (Book X, lines 460-503), but then he and his demons are turned into limbless serpents (Book X, lines 504-577), so are the Kims thwarted in their hopes to use their jobs to take over the Parks’ house and improve their lives.

When Ki-woo wakes up in hospital and is told his Miranda rights by a police detective, he finds himself involuntarily laughing. The doctor there says people who have undergone brain surgery sometimes laugh like this. Ki-woo continues uncontrollably smiling and laughing when he sees a photo of now-dead Ki-jung, all while Chung-sook is weeping over the loss of her daughter.

This laughing during a mournful family moment reminds us of Arthur Fleck‘s pseudobulbar affect, which happens most notably when he’s upset. As I argued in that post, this laughing/weeping represents the dialectical relationship between sorrow and happiness. Recall Laozi‘s words: “Misery is what happiness rests upon./Happiness is what misery lurks beneath.” (Tao Te Ching 58)

The point is that suffering has grown so extreme for Ki-woo that he laughs rather than sobs; one goes past the ouroboros‘ bitten tail of weeping and over to the even greater sobbing of the serpent’s biting head, expressed in laughing. (See these posts to see how I use the ouroboros to symbolize the dialectical unity of opposites, the serpent’s head and tail representing extreme opposites on a circular continuum, the ouroboros’ coiled body, representing the middle points.)

Finally, once Ki-woo is better, he tries to find his missing father. The surviving Kims are the only people who know about the underground bunker, so he rightly suspects that Ki-taek is hiding down there. In a desperate attempt at communicating with the outside world, Ki-taek uses Geun-se’s method of tapping that button in Morse Code so someone outside might, by chance, see the flashing light and decode the message. This desperate communication is yet another example of alienation caused by capitalism: if only father and son could speak to each other face to face.

Fortunately, Ki-woo sees and decodes his father’s message. The boy’s plan is to make as much money as he can to buy the Parks’ old house one day and free his father from his underground prison, his hell. This hope of a rescue, far off into the future and difficult to have faith in, reminds us of the promise to Adam in Book XII of Paradise Lost (lines 386-465) of paradise regained at the end of time, salvation from Christ’s crucifixion.

Now, Adam will have to wait interminably in Sheol for the Divine Rescue, but he will eventually get it. Similarly, the surviving Park family can hope for a better life after the tragedy at the party, even after the death of Mr. Park…because they have the money for that hope. His money lives on after him.

Ki-taek, on the other hand, isn’t anywhere near as lucky. He must wait for Ki-woo, still stuck in the Kims’ old hell-hole of a banjiha, to scrounge up the money to regain the paradise of the Parks’ former home, a rather unlikely achievement, to put it mildly. For remember, in my scrambled allegory of Milton’s epic, the Parks are redeemable Adam and Eve, but the Kims are the devils, forever stuck in the hell of South Korean capitalism, the Seoul of Sheol.

Bombs

The war machine

d
r
o
p
s

b
o
m
b
s

d
o
w
n

on the cities of the innocent.
***************************************************

Moms’ eyes

r
a
i
n

t
e
a
r
s

d
o
w
n

their despairing, reddened cheeks.
*****************************************************

Sons’ and daughters’ bodies

f
a
l
l

d
o
w
n

d
e
a
d

to the stony ground.
*****************************************************

Civilizations’ pillars

b
r
e
a
k

a
n
d

c
r
u
m
b
l
e
,

leaving pebbles on the earth.
**************************************************

Proud, towering trees

t
o
p
p
l
e

o
v
e
r
,

l
y
i
n
g

in beds of smokey black.
****************************************************

When will the fighter jets

b
e

b
r
o
u
g
h
t

d
o
w
n
,

leaving the earth to grow in peace?
*******************************************************

	The Tanah: Troughs… on The Tanah: Amores–The Last…
	The Tanah: Troughs… on The Tanah: Amores–Four More Sp…
	The Tanah: Troughs… on The Tanah: Amores–Four More Lo…
	The Tanah: Troughs… on The Tanah: Amores–Three…
	The Tanah: Troughs… on The Tanah: Amores–Transl…