One
day,
an
ax
is
to
go
smashing down
on the floor
like Pete
Townshend’s
back in the day.
But
the
ax
is
not
go-
ing
to
shatter into a hundred
tiny pieces lying
scattered all over
the stage, like Pete’s
electric instrument.
The
act
of
re-
bel-
lion
won’t
just be a
noisy affair, to
irritate the rulers of
our cruel, uncaring world.
This
axe
will
come
down
from
the
sky
and
its
sharp blade will hack
off the heads of the
guardians of the rich.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D.H. Lawrence, his last–published privately in 1928 in Italy and in 1929 in France–before his death in 1930. An unexpurgated version of the novel wasn’t openly published in the UK until 1960, after the publisher, Penguin Books, won in an obscenity trial. The book was also banned for obscenity in the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Japan.
The book controversially tells the story of a sexual relationship between an upper-class woman and a working-class man, using what were originally deemed sexually explicit scenes and then-unprintable four-letter words.
Though the uncensored version of the book has been accepted since the beginning of the 1960s (recall Philip Larkin‘s poem on the new permissiveness resulting from “the end of the Chatterley ban”), Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not considered one of Lawrence’s best works. It’s been said that, though the novel has a high purpose–decrying the problems of the coal-mining industry and the soulless, emasculated modern man (as exemplified in Clifford Chatterley)–it fails in its promoting of an appreciation of sensuality as a solution.
Many film, TV, radio, and theatre adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover have been made, including a 2022 film released late that year in UK cinemas and on Netflix.
Three major rifts are dealt with in the novel: mind vs body, the upper vs lower classes, and industrialization vs nature. Lawrence felt that it was a modern tragedy that the mind and body are so alienated from each other, often involving an excessive pursuit of intellectual interests while ignoring sensuality. Impotent Clifford especially personifies this problem, but it also expresses itself in the “tentative love affairs” of sisters Hilda and Constance (Lawrence, page 3). Lawrence’s ideal was an integration of mind and body through sensuality (page 340)–hence, the book’s frank expression of sex through the use of “taboo words” (page 367).
Lawrence also contrasts the beauty and vitality of nature with the mechanistic monotony of modern, industrialized life, a theme dealt with in his other novels. This issue can and should be tied in with the theme of class conflict.
As for the rift between the upper and lower classes as depicted in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I wish to begin by saying that I have no illusions about Lawrence’s politics, which in all, seem to have been all over the place, as one looks over the course of his whole life. The novel itself is a paradox, having content to upset conservatives while also having a conservative, even stylistically Victorian, formality.
The only consistent idea I can find, from a cursory reading of Lawrence’s political philosophy, is an advocacy of individualism. Such writers as Terry Eagleton and Bertrand Russell found Lawrence to be reactionary, right-wing, and even proto-fascist in his thinking (during WWI). On the other hand, and I find this significant in relation to when he wrote and circulated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he wrote in 1924 that he believed “a good form of socialism, if it could be brought about, would be the best form of government.” Also, in the late 1920s, he told his sister he would vote Labour if he was living in England.
So, though he certainly despised Soviet-style socialism as much as he did fascism (in his “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” he denounces “the State” in general–pages 352-353), sympathy for a generalized kind of socialism wasn’t all that far away from his mind. He was, after all, the son of a miner. It might be reasonable to think that he, in his later years, had at least some partiality towards libertarian socialism, if the above references are truly representative of his political thinking towards the end of his life.
In any case, in his “A Propos,” he wrote of a better time in England’s history, of men and women living in harmony with nature, moving to the rhythms of the days and seasons (page 356); from which today’s industrialized world has been a sad decline. He recognizes modern alienation, and the class antagonisms that inevitably result from it (page 365); but in my opinion, he misdiagnosed the problem, claiming that, instead of the cause being capitalism, it is a lack of pagan “blood-warmth of oneness and togetherness.”
Addled by bourgeois biases that one born in a working-class family in the late 19th century surely wouldn’t have had, Lawrence imagines that “In the old England, the curious blood-connection held the classes together. The squires might be arrogant, violent, bullying, and unjust, yet in some ways they were at one with the people, part of the same blood-stream.” (pages 365-366) I find it extraordinary how someone can reconcile the squires’ attitude with the people through “the same blood-stream.” Those denying the classist nature of the world’s problems always find some bizarre alternate cause: the Jews, the Freemasons, the NWO, “corporatism,” or in Lawrence’s case, a shifting away from pagan harmony with nature and away from an embracing of frank sensuality.
Yet it is precisely the capitalist seizure of the Commons, forcing the poor farmers to move to the cities and sell their only salable commodity, their labour, to the industrialists, mining companies, etc., that has led to our modern alienation from nature, from each other, and from our sexuality. Lawrence saw the actual problems, but misinterpreted them.
Therefore, in my analysis, though my Marxist reading of his novel won’t be what he meant, I believe it will uncover the true nature of the problems he addressed in it: alienation from our species-essence (body vs mind), industrial capitalism (industrialization vs nature), and class antagonisms (upper vs lower classes).
After having had those “tentative love affairs,” Constance “Connie” Reid marries Clifford Chatterley, an aristocrat, when she’s 23, in 1917. A month after the marriage, he is sent to fight in WWI, and he returns paralyzed from the waist down, rendering him impotent.
Now, for Lawrence, Clifford is largely an allegorical figure, his paralysis and impotence making him the personification of the life of the mind without the body, since Clifford takes up writing and chats with a number of intellectuals, leaving Connie to feel isolated. Note that one of the criticisms of this novel is how characters are reduced to allegorical types, leaving them without depth.
What I would find far more meaningful is to say that it was the very imperialist war that Clifford was made to fight in that is what has scathed him so, since that’s what has literally happened! No allegorical tripe about a mind without a body–simply a recognition that class antagonisms, which he as an aristocrat embodies, led to the imperialist competition over land that was WWI, and has injured him, alienating him from his species-essence, him mind alienated from his body.
Note that class struggle, be it in the forms of the master/slave, feudal lord/peasant, or bourgeois/proletarian, causes hurt to the powerful as well as the powerless, in that the powerful are always pressured to stay on top, always in fear of losing their power. When we see Clifford so deprived of his manhood (for this fear of the loss of power extends, of course, to the patriarchal family), psychologically as well as physically (recall his later being mothered by Mrs. Bolton), we can see how true this fear of loss of power is, and how this fear is dramatized in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
The threat to the power of the patriarchal family is easily seen in Clifford’s having lost the ability to procreate, and therefore to pass the family name and property directly from father to son. When he tells Connie he’s willing to have her get pregnant by another man, as long as he’s of high birth, she doesn’t love the other man, and the baby is understood to be Clifford’s, we are then reminded of a quote from James Joyce‘s Ulysses:
“Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten…Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction. Who is the father of any son that any son should love him or he any son?” (Joyce, page 266)
Accordingly, Connie has a brief affair, not yet with Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper, but first with a visiting Irish playwright named Michaelis. In all of this we can see the flimsy foundation that patrilineal succession is laid on: the whole point behind the maintenance of a man’s power and authority over his wife is to ensure, at least within reason, that he is, indeed, the father of all of the children in his home.
To that end, girls are expected to be virgins on their wedding night, wives are forbidden to have affairs (whereas adulterous husbands are given more of a slap on the wrist), women are discouraged from having careers (for fear of their independence leading to them having affairs), and sons, being the heirs of the family name and property, are treated better than daughters.
We already see in Lady Chatterley’s Lover the beginnings of the breakdown of the patriarchal family system, which writers like Friedrich Engels recognized as intimately linked with systems of class oppression, in how Connie has lost her virginity before even marrying Clifford. The bohemian lifestyle she learned from her father, Sir Malcolm, a painter and unabashed sensualist. Her affair with Michaelis makes her later liaison with Mellors not at all surprising.
In his “A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence goes on and on about his advocacy of monogamy and marriage, which is an odd way to defend a novel in which the sympathetic characters are committing adultery, trying to get divorced, and only hopeful of getting married by the end. One should remember that there’s a difference between an author’s conscious, stated intentions in writing a novel, and his unconscious reasons for presenting it the way he has.
With the original banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lawrence would have been accused of trying to corrupt public morals (page 345). An impassioned and lengthy defence of monogamy and marriage, as seen in his “A Propos,” is thus not at all surprising. For this reason, I would take his defence of marriage with a grain of salt.
His novel was meant, according to him, as a championing of “true phallic marriage” (page 360), of monogamy with the right admixture of sensuality, of the union of body and mind. That may be all well and fine, but the average reader probably isn’t going to receive that message; one often doesn’t remember all the details that Lawrence was hoping one would retain in reading his book, let alone link those details in a way that makes his message of advocating ‘sensual marriage’ clear.
Instead, the reader will, rightly or wrongly, more likely glean from Lady Chatterley’s Lover an advocacy of free love and sex for mere physical pleasure. All the things the moralists of yesteryear were condemning the book for. In this, we can see how Lawrence’s critics have said that his novel hasn’t quite succeeded in the purpose he claimed it had.
For such reasons as these, and now that we live in a more liberal world, one far more tolerant of novels, films, etc., the deal more frankly with sexuality, I feel that we can reinterpret the meaning of Lawrence’s novel in our own way, and therefore can reconsider and reappraise it, that is, in a more favourable way. A key hint to how that reinterpretation and reappraisal can be made is in seeing how the novel deals with class, which is also an important feature of the sexual relationship between Connie and Mellors.
Connie is from the upper classes, married to an aristocrat. Mellors is of the working class. Their coming together, as such, in a sexual union is as much a shock to people like Clifford and Hilda as is their adultery and lewdness. We Marxists might look on such a union, as I did with the sex scene between Alexander and Maria in Tarkovsky‘s film, The Sacrifice, as symbolic of the dissolving of class differences.
Now, just as with Lawrence’s pro-marriage arguments, his openly-expressed disdain for socialism, particularly the Soviet kind (page 352), as we read in his “A Propos” and in his other statements at other times of his life, is something we can take with a grain of salt, especially when we place them in historical context. Just as there was opposition to frank, four-letter expressions of sexuality back then, so was there opposition throughout the bourgeois Western world to socialism (consider the proliferation of fascism in the 1920s as an example).
Lawrence’s depiction of the hard, soulless life of the Tevershall miners could easily have been interpreted as an indirect advocacy of socialism, even if Lawrence hadn’t intended such a reading. To protect his reputation from the “commie” label would have been a strong motive for him to speak ill of socialism, regardless of his actual feelings about the ideology. After all, recall how Marx had to deal with the accusation of communists apparently wishing to abolish marriage, and to hold women in common (it can be found in The Communist Manifesto, II: Proletarians and Communists, 37-38–link above).
Now, Mellors is working-class, but he’s more than that. In the army in WWI, he was a lieutenant. He is also well-read and intelligent. When speaking, he sometimes shifts from the accent of one from the middle class to his Derbyshire accent, a more working-class dialect. When speaking in this latter manner, he often uses those four-letter words. But during his more articulate moments, we can see in him the potential of the working class to rise up to something higher.
In the case of Connie, though she’s from the upper class and married to a minor nobleman, her previous bohemian lifestyle, current affair with Mellors, and her attempts at imitating his Derbyshire accent, as well as her learning his naughty words (pages 194-195), all symbolize her willingness to come down, just as Mellors is capable of coming up. This mobility of theirs shows how, in the world of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the boundaries between the lower and upper classes are blurred.
“And now she touched him, and it was the sons of god with the daughters of men.” (pages 191-192) As I’ve discussed elsewhere, the coming-together of such worlds as the divine and human ones is something thought best to be kept separate. Connie’s and Mellors’s sexual union is just such a union socially frowned on.
Just as Connie and Mellors, as well as their coming together, are relatable and sympathetic, so is Clifford, as an aristocrat who is totally out of touch with the real world, totally unrelatable and unsympathetic. His impotence, weakness, and infantile dependence on Mrs. Bolton can all be seen to represent the modern fading-away into irrelevance of the nobility and all things feudal.
His impotence, as it relates to Lawrence’s idealizing of sensuality, is not something Clifford can be faulted with, since it was the result of a war injury and therefore beyond his control. For such reasons as this, I feel that a more legitimate criticism of him is based on his class arrogance and pursuit of money and power on the one hand, and his helpless dependance on workers like Mrs. Bolton on the other.
Indeed, his Oedipal dependence on her can easily be related to the final stage of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic, in which the slave, through the accumulated labour value of all of his or her work for the master, has rendered the master so helpless and dependent that the roles of powerful and powerless are traded. Accordingly, Mrs. Bolton’s attitude towards Clifford is paradoxically one of admiration and worship of his nobility, yet also of contempt for his arrogance. “She was very good and competent, and she soon knew how to have him in her power.” (page 88) She is a mother to him, adoring her sweet baby, yet also looking down on the pathetic weakling.
In contrast to Clifford’s vain pretensions to being a part of the literary world, we have the earthy language of Mellors, with its fucks, cunts, arses, pisses, shits, etc. He is a double of Clifford in many ways, though a much more sympathetic version. He, too, has been cuckolded by his wife (Bertha Coutts), whom he hasn’t yet divorced, as Clifford never divorces Connie within the confines of the novel. Mellors is aloof and sarcastic, not wishing to socialize much, paralleling Clifford’s arrogant disconnect from the people. He, too, was scathed while serving in WWI, though he suffered pneumonia from it, rather than paralysis. Mellors, however, has a nobility from his inner character, rather than from a position of birth. He is the stud that Clifford can never be.
His use of four-letter words, as well as his sex scenes with Connie, contrast with Clifford’s abandonment of the body in a way that can symbolize something Lawrence never wrote of in his “A Propos”: the superiority of a materialist philosophy to that of idealism, making possible a Marxist spin on Hegel’s master/slave dialectic. Four-letter words give most physical expression to the sexual and biological acts they refer to, an all-too physical expression for prudish minds.
More can be said on the novel’s preference of materialism to idealism, as seen on page 258, when Connie says this to Clifford: “Give me the body. I believe the life of the body is a greater reality than the life of the mind…With the Greeks it gave a lovely flicker, then Plato and Aristotle killed it, and Jesus finished it off. But now the body is coming really to life, it is really rising from the tomb.” (my emphasis)
As far as the bad-mouthing of “Bolshevism” in the novel is concerned, in Chapter IV in particular, consider the sources of it. Bolshevism is “hate of the bourgeois,” according to Charlie May, to which Tommy Dukes agrees “Absolutely”; Hammond would “deny that Bolshevism is logical,” and he says, “The Bolshevists aren’t really intelligent”; Berry considers Bolshevism to be as “half-witted” as “[their] social life in the west” (pages 38-39). There’s of course no way Clifford would ever approve of “Bolshevism.” When Connie coldly doesn’t kiss him goodnight, he imagines her to be a “bolshevik” (page 52), projecting his own coldness onto her.
But who are all of these men, in the world that Lawrence constructed? They aren’t at all sympathetic. None of them has the required, vaunted sensuality. These intellectuals are all talk and no action, engaging in empty, meaningless discussions on love, sex, and politics. They personify what I said above about how inferior idealism is to materialism.
Lawrence recognizes the evils that come from money and greed: “Society was terrible because it was insane. Civilised society is insane. Money and so-called love are its two great manias; money a long way first.” (page 104) Mellors, to a great extent the spokesman of Lawrence, imagines he’ll protect Connie from “the insentient iron world and the Mammon of mechanical greed.” (page 130)
Still, Lawrence acknowledged, through Mellors’s experiences, how “if you were poor and wretched you had to care [about money]…the care about money was like a great cancer, eating away the individuals of all classes.” (page 155)
Shortly after the above quote, we have Mellors thinking about how much he wants to have Connie “in his arms” (page 156). He goes over to the Chatterley’s house, in his wish to be close to her. Mrs. Bolton sees him through the window, recognizes him by his nearby dog, and realizes that he is Lady Chatterley’s lover. (page 158)
This juxtaposition of his recognition of the need for money with his need to be with Connie, even to the point of going over to Clifford’s house in the hope of seeing her, is significant. Clifford has, in abundance, all the things that working-class Mellors needs: money, “the woman” (page 156), and the property.
Mellors’s making love with Clifford’s wife, the taking of the aristocrat’s ‘property’ (recall what I said above about Engels and the relationship of the patriarchal family with the origins of property), is thus symbolically a revolutionary act. We see here the connection between capitalism and patrilineage, and how Mellors’s affair with Connie–his seizing of the means of reproduction, as it were–is a defiance of these two forms of ownership. Mellors going over to Clifford’s house is also symbolic defiance.
On pages 166-167 there is a vivid description of Connie’s experience, during a car ride to Uthwaite, of “the long squalid straggle of Tevershall” (pages 165-166). Here we have a depiction of the harsh life of the English working class, of the local miners and where they live…”all went by ugly, ugly, ugly…”
As Connie looks on the ugliness of Tevershall with horror, she shudders at the thought of producing an heir to Wragby, thus continuing this classist state of affairs. Lawrence may have insisted on his diagnosis that the problem of the “Half-corpses, all of them” [that is, the Teverhsall workers] is because industrialization has cut the men away from the rhythms of nature, yet as I said above, it was precisely the development of industrial capitalism, the ruthless pursuit of profit, that brought about that cutting away.
It’s the elephant in the room that Lawrence, addled by anti-Sovietism, completely missed. “The industrial England blots out the agricultural England.” (page 171) Put another way, capitalist England stole the Commons from the English farmers, forcing them to look for work in the ugly, industrialized cities.
On pages 174-175, Connie further contemplates the ugliness and death-like state of the miners. One senses her feelings of alienation from these men, their alienation from each other, and each man’s alienation from his species-essence.
After having contemplated the miners, Connie returns home, and she sees Mellors there. Just as the miners work for Clifford, so is Mellors “One of Clifford’s hirelings!” (page 177). Immediately after, the novel quotes Julius Caesar, with two lines from Cassius: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Act I, scene ii, lines 140-141)
In the context of this section of Lawrence’s novel, with Connie’s having just contemplated the plight of the miners, of Mellors similar position as a “hireling,” and “an underling,” the Shakespeare quote, meant to rouse Brutus to join Cassius’ conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, is implicitly being used to suggest the need for a revolt of the “underlings” against Clifford.
Immediately after is a discussion between Connie and Mrs. Bolton about the death of the latter’s husband in the mining pit (pages 178-179). So again, by way of juxtaposition, we see a linking of the suffering of the miners, and of that of Mellors, with the death of Mrs. Bolton’s husband in the pit–all examples of the oppression of the working class.
Mrs. Bolton speaks of the alienation caused by those “as runs the pit…they all want to separate a woman and a man, if they’re [physically] together.” The killing of her husband was just such a separation, the taking of him from her.
Such alienation finds its opposite in the lovemaking between Connie and Mellors, especially when she orgasms in Chapter XII. “Beauty! What beauty!…How was it possible, this beauty here, where she had previously only been repelled?” (page 192) It is just after this lovemaking, her first with him that feels warm and wonderful, instead of ridiculously distant, that she repeatedly asks him if he loves her (she manages to squeak a yes out of the otherwise aloof man), and she imitates his Derbyshire dialect and dirty words. In all of this, we can sense their growing togetherness.
In the following chapter, we get a sense of Clifford’s arrogant attitude towards the miners, him wishing to prevent them from striking without their consent (page 197). Connie, with him in the woods, gets into an argument with him about the miners’ plight, and his callous attitude towards them. Again, given our sympathy to her and antipathy to him, we can safely conclude that the narrative is far more favourable to the working class than to the upper class, despite Lawrence’s denials.
After the argument, Clifford’s motorized wheelchair gets stuck on a steep incline. He wants Mellors to fix it. Stubborn Clifford insists on trying to get up the incline without any help from Mellors or Connie, but it becomes obvious that only a push from them will get the wheelchair up.
In this scene, so humiliating for Clifford, we see the fall of the pride of the man who just spoke of the strength and responsibility of the aristocracy over the workers. Clifford’s powerlessness represents the waning power and relevance of the upper classes.
Mellors’s helping of Clifford, despite exhausting himself because of how his pneumonia has weakened him, puts him in the same position as mothering Mrs. Bolton: we see again the final stage of the slave/master dialectic, with Mellors’s rising power and Clifford’s decline, a contrast paralleled with the former’s phallic potency vs the latter’s lack of it.
Yet if Clifford feels physically and psychologically emasculated, so has Mellors felt that way, if only psychologically so. He tells Connie of his past sexual experiences with those women who weren’t interested in sex, those who “had nearly taken all the balls out of [him]” (page 221). Then came Bertha Coutts, who liked sex all too much for Mellors’s liking. Too sexually aggressive for him, she had a vagina that “was a beak tearing at [him],” like a vagina dentata.
So as I said above, Mellors is in a number of ways a double of Clifford. Bertha’s sexual aggression, relative to Mellors, is parallel to Connie’s sexual aggression, relative to Clifford. Commenting on Mellors’s experience of his wife, she quotes As You Like It and says that he had “too much of a good thing.” Some criticize the novel’s depiction of Bertha, treating her sexual aggression as a bad thing, as not acceptably ‘womanly’; but it’s not that she has desires that are ‘unwomanly,’ for Melors is happy to have a woman who wants sex. It’s just that she’s too aggressive about it, even for him.
Added to Bertha’s excesses are her fleeing to another man while Mellors was in the army in India, and all of her troublemaking while Connie is in Venice, stirring up the gossip about his affair with Connie, which leads to Mellors getting fired. Bertha has psychologically castrated him many times, but he’s a far more sympathetic character than Clifford.
Mellors seems to be ambivalent about the issues that socialism raises. On the one hand, he has a bookshelf including “books about bolshevist Russia” (page 233), yet on the other, he blames “a steady sort of bolshevism [for] just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing.” (page 238) Still, he recognizes that “We’re forced to make a bit [of money] for us-selves, an’ a fair lot for th’bosses.” (page 240) He would “wipe the machines off the face of the earth again, and end the industrial epoch absolutely, like a black mistake.” (page 242)
Recall what I said above about the capitalists starting industrialization, something Lawrence isn’t interested in acknowledging. Now, the Bolsheviks, of course, industrialized, too (i.e., Stalin beginning his Five-Year Plans around the time that Lady Chatterley’s Lover was written), but with the aim of building up the productive forces in order ultimately to end capitalism and the alienation it causes. Capitalists industrialize only to maximize profit, not to provide for all.
In contrast to all this antipathy towards mechanistic, ugly industrialization, our two lovers adore all that is nature; and during a heavy rain, they both strip naked (Connie first) and run out into it and get soaked (pages 242-243). Back inside after having made love out there, they get warm by the fire, he strokes her buttocks and “secret entrances” (page 244), he admires her beautiful body, and they discuss plans of running away together, having their baby, and divorcing their spouses…acts of liberation!
Intertwining flowers in each other’s pubic hair, they imagine a wedding of their genitals, naming them “John Thomas” and “Lady Jane.” Incidentally, Lawrence at one point considered naming his novel John Thomas and Lady Jane.
Another example of the novel’s acknowledgement of how problematic class is comes when Hilda learns that her sister’s lover is working class. Hilda, of course, disapproves (page 262), for “she loathed any ‘lowering’ of oneself, or the family.” She imagines the affair will end, but this is wish-fulfillment. “One can’t mix up with the working people.” (page 265)
Hilda, when meeting Mellors, dislikes him even more, from hearing his Derbyshire dialect. She’d rather he spoke “natural,” or “normal English” (page 268), since it would sound more pleasing to her “solid Scotch middle class” disposition. (page 262)
Now, Connie would naturally defend Mellors against her sister’s snobbish judgements of him, but her own upper-middle-class prejudices rise up from her unconscious when she, in Venice now, has learned of Bertha’s stirring up of trouble back home (page 290). She imagines of Mellors, upon hearing of his wife’s excesses, that “He was perhaps really common, really low,” and she worries about the “humiliating” damage done to her reputation if Clifford should learn about her affair with Mellors.
Her father, Sir Malcolm, warms up to Mellors soon enough after meeting him back in England; but when Clifford finally learns of the affair, he regresses to such a childlike state that, kissed consolingly by maternal Mrs. Bolton, he is “in a relaxation of madonna-worship.” (page 320) When he learns that the other man is Mellors, though, Clifford is in such a fury that he says she “ought to be wiped off the face of the earth!” (page 326) This choice of words, by the way, is interesting in how they echo Mellors’s wish to wipe machines off the face of the earth. Note how the antipathies of the upper class are diametrically opposed to those of the working class. Mellors would wipe out machines that destroy the proletariat; Clifford would wipe out women who defy the patriarchal family. Accordingly, he refuses to divorce her.
In a letter to Connie, Mellors–who is in the process of working out his divorce from Bertha–discusses such things as the workers wanting to nationalize industry, and wanting to establish a Soviet; he shows his ambivalence about such things again (page 324). He says the men are doomed, and he makes a thinly-veiled reference to Lenin: “they go about as if there was nothing to be done. Anyhow, nobody knows what should be done.” (page 330)
He then speaks of his preference of a society unconcerned with money (one might recall, in this connection, that one of the ultimate goals of communist society is that it should be money-less). Instead, Mellors would have everybody dancing about like pagans who “acknowledge the great god Pan”–more of Lawrence’s vague solutions to modern problems.
Among the last things that Mellors says to Connie in his letter, which brings the novel to an end, is his dialectic, as it were, of chastity and fucking, the former of which he equates with the snow of winter, and the latter of which he equates with spring. He says, “So I love chastity now, because it is the peace that comes of fucking.” (page 332)
He puts it this way because he and Connie have to wait until both are properly divorced before they can marry and therefore resume their lovemaking. They must be patient before they can have that sensual pleasure again. For him, “it is so good to be chaste, like a river of cool water in [his] soul.” (page 332)
This chastity is like a building-up of reserved passion, to be held in until finally they can be together again, to release that passion in a fiery explosion of sex. I’m reminded of the Hindu concept of tapas, which in Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty‘s book, Siva: the Erotic Ascetic, is defined as “The heat of asceticism.” (O’Flaherty, page 324) Elsewhere in her book, she speaks of tapas in this way: “Chastity was characteristic of Indian asceticism from the very start. The Upanishads say that one may realize the Self by practising tapas in the forest, free from passion…Sexual excitement represented a threat against which the ascetic must constantly be on guard. When Brahma desired his daughter, he lost all the tapas which he had amassed in order to create…Although in human terms asceticism is opposed to sexuality and fertility, in mythological terms tapas is itself a powerful creative force, a generative power of ascetic heat.” (pages 40, 41)
So Lady Chatterley’s Lover ends with the hope that Connie, with child by Mellors, will be with him again one day. Then, the winter of their chaste discontent will be made glorious spring by this son of a fuck.
As we know, Lawrence bemoaned modern, industrialized England’s decline from its earlier world, in which men and women lived in harmony with nature, and the body and the mind weren’t alienated from each other, but unified in freely-expressed sensuality. Though his novel depicts the barriers of class in all their ugliness, he seems to prefer old English tradition to a socialist resolving of the class problem, which is odd, given his portrayal of aristocratic Clifford as not only weak and ineffectual, but also unsympathetic, perpetuating industrialization and its killing of the workers’ souls, just so he can make more money…like a capitalist.
It is for these reasons that I feel that a Marxist reading of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in spite of how different Lawrence claimed his intentions were in his “A Propos” of the novel, is by far the easiest and best interpretation of it. A writer may claim that his novel means one thing while he’s unconsciously meant something quite different. He might intentionally mislead us about his intentions, to protect us from knowing its real meaning and therefore not spoiling us with its secrets, or to protect himself against allegations of corrupting morals or promoting socialism, as I speculated above. In any case, I don’t feel bound to keeping my interpretations in conformity with his “A Propos,” and I therefore feel free to interpret as I wish.
Connie’s affair with Mellors, as I see it, is a symbolic act of revolt against the patriarchal family and the class system, two social problems that are intermixed. The frank expression of sexuality, with its four-letter words, is connected with the advocacy of such a revolt, since, despite Lawrence’s denials, it’s a case of épater la bourgeoisie. The lovers’ bearing of a child that is not Clifford’s is a symbolic termination of the patriarchal family and the upper classes, all in one stroke.
Connie’s and Mellors’s union is that of the upper and lower classes, a symbolic blurring of class distinctions. Their leaving of Tevershall and Wragby is a turning of one’s back on the ugliness of industrial capitalism. I’d say the book’s censorship had even more to do with this political subversiveness than the dirty words…even if Lawrence had never intended it.
D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, New York, Bantam Classics, 1968
The Sacrifice (Offret) is a 1986 Swedish film written and directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. It stars Erland Josephson, with Susan Fleetwood, Allan Edwall, Sven Wollter, and Valérie Mairesse. Many of the crew had worked in Ingmar Bergman films.
The Sacrifice was Tarkovsky’s last film, and his third film as an expatriate from the Soviet Union, after Nostalghia and the documentary, Voyage in Time. He died of cancer shortly after filming it; in fact, he was too ill to attend its presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1986. It won the Grand Prix there, as 1972’s Solaris had.
The film also won Tarkovsky his third FIPRESCI Prize at Cannes, and his third Palme D’Or nomination. It won the BAFTA Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1988. It was considered as a nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 59th Academy Awards, but it didn’t get the nomination.
As was a problem with Stalker, the shooting of The Sacrifice included a failed attempt to capture something important on film: this time, the climactic burning down of the house of Alexander (Josephson), because the only camera used to film the burning jammed, thus ruining the footage. The house had to be reconstructed at great expense in two weeks, and the burning was more prudently re-filmed with two cameras.
Here is a link to quotes, in English translation, from the film; and here is a link to the complete film, with English subtitles.
The film begins with a shot of a detail from Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished painting, Adoration of the Magi. The detail from the painting shows the baby Jesus receiving a gift from one of the Magi. As we look at this detail, we see the credits and hear the aria “Erbarme mich, mein Gott” (“Have mercy, my God”), from JS Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.
When the credits have all been shown, the camera shot slowly moves upwards, so we see the palm tree in the top centre of the painting. From this, we go to a distant shot of a tree that Alexander is planting near the shore at Närsholmen, on the island of Gotland. The tree is Alexander’s gift to the land there, just as Jesus received gifts with a tree in the background, one associated with the Virgin Mary (partly from the verse, “You are stately as a palm tree,” from the Song of Songs—7:7). A movie called The Sacrifice fittingly has gift-giving as a major theme.
Just as we see a celebration of Christ’s birth in the painting, with a tree in the background, so is it Alexander’s birthday, with him planting a tree, and he’s soon to receive gifts. Also, just as Christianity is a fusion of Biblical and pagan elements (as I argued here), so is The Sacrifice a combination of Christian and pagan elements, as we’ll soon see.
Trees have been sacred in both paganism and Christianity, and Leonardo’s painting, with its ruin of a pagan building in the background (not that we’ll see this part during the credits), shows the supplanting of paganism by Christianity.
Alexander asks “Little Man” (a boy played by Tommy Kjellqvist), his son, to help with the tree. Alexander speaks of an orthodox monk planting a barren tree on a mountainside. The tree was to be watered every day until it came to life; after three years of this constant work, the tree was finally covered with blossoms! In this story, we learn the value of systemic work.
This notion of constantly doing something would be contrasted with constantly talking, something Alexander has a problem with, and even admits to himself. A former actor turned journalist, critic, and lecturer of aesthetics, he will later quote Hamlet: “Words, words, words,” sharing the Dane’s opinion that words are useless, and action is needed (while also doing plenty of the former and not enough of the latter).
In this connection, we should remember that, for the great majority of the film, Little Man doesn’t say a word, because of a throat operation he’s recently undergone. Only at the very end of the film does he say anything, which is, “In the beginning was the Word. Why is that, Papa?” As a mute for almost all of the film, this innocent child is almost as Christ-like as the baby in Leonardo’s painting, who also would have been without a word to say.
Action without speech would thus seem to be the moral ideal of the film…and yet Jesus–committing the ultimate salvific act, his self-sacrifice on the Cross–is called “the Word” at the beginning of the Gospel of John. This Jesus had many important words to say in all four Gospels, too, of course, including his parables. Tarkovsky in fact called this last film of his a “parable,” according to his book, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (1985).
On the other side of the coin, one may question the moral validity of Alexander’s actions to save the world from a nuclear holocaust. Salvation by adultery? Salvation by arson? Do such actions really appease an angry god, be he Christian or pagan?
As a result of such considerations of works vs. words, one can see a dialectical relationship between these in terms of their worth. Both words and actions have their share of validity vs. worthlessness.
A similar dialectical relationship can be seen in theism vs. atheism in the film, as I also noted in my analysis of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Otto (Edwall) arrives on his bike as a postman to give Alexander a telegram wishing him a happy birthday, with jocular allusions to Richard III and The Idiot (Alexander has played both King Richard III and Prince Myshkin on the stage, back in his acting days.)
Otto asks Alexander about his relationship with God, to which the latter answers, “nonexistent.” This attitude is soon to change, though, when he learns from the news of the threat of WWIII. There are no atheists in fallout shelters, apparently.
Otto discusses his interest in Nietzsche‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which it is famously declared, “God is dead!” Yet later, Otto will discuss his belief in witches, angels, and the bizarre idea that Alexander can prevent nuclear war through having a sexual union with Maria (played by Guðrún Gísladóttir), one of his house servants, who is also, according to Otto, a witch “in the best possible sense.”
We can see a dialectical relationship even between that English king and Russian prince whom Alexander once played on the stage: the former is clever, but as ugly morally as he is physically deformed; the latter is simple and naïve, yet has a good heart. Such ambiguities and equivocations can be found throughout The Sacrifice, for spirituality here is at one moment portrayed as the highest good, and the next moment, the highest foolishness.
Speaking of foolishness, while he has Little Man sitting on his lap among trees further away from the shore and closer to his house, Alexander tells the little boy about what a difficult thing the fear of death is. It sometimes makes us do things we ought not to do…and yet it is this very fear of death, in a nuclear holocaust, that drives Alexander not only to sleep with Maria, but also to burn his house down, in some superstitious hope that these acts will save humanity from destruction.
At home, Alexander has received a gift from Victor (Wollter), the family doctor who did Little Man’s throat operation, as well as a close friend of Alexander’s family. The gift is a book of pre-Renaissance art depicting Christian saints; Alexander is most pleased with it, since though his relationship with God is “non-existent,” he has aspirations to bring it into existence. There’s a sense he’s been waiting for a catalyst to make this happen–it’s coming soon.
His English wife, Adelaide (Fleetwood), also an actress and fluent in Swedish, appears in the house with her daughter, Marta (played by Filippa Franzén). House servants Maria and Julia (Mairesse) are preparing the birthday dinner, and Otto will soon arrive with his own gift for Alexander, a huge, framed, old map of Europe.
“Every gift involves a sacrifice,” Otto says.
Is adultery with one’s maid a gift to God? Otto seems to think so, in spite of Exodus 20:14.
Is burning down one’s house a gift to God? Alexander seems to think so, as we’ll see.
There’s a sense of coolness not only between Otto, the postman, and bourgeois Victor, but also between Maria and bourgeois Adelaide, who finds the odd Icelandic servant frightening; bourgeois Alexander also finds her a bit “odd.” Otto, Maria’s neighbour, is more acquainted with her, and thus thinks better of her. It shouldn’t be surprising to find fellow proletarians warmer with each other, but alienated among the bourgeoisie.
Studying the map, Alexander imagines it to depict a much happier Europe than that of the modern world, just as he was idealizing in his mind the book’s pictures of ancient saints. He prefers the world of the past to that of the disillusioning present.
He discusses his having given up on acting due to a feeling that his identity dissolves in his roles. He came to be ashamed of impersonating other people. Adelaide preferred him as an actor, fell in love with him then; but she has grown disenchanted with him as a mere bookish, loquacious intellectual now.
Her disenchantment with him seems to have led to alienation in the family, an aloofness between him on the one side, and her and Marta on the other, while he is trying hard to be close with his son, to compensate for that alienation.
These issues lead to a suspicion that Adelaide has been having an affair with Victor. In fact, given that pretty Marta is barely of the age of consent, and that we see Victor touching her in a creepy way later on, I suspect that our good doctor has been in bed with both mother and daughter! Could this be why he wants to take a job in Australia, to escape the guilt of his tangled sexual indiscretions? I’ll discuss these issues in more detail later on.
After discussing his hobby of collecting evidence of the paranormal, Otto suddenly collapses on the living room floor. When the other guests check on him, he insists that he is alright; apparently, an evil angel has passed by and touched him.
Almost immediately after that, the guests hear jet fighters flying low, just above the house, and causing such a shaking that a large jar of milk falls off a shelf and breaks on the floor. All of the guests are disturbed by the jets except Otto, who remains still on the chair he’s gone to after his fall. It’s as if he knew the jets were coming, and he is equating them with the angel that touched him.
Alexander has been outside, looking at a miniature model of his house, something Little Man and Otto have made for him as a birthday gift. Upon beholding the model, Alexander quotes Macbeth in the original English: “Which of you have done this?”, which originally was the Scottish King’s frightened response to seeing the ghost of Banquo, whom he’s just had murdered. It’s as though Alexander, seeing himself in the future and seeing the ‘ghost’ of the house he is to burn, is feeling a similar guilt and looking for someone else to blame it on, to project it onto.
He goes back into the house to find all the guests listening to a news report about what seems to be the beginning of WWIII and a possible nuclear holocaust. Everyone is in a state of shock, but Adelaide reacts in the most extreme way, having a complete mental breakdown and needing a sedative from Victor.
A few interesting things should be noted about Adelaide in connection with what used to be called ‘female hysteria.’ Her hairstyle and dress remind one of the fashions of the 19th century, the last in which diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ in women were common. She calls out to the men to “do something,” to come to the rescue of the Victorian-minded woman. A prominent symptom of ‘hysteria’ was hypersexuality; now, while Adelaide is flipping out, and Victor is embracing her from behind in an effort to restrain her (holding her almost like a lover), her legs are spread out on the floor, revealing sensuous hosiery and high heels.
I’m not at all trying to revive bizarre, antiquated, and indeed sexist theories of mental illness in women (Freud himself, not exactly one to be called a feminist, was one of the first people to acknowledge symptoms associated with ‘hysteria’ in men, thus contributing to the decline in the diagnosis of this spurious medical condition.). I’m merely making links here between Adelaide’s mental state, her sexuality, and foolish old world thinking. After all, Alexander is about to engage in some hysteria of his own.
The needle that Victor sticks into Adelaide’s arm, to sedate her, can be seen as a phallic symbol. Some in the 19th century believed that genital stimulation could treat women’s ‘hysteria,’ including the use of the first electric vibrators [!]. My point in bringing all of this up is to show how it’s hinted, in symbolic and literal form, that Victor and Adelaide are lovers.
As Victor is embracing her, Alexander is further off, looking out a window: shouldn’t her husband be holding her? In this we can see the family dysfunction hiding behind a birthday party.
Victor asks Julia if she wants a phallic shot of sedation, she who’s shown no signs of mental breakdown, but who is as pretty as Adelaide. The maid walks away without a word, as if disgusted by the doctor’s apparent lechery. Then he goes over to pretty Marta to give her a shot. She says she doesn’t need the shot, but he insists, with a lecherous smirk and that creepy touching of her face that I mentioned above, that “it’s absolutely necessary.” That shot is symbolic Rohypnol…isn’t it?
Alexander would rather have drinks than the doctor’s offered shot. Otto doesn’t want a shot, either. (Perhaps by sedating the two men, Victor would have a chance to get at Mother and daughter, with Julia being discreet enough not to say anything.) Marta offers to go upstairs with Victor, while Julia watches over Mama [!]. A little later, we’ll see Marta get naked in her bedroom, knowing that Victor is still around, and Otto has left.
The phones are dead, and the electricity is out. Julia refuses to wake Little Man and have him traumatized with knowledge of humanity’s impending doom.
Alone in a room near sleeping Little Man, the Leonardo painting hanging on the wall, Alexander takes a look at it, then says the Lord’s Prayer. Teary-eyed, he is now entering his own version of ‘hysteria,’ behaving foolishly in a state of fear. Terrified of nuclear war, he has come to what he has been waiting for all of his life: to bring back into existence his relationship with God.
Note how contradictory his prayer is. After finishing his recital of the Lord’s Prayer, he on the one hand offers all he has to God, including his son (as mad as Abraham must have been), then he begs God to restore everything to what it was before the news report. In this prolix prayer, he offers to be mute for the rest of his life. His ‘brevity’ is like that of Polonius–the soul of folly.
His prayer thus demonstrates a paradoxical attitude towards faith and spirituality in this film: it’s illuminating and comforting, yet foolish. The terror of nuclear war urgently needs an escape, yet the opium of the people is no more than that–an escape. Fittingly, after his prayer, Alexander gets on a couch and sleeps to escape his fears.
Before we see his dream, though, we see an example of one of the family problems that he must at least be suspicious of: that scene I mentioned above, of Marta getting naked in her bedroom, happens now. She calls for Victor, saying she needs him [!]. Alexander hopes to save the world, and he can’t even set his own family issues right!
Alexander’s dream, in black and white, begins with melancholy Japanese flute music and dripping water for a soundtrack. It depicts him looking out of a window from a dark room to see snow on the grass. Since he has fears of WWIII, this snow could be seen as symbolic of a nuclear winter. Outside now, he’s stepping in the mud and puddles of melted snow, symbolic of a return to formless, primordial Chaos after the destruction of the world.
He bends down and moves some leaves and trash aside to reveal a number of coins. So much of the motive behind Cold War hostilities, leading to the danger of nuclear war, is money: either the greedy love of it, or the urge to transform society so that it can be shared by all or be eliminated altogether.
He walks in the snow, looking around. More of those coins are seen in the snow, among the puddles, mud, and trash. He sees the bare feet of Little Man in the snow, so vulnerable in the danger of WWIII, and he speaks fearfully for the boy, who then runs away. We hear the sound of approaching fighter jets, which blow aside everything on the ground as they fly by.
He wakes from his dream with a jolt.
Otto returns, to tell Alexander what, apparently, he needs to do to save the world from nuclear war. He must make love with Maria, one of his house servants! Since Otto, as we know, has an interest in the paranormal, and Maria is “the best” kind of witch, such rationalizing is all we need, it seems, to be convinced of this “last hope” as a viable solution.
Alexander sneaks out of his house while Adelaide and Victor are sitting together at a table outside [!], and he uses Otto’s bicycle to ride over to Maria’s home. All of this subterfuge just reinforces the sense of alienation in Alexander’s marriage.
When he arrives at Maria’s home, then begins what must be the most bizarre seduction in human history. Seriously: how does a man convince a woman (his employee) to have sex with him, saying that their tumble in bed is the only way nuclear armageddon can be prevented?
He starts by discussing a time when he was a boy and his mother was ill, and he wanted to tidy up an unweeded garden, so it would be more pleasing to her eyes. After doing so with the utmost diligence, he regrets his gardening efforts, preferring the unruly beauty of the original garden. The story seems to be teaching us not to tamper with nature, not to change anything from its original state, for it may have beauty despite its messy imperfections.
Il ne faut pas cultiver notre jardin.
When he’s come to the point of asking to lie with Maria, he points to his temple a pistol he’s taken from home, implying he’ll kill himself if she doesn’t consent to the sex. One is reminded of when Richard Gloucester, a role Alexander has played, remember, threatens to stab himself if Lady Anne won’t accept the evil hunchback’s hand in marriage. So Maria gives herself to Alexander. Indeed,…
Was ever woman in this humour woo’d?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
The fact that, when the lovemaking happens, we don’t see it done the usual way, but rather Tarkovsky has us see the two lovers floating, turning together in a circle over her bed, emphasizes that it isn’t the sex act per se that matters, but what their physical union symbolizes.
And when we see the sex in a symbolic sense, we can see how it finally makes sense. Consider who Alexander and Maria are in relation to each other. He is her employer. He is an affluent bourgeois, she is a worker. Their sexual union symbolizes the removal of class differences. Their lovemaking represents the sublation of the material contradiction between the upper and lower classes, which is vital in ending nuclear brinksmanship between the US and the USSR, as I’ll explain in more detail later.
Now, many will object to my interpretation on the grounds that the oh, so spiritual Tarkovsky wasn’t exactly a card-carrying Marxist-Leninist. There was friction between him and his mystic visions, on the one hand, and the atheistic Soviet authorities, on the other hand. After all, he left the Soviet Union to make his last movies, like The Sacrifice, for the sake of pursuing artistic freedom, did he not?
That friction between him and the Soviet government was there, but it’s been exaggerated by bourgeois, imperialist propagandists (as one can see in liberal Wikipedia). The fact is that Soviet censorship had been softening little by little over the years, ever since the death of Stalin in 1953, three years before Tarkovsky’s first student film and nine years before Ivan’s Childhood, his first feature film. Though the Soviet censors would have been sensitive to anything even remotely, subtly critical of communism, they would have also recognized Tarkovsky’s obvious genius, and would have known that promoting that genius would have been good for the USSR’s global reputation; so a balance between censorship and indulgence was sought.
Recall, also, that Tarkovsky’s son insisted that his father was no political dissident. While Tarkovsky was surely no doctrinaire supporter of the Soviet system, being someone born, raised, and educated in the USSR, he would have at least unconsciously absorbed some basic socialist values, like closing up the gap between the rich and the poor, something this sex scene can be seen to symbolize.
There is a dream sequence seen while Alexander and Maria are making love, in which we see her in the hairstyle and clothing of Adelaide; this shot suggests a wish-fulfillment of Maria being his true soulmate. This vision, along with one–immediately after another brief shot of Leonardo’s painting–of naked Marta chasing after chickens (representing cowardly Victor, who’s running off to Australia after his sexual misconduct?), reinforces our understanding of the failure of Alexander’s married life, his own unconscious acknowledging of that failure.
As they make love, we can hear Maria’s voice, comforting Alexander, trying to soothe his pain and ease his fears. It’s easy to see how he’d prefer her to his emotionally volatile wife, whom, indeed, we see lurking in the darkness immediately after we see naked Marta.
He wakes up on his sofa, back at home. The power and telephones are back. His beloved Japanese flute music is playing on his stereo. He later puts on a Japanese robe, as if about to perform some kind of Shinto ritual.
The electricity having come back, right after the supposedly salvific lovemaking, implies that all is back to normal, that God, satisfied with Alexander’s ‘gift,’ has prevented nuclear war. Still, Alexander is not assured of the world’s safety, of this Nietzschean eternal recurrence (i.e., from the end of the world to its new beginning) that Otto had promised, so Alexander–in his ongoing religious hysteria–feels he must make the ultimate sacrifice: burn his house to the ground.
Further evidence of his family’s dysfunction is seen when, as he’s sneaking around behind them in his frenzy, Adelaide and Marta are upset to have heard of Victor’s plan to leave them and go to Australia. The women complain of Alexander losing his ‘friend,’ but they’re really just jealously upset about losing a lover. Victor, of course, just wants to run away from facing the responsibilities of his own sexual misconduct.
Alexander must be aware that he’s been made a cuckold: he’d be overhearing their conversation as he’s sneaking around, and he must have seen and heard previous hints of their fooling around behind his back. Part of his reason for burning down the house, rendering Adelaide and Marta homeless, must be out of spite; yet with no consideration for Little Man, whom he deeply loves, Alexander is still being irrational.
And again, I must ask, especially if the lovemaking with Maria (also Alexander’s unconscious revenge against his adulteress wife) is enough to save the world: why would burning down his house appease God? Didn’t He prefer His Son’s crucifixion?
My answer to this, as with the lovemaking with Maria, is that its meaning is symbolic. Alexander’s house, where his maids work, is his property. Private property, which we socialists wish to abolish, is places: farmland, factories, office buildings, apartment buildings–the means of production.
The acquisition and accumulation of capital (which must ever expand), along with the ruthless and jealous wish to protect ownership of it, have led to the export of capital into other countries, as well as competition over who will exploit the most of those countries. This has resulted in two imperialist world wars, and with the American invention of the atomic bomb, fears of nuclear war.
So, to avert nuclear war, Alexander’s burning down of his house can be seen to symbolize a bourgeois sacrifice of private property. (This message is especially relevant to us today, in our current Cold War with Russia and China–hence my urgent recommendation of this film.) Class war is the inevitable result of rich landowners leaving very little for the poor to live with. Bourgeois exploitation of the proletariat, being so intolerable for the poor, necessitates class antagonisms and socialist revolution.
In the modern world, imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism makes war inevitable, as a competition for land and resources. The Manhattan Project brought in the nuclear age, resulting in the necessity of the USSR, China, and the DPRK to develop their own nuclear weapons programs, to prevent the US from bombing them as Japan had been bombed. To prevent nuclear war, then, the class antagonisms of capitalism and imperialism must be ended–hence, the abolition of private property, as Alexander’s arson symbolizes.
It’s fitting in this connection that, as the house is burning down to the ground and his family, Julia, and Victor return from their walk to watch the fire in horror, Maria arrives on her bicycle and Alexander runs up to her, falls to his knees, and kisses her hands. This is symbolic of the bourgeois ceding power to the worker, as linked with the burning down of the house as representing the abolishing of private property.
Bourgeois Adelaide and Victor take him away from Maria, he runs back to her, and they take him away again, Adelaide growling at Maria, “Don’t touch him!” This symbolizes capitalist attempts at counterrevolution. As a bourgeois himself, Alexander can thus be seen as like Engels.
Now, the above is my allegoric interpretation of Tarkovsky’s “parable.” On the literal level, however, it’s obvious that Alexander, driven to hysteria by the fear of nuclear annihilation, has simply gone mad in his religious ecstasy. Just as Tarkovsky was, as I speculate, ambivalent about socialism, so was he ambivalent about spirituality and religion, seeing both the good and bad sides in it. Spirituality can give comfort, and it can cause one to go mad. Tarkovsky’s genius allowed him to have just as nuanced an attitude towards religion as he had towards socialism.
It’s safe to assume that the paramedics, presumably answering a call from a neighbour about the arson, will drive Alexander to a mental hospital. His family has fallen apart just as he has mentally. There is no spiritual edification to be found in this scene, except for the allegory I provided.
With the end of this family’s world achieved in his arson, the eternal recurrence brings us back to the beginning with Little Man tending the tree. Finally, he can speak, and he quotes the opening of the Gospel of John as mentioned above. His question, “Why is that, Papa?”, seems to be another example of Tarkovsky’s ambivalence towards religion. The quote from John affirms it, while the boy’s question challenges its validity.
The lesson that the parable of The Sacrifice seems to be teaching us is that spirituality has its good and bad sides, and that we must be forever mindful of both. It’s a wavelike dialectic, going up and down and up and down.
There
are those
who think our world today is normal in this state,
when
actually,
our world today should be seen from this perspective.
Many
on the
right think all our problems should be seen this way,
but
such a
vantage point just pushes things the other way.
The left is pushed so far aside, it isn’t even seen,
and
so, the
middle’s pushed rightwards, yet still seen as the centre.
Today’s
world’s
a game
which is
played
by fools,
teetering,
a tower
liable to
fall at any
time now.
The left
is
marginalized
as
usual.
Few, if any,
are
listening
to any of
their
dire
warnings.
The right
is
dominating
discourse
while
pretending
that
affairs
aren’t
enough
to
the
right.
The centre
pretends
to be
left,
while
inching
further
and
further
to
the
right.
Pieces
keep
being
pulled
out
without
any
regard
for
balance.
The edifice
will one day fall to the floor,
a heap of ruins we’ll have to clean up,
yet may not live to do so. There are far too
many holes in the stack as it is: let’s be careful.
Imagine a railroad track that ends where the bridge is out,
over a
steep
cliff
that
no one
would
ever
want to
fall off
to his
death.
People on a train
are going on that railroad track, right to the end of it.
They
don’t
seem
aware
of the
danger
that
they’re
heading
toward.
Marxists, liberals, and right-wingers
are all on that train, racing toward certain doom.
These
last
of the
three
are all
running
to the
front,
as if
wanting
to die.
The liberals are just sitting in their seats,
with a strange faith that the track will go
all
the
way
to
the
other
side
of
the
abyss.
Only the Marxists, the Leninists in particular,
are going to the back, running to jump off,
before
they
go
over
with
all of
those
fools
who
think
the
track
is safe.
There have always been
a concentrated group
of people who
will know
how
one
may
see
the wise way to go, but
how do we get all
the others out
there to
see
the
way
out
of our current trap?
There are those
to the right,
they who
can
not
see
one
thing amiss about
class conflict,
but believe
markets
to be
the
one
way
out.
Then, there are those
on the ultra-left
who are not
satisfied
unless
all
is
set
up
without any faults.
how can one
funnel
such
men
in
so
thin a space to get
us all out of
this mess
that
we
are
in?
Burn!, or Queimada, is a 1969 historical film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. It stars Marlon Brando, with Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. It was written by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio, who based the fictional story partly on the activities of William Walker, an American filibuster involved in the 1855 invasion of Nicaragua, and whose name was used for Brando’s character. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, with the beautiful, anthemic “Abolisson” (“abolição,” or “abolition”–i.e., abolition of slavery, or abolition of private property) playing during the film’s opening credits.
Burn! has been critically acclaimed in the US and abroad. Edward Said praised it and Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers, saying they “…stand unmatched and unexcelled since they were made in the 60s. Both films together constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equaled.” The film gives a raw and uncompromising depiction of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. Of these three evils, David N. Meyer said in The Brooklyn Rail that “…few other films ever address them at all,” something Michael Parenti has also observed. Indeed, anti-imperialist cinema like Burn! typically gets minimal distribution in theaters…for reasons that should be obvious.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie, partly in English and partly in Italian with English subtitles.
Sir William Walker is an agent provocateur, sent to the island of Queimada in 1844 by the British Admiralty, for the purpose of stirring up a slave revolt among the blacks on the island to remove the Portuguese regime, so the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can take over and economically exploit the place. In the Lesser Antilles, Queimada literally means “burnt,” because the Portuguese once had to burn the entire island down to put down the resistance of the indigenous people, after whose deaths blacks were brought to the island to work the cane fields.
The flames of Queimada are the hellfire of imperialism.
It’s interesting how in this film we have an American actor playing a British character based on an American, a casting that suggests the intersection of American and British imperialism. The notion of burning the entire island down, in a film made in 1969, when the Vietnam War was still going on, also invites comparison between the destructiveness of the imperialism of the past with modern imperialism, with its napalm fire and bombings of all those people today who try to defy the US/NATO empire.
Empire rules by a cunning combination of the carrot and the stick. We usually note the stick, but don’t pay enough attention to the carrot. Burn! brings our focus to the carrot in how we see Walker entice José Dolores (Márquez) into leading a slave rebellion to help the British oust the Portuguese.
In all of Walker’s machinations we also see an example of inter-imperialist conflict. As competitors in the production and sale of sugar, the British and Portuguese naturally dislike each other, as we see in the altercations between Walker and Portuguese soldiers at the beginning of the film.
We should wince when we see the stark contrast between the wealthy whites, in their fine clothing, getting off the boat with Walker, on the one hand, and the appalling poverty of the blacks, the children of whom are typically half- or fully naked. José appears, offering to carry Walker’s bags: this offer of service will be a motif repeated in the middle of the film and at the end, with strongly ironic overtones…of the sort of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.
Walker’s original intention on coming to Queimada has been to meet with a black rebel named Santiago, but the rebel has been caught, and he is to be executed. Walker is informed of the bad news by Teddy Sanchez (Salvatori, in dark makeup), a man of mixed African and European background with revolutionary ideals for the island, but ultimately an ineffectual leader. José is standing by as Walker hears the news, a kind of foreshadowing that he will soon replace Santiago, for Walker’s purposes.
Walker later provokes a Portuguese soldier to get himself arrested, so he can watch Santiago’s brutal execution, which includes the use of the garrote and decapitation, from the window of his prison cell. Being white and wealthy, though, Walker can get a lawyer and be freed promptly.
He follows the widow and children of Santiago as they carry his headless corpse from the prison back up a hill to their home. He gives them a hand in carrying the cart part of the way up the hill; in this act of his, knowing how two-faced he really is, we can see in Walker a personification of the liberal who pretends to care for the downtrodden, but who is really just using these people for his own ends.
We see a similar thing going on today when our movie stars are all simping for Ukraine (Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, Mark Hamill, etc.), pretending they care about the suffering of Ukrainians, when it’s really about promoting the interests of the US/NATO empire, even to the point of defending neo-Nazis (however much the celebrities in question are unaware of, or in denial of, that ugly reality). In this way, it is fitting that a Hollywood actor is playing Walker, a bad guy pretending to be a good guy (though, in Brando‘s defence, he did reject his Godfather Oscar as a protest against Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans; also, Brando considered his performance in Burn! to have been the best of his career).
Alberto Grimaldi, producer of Burn!, wanted Sidney Poitier to play José, but Pontecorvo wanted Márquez for the role. I agree with the director’s choice, not out of disrespect for Poitier, of course, but because an unknown actor is more fitting to play the underdog José.
Since Santiago is dead, Walker needs someone to replace him, someone brave, who takes initiative, someone with nothing to lose. He spots these qualities in José, and tests the black man by abusing him with strikes to the face, calling him a “black ape” who stole his bags when he was arrested, slandering his dead mother, and asking if everything a white man says is correct. At first, José is submissive, suggesting he won’t make a good revolutionary leader…then José tries attacking Walker with a machete.
José is Walker’s man, after all.
What’s ironic in Walker’s provocations of José is that his white supremacism is, of course, genuine, rather than merely posturing as a test to awaken José’s rage. The reality of that white supremacism will be clear to José in good time.
Such dialectical juxtapositions of contraries as these are a theme running throughout the movie. Walker as both “friend” and foe of the blacks, the carrot and stick of imperialism, wealthy whites in their finery among half-naked blacks, and half-white, half-black Sanchez, who lives among the privileged but, sympathetic to the blacks, is ultimately powerless and useless to their cause. Even the band of blacks whom José gathers to commit a bank robbery, meet in a church…and the bank–house of the wealth of the privileged Portuguese–is the Banco Espírito Santo.
The Portuguese soldiers will be distracted by drunk, reveling blacks at night, making the robbery much easier. After informing the Portuguese of where José and his men are, Walker supplies his revolutionaries with weapons and teaches them how to use them. His playing of one side against the other reminds us of how two-faced Walker is.
Since Walker has lied to the Portuguese about a supposedly small number of black thieves, they overconfidently send too few soldiers to retrieve the stolen money, and they are killed by José’s men, an encouragement to his people. Soon they’ll have to fight more Portuguese, of course, and in the process, Walker’s robbery grows into a full-blown revolution.
In making José into a revolutionary leader, Walker has made him into both a blessing and a thorn in the side of the British, as we’ll soon see…another example of the theme of juxtaposed opposites in the film.
While José’s revolution is carrying on, Walker of course has his own, British agenda. In a meeting with a group of wealthy white men, Walker discusses how paid workers will be economically preferable to slaves.
In making his case, he uses a shrewd, if “impertinent,” metaphor: men’s use of wives vs. their use of prostitutes. The wife, in the context of the patriarchal family, is analogous to the slave; she’s her husband’s chattel, but all of her expenses are paid by him, even her burial, if he should survive her. The prostitute, on the other hand, is analogous to the modern-day wage labourer; in belonging to no man (her pimp notwithstanding!), she is “freer,” but her client pays only for her services, and she has to pay for her expenses all out of her own pocket.
This analogy is another example of the film’s dialectical juxtapositions of opposites. The British Empire ended slavery not so much out of humanitarian reasons (though these, as well as slave revolts, were significant factors) as out of the economic reasons Walker has laid out in his women-as-property analogy. Slaves are freed, a good thing; but now they’re wage slaves who are no longer provided for, a bad thing.
So, freeing the black slaves isn’t really freeing them, any more than a prostitute is freed…not if the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can help it. This means that Walker et al cannot allow José Dolores to become another Toussaint L’Ouverture.
For a time, the blacks are happy, celebrating, dancing, and making music. What’s left of the Portuguese regime is allowing them a day of freedoms, the “Dia de Reis,” a kind of Saturnalia. The increasingly demoralized Portuguese soldiers can only stand around in disgust at the sight of the costumed revelers.
Now, just as Walker is using the blacks for his purposes, so is he using Sanchez, whose blackness he sees more than his whiteness. At the same time, presumably because of that whiteness, Walker is more direct with Sanchez about how he is using him–to assassinate the Portuguese governor so Sanchez can head the new provisional government, freeing Britain to exploit the sugar cane industry.
José and his men are to lay down their arms and be workers for the Antilles Royal Sugar Company in exchange for the abolition of slavery in Queimada. We hear Morricone’s “Abolisson” again at this point in the film.
José, wearing the uniform of one of the Portuguese soldiers, doesn’t yet know of Walker’s double-dealing, and he still imagines that “Inglês” is his friend. José still thinks that Queimada belongs to him and his people.
José will soon learn the disillusioning truth, though. He’s already uncomfortable having to negotiate a new Queimada constitution with a provisional government made up of white men. He is cool even when meeting Sanchez, seeing his white skin more than his black; this is all in spite of how Sanchez warmly greets him and sincerely hopes for the best for José’s people. He warns Sanchez to be plain with him during the negotiations.
Over the course of a month of discussions with the whites over how to establish the new constitution, it becomes clear to José that they have no intention of relinquishing control of Queimada. To their obviously self-serving suggestions, he can only say “No.” In frustration, he leaves the room, calling them all “Bastards.”
They rationalize their control over the sugar cane industry by insisting it will be good for the blacks economically, but José can see through these white exploiters. All that matters to them is maintaining a maximization of profit, while he cares about his people. He orders his men to remove all the whites from the building.
Walker carries on with the rationalizing, telling José that his politically inexperienced blacks cannot modernize Queimada without the help of the whites. Walker speaks of who, other than the whites, will handle commerce, teach in Queimada’s schools, and cure the sick among the blacks; but as anyone familiar with colonialism will tell you, those whites will handle commerce, teach in schools, and cure the sick only for the benefit of other wealthy whites. The poor blacks won’t enjoy any of those benefits.
José knows that it’s better, for Queimada to go forward, if the whites go away. The blacks, in their inexperience of modern forms of government, commerce, education, and medicine, will surely stumble many times, but they’ll also learn from their mistakes, and in doing so, they’ll move much farther forward, in due time, than they will as exploited wage slaves, forever mired in poverty, because their white slave masters have never had any intention of giving up their power.
José goes outside at night to reunite with his people. He’s saddened by his disappointments with the whites, but to see his people again, those he loves and who love him, brings a smile back on his face.
Walker finds José in a tent, and with a revolver he is prepared to shoot the revolutionary he’s created; but José finally agrees to his men’s laying down of their arms and returning to the plantations. He can see the pragmatism of going along with the British, to prevent extreme poverty and starvation from engulfing the island; but he warns Walker of who has the machetes, which can cut off heads as well as the cane.
In his warning to the British, who in their selling of the cane that he and his people cut, in their dependence on their black workers, the British are reminded of the slave/master dialectic. This observation should be seen in connection with the following scene the next day, when José offers again to carry Walker’s bags, “for a friend,” as the agent provocateur is going to his ship to leave Queimada. This offer to carry Walker’s bags should be remembered at the end of the film, again in symbolic connection with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.
Walker is going to Indochina, to do more of his imperialist cajoling there. He shares a pleasant drink with José, the two of them exchanging friendly smiles, before he boards his ship. His fake friendship with José perfectly exemplifies the two-faced nature of liberals towards those oppressed by imperialism, something the oppressed should be ever wary of.
Ten years later, Walker is sought out so he can go back to Queimada and quell an uprising of José’s in response to the British takeover of the island. What must be emphasized here is how imperialism is in the service of wealthy capitalists. It isn’t just governments who are bullying the blacks of Queimada.
A scene at the London Stock Exchange demonstrates clearly how the financial success of the sugar businesses has given them great political power over their plantations. Men from the Antilles Royal Sugar Company look for Walker, so he can do something about José. He is found in a pub, in the middle of a fistfight that he wins; this detail adds to our understanding of Walker’s brutishness, for we even see him hit the two men seeking him out.
When Walker returns to Queimada, we find not only José rebelling against British exploitation, but also Teddy Sanchez is growing to be uncooperative. Paid for by the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, Walker will act as a military advisor to help put down José’s rebellion. In this we can see clearly how imperialism and colonialism are working in the interests of capitalism; this point would normally be so obvious that it wouldn’t need to be said, except that right-wing libertarians generally refuse to admit that their precious “free market” is ever guilty of any wrongdoing. Government acts alone in these forms of wickedness, in their opinion.
Sanchez hopes Walker will be able to negotiate with José as he had before–to offer the blacks equal civil rights, higher wages, and a general amnesty. The other men in power are hoping Walker will simply get rid of him, and Walker is leaning towards their way of solving the problem.
Another example of the carrot/stick tactic of imperialism is having many black men on the island work as soldiers for the British. We see some of them round up a group of insurgents, line them against the side of a building, and shoot them. One can imagine how the other, powerless blacks must look on these uniformed men as traitors to their own people.
Walker saves one of the men to be shot, needing him to mediate between Walker and José. Though he saves the man’s life for this purpose, because the man tries to run away, Walker shoots him in the leg. In this act, we see, in a symbolic sense, how even when Walker does something good in itself, bad always accompanies the good–more juxtaposing of opposites.
In his conversation with Walker, the man repeats what he’s heard José say, which is the reason for this revolt: the plantation workers, toiling away for the most paltry of wages, are still slaves because they have only machetes, but no ownership of the sugar cane business. We Marxists have always understood how the same basic contradiction has existed throughout history, regardless of if it’s in the form of master vs. slave, feudal lord vs. peasant, or bourgeoisie vs. proletariat: those who own the land and means of production have the power, and they will always be at war with their powerless labourers.
Walker tells the man, just before he is to ride off on a horse to tell José of Walker’s intentions, that he will be pleased to see him. Walker even has the man give José an alcoholic drink as a gift. Such acts are yet more examples of the two-faced liberal pretending to be the friend of the man he’s oppressing.
Walker asks a black soldier working for the imperialists why he isn’t fighting on José’s side. The man doesn’t answer, having a look of shame on his face, but the answer is obvious: his work is safer and better paid…hence, Walker’s smile.
Walker’s container of alcohol is returned from José, with a message on it, saying that he doesn’t drink anymore. José is wise to Walker’s lies now. The message has been sent to him on a cart with dead imperialist soldiers tied to it. It’s obvious that José is done with negotiating. This is war.
In preparing for this war, Walker as the military adviser notes how, in spite of how the imperialists have far more men, weapons, money, etc. than José’s men have, the imperialists haven’t been able to defeat José for these six years; apart from the guerrillas’ inaccessible location, the reason for this frustration is that the imperialists fight for their pay and because they have to, whereas the guerrillas fight for an idea, because they have nothing to lose but their lives. They fight for their love of freedom, and this love motivates them in a way that nothing comparable can for the imperialists. Revolutionaries must never forget this edge they have over the powerful, and must use this edge to steel their courage.
The black collaborators manage to find where the guerrillas and the people they’re protecting are, and they round up the people; then, carrying torches, they burn down the forests where the guerrillas have been hiding. As with the Portuguese, the imperialists’ method of victory is total, indiscriminate destruction, with no respect for plant life, just like the “innocents raped with napalm fire” during the Vietnam War.
A dying black collaborator tells his comrades that the guerrillas emerged from the fire, themselves burning, and killed him and his fellow collaborators there at a fort. The dying man describes the guerrillas as inhuman devils, an obvious projection of how inhuman and devilish the torchers of the forest are.
The imperialists find other villages where the rebels’ people are living, and the black collaborators round them up, too, and burn down their homes. Dogs chase a guerrilla through the fields until he comes to a clearing, then he is shot.
Sanchez, ever torn between his wish to help the blacks and his being forced to help the whites (perfectly symbolized in his half-white, half-black skin), tells all the rounded-up people that the war is José’s fault, it will end soon, and they will all go back to work. The frown on his face shows how reluctant he is in telling them this.
Bread is offered on a cart to the hungry people, and while they are expected to sit and wait patiently for it to be distributed, they rush for the cart, and the collaborators have to fire their rifles to bring about order. Sanchez, in his growing frustration, makes an attempt to take control of the government for the sake of the blacks. His unwillingness to cooperate with the Antilles Royal Sugar Company will be his undoing. In his downfall, we see how the government is controlled by the capitalists, not vice versa.
British redcoats arrive on the island to help defeat José. Sanchez is arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason, and he is executed by firing squad. His arrest is “in the name of the people of Queimada,”…but we all know which people are being referred to here.
The redcoats start fighting the guerrillas, and we see them rounding up the blacks, including women and children. We see the trauma in the eyes of a naked black boy when he has rifles pointed at him. Cannon and rifle fire have left a fog of smoke and a sea of flame all over the plantations…Queimada, indeed. Guerrillas are getting shot left, right, and centre, including the one who mediated between Walker and José.
Shelton (played by Norman Hill) complains of the destruction of the sugar cane plants that has resulted from the battle. After explaining that the plants can be grown again for future exploitation by the Antilles Company, Walker tells Shelton why the island is named Queimada, and that the danger of revolutionary fervour passing from here to other exploited islands greatly outweighs any momentary loss of profits.
José is spotted in Walker’s telescope; he is climbing a mountain with his fellow guerrillas. Here he is shot and captured. Just so we have no doubts about Walker’s duplicitous nature, he describes José as “a fine specimen” who started as a water and bag carrier, made into a revolutionary leader for England’s purposes, and then when he is no longer useful, he is eliminated, “a small masterpiece”; Walker says all of this while smiling.
Just as Walker has spoken of new sugar cane crops growing after a burning, so does José speak of a rebirth of revolutionary feeling after the imperialist fire has defeated him. José says this among the black collaborationists, as if to plant the seed in their minds, to move them to redeem themselves. José knows that others with replace him after he’s executed, hence he doesn’t fear death.
Walker comes over to greet José and shake his hand, but the latter of course won’t shake the hand of the man who’s stabbed him in the back so many times. Walker offers José drink, but he remains cool. Walker has a soldier give José his horse; this gift doesn’t make Walker any more his friend by the weight of an atom.
A naked black boy is found in one of the desolate villages; Walker orders a black collaborator to grab the boy and take him with them. We hear the cries and screams of the boy as he’s carried off. As this is happening, Walker rides over to José and angrily blames the victim, calling José a “black ape” again, and accusing him of starting the bloodshed, in true imperialist fashion. José spits in Walker’s face.
When José is to be hanged, Walker hopes to free him, not out of any sense of camaraderie or remorse (as the Wikipedia article spuriously claims), but because Walker fears making a martyr out of him, inspiring future revolutionaries. If Walker can make it seem to the blacks that José has betrayed them, or has fled death like a coward, then the spirit of revolution may die with him…or at least be weakened.
This attitude is what we should see in Walker when he enters José’s tent and tries to cut him loose. He feels no remorse whatsoever for having betrayed José. In offering him a chance to save his life, Walker is making no act of atonement. Earlier, we even see Walker tie the noose to hang José with.
José chooses to be hanged rather than run free, since he knows that staying alive would be convenient to the British. His martyrdom will indeed inspire future revolutionaries among the blacks; a spark of such inspiration is to be seen in the final scene, as Walker approaches the ship to take him off the island.
The frown we see on Walker’s face as he goes there is, as I said above, not a frown of remorse, despite what the liberal editors of Wikipedia would have you believe. His is a frown from having not done the best he could have done at his job, something he earlier said he prides himself on. He’s frowning at José’s martyrdom, a danger to the empire, and a sign that Walker has ultimately failed in his imperial project.
His failure is to be openly displayed when he hears a black man offer to carry his bags again. Hearing the voice from behind, Walker has a brief hope it’s the voice of José. He frowns in disappointment to see it’s a different man, who then sticks a knife in Walker’s gut.
As he lies dead on the ground, we see black workers looking from all around at him, frowning because of all the pain, suffering, and death that his machinations have caused them, but they’re also content to have finally got their revenge. After the burning, the spirit of revolution will be reborn.
This act of service, offering to take his bags, then stabbing him, is once again a symbolic manifestation of the master/slave dialectic. Capitalists will hang themselves on the very rope they make, just as they made José hang, since he so willingly allowed it. We don’t need the capitalists; they need us, the proletariat. It’s their very dependance on our work that will be their undoing, and this is what the taking of Walker’s bags, then the taking of his life, at this final moment of the film, symbolize.
We in today’s world can use Burn! to teach us to beware the carrot as well as the stick of imperialism. When they offer us freedom in manufacturing our consent for their wars, they’re really scheming to cause us to suffer more servitude to the depredations of empire, that juxtaposition of contraries that I mentioned above.
It’s obscene to call the Ukrainian war against Russia a struggle for Ukrainian freedom and democracy (as the European bootlickers of the US assert), when the very Ukrainian authorities being given all the Western money and aid include neo-Nazis who have banned eleven opposition parties and corruptly used much of the money for their own personal use. Indeed, a substantial portion of military hardware sent to Ukraine has ended up sold on the black market.
The war planned against China, using the Taiwanese no less as cannon fodder as the Ukrainians are being used, will also be spuriously presented in the media as a fight for democracy. The real plan is to weaken China and Russia, and to bring about regime change in the two countries, and therefore to ensure a lasting US hegemony. In Burn!, we see the same basic idea: use the blacks as cannon fodder to remove the Portuguese and ensure British hegemony on the island.
We mustn’t allow the Walkers of the world to have their way. We mustn’t be the José Dolores who goes along with such schemes, only to be stabbed in the back, dolorous in the end. Instead, we must be the José who takes up the real fight, and who spits in the face of the Walkers of the world.
If we carry his bags, we must carry a knife, too.
I: Introduction
Before I go into this analysis, I need to clarify a few things for my readers. If you wish to read a characterization of Christ that reaffirms all the orthodox notions of him, I recommend going back to your Bible, or to your local church and listen to your preacher. There’s no point in my simply restating what’s already been said so many times before.
I’m attempting here to argue something different: a combination of ideas from modern Biblical scholarship with some literary interpretations of my own. So if you, Dear Reader, happen to be a Bible-believing Christian who doesn’t like to have his or her cherished beliefs challenged, I’m afraid that this analysis isn’t for you; stop reading, and do as I suggested in the above paragraph. I respect your right to have your faith, but I don’t share it.
Also, if your beliefs are as I’ve said above, don’t assume that you’ll read this through, then ‘prove me wrong’ in the comments section with a reading list of links and books. Don’t assume you’re going ‘to win my soul for Christ’: almost twenty years ago, I went through a Christian phase, for about six or seven years, then I lost my faith by the end of the 2000s. I’d say bringing me back into the flock, through a little online arguing, is most unlikely.
Finally, if my analysis offends your sense of orthodoxy, I’d advise against making abusive comments, as such an attitude is decidedly un-Christian, and therefore will have the opposite effect of changing my mind. Recall Jesus’ words in this connection: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘Hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5: 43-47)
Then, there’s what Bill Hicks said in response to offended Christians (<<<at about 1:20).
Furthermore, if my interpretations seem to be ‘manipulative’ of Scripture, keep in mind how manipulative the Church and others in power have always been in their interpretation of the same Scriptures, typically for political ends. For those manipulations, the accepted ones, are ones that have been made by the owners of the most real estate!
Now, as for those of you who are open-minded enough to consider a different point of view, I welcome you.
II: Jesus, the Anti-imperialist Revolutionary
Jesus was not a “Christian.” He had no intention of starting a new religion, nor did his immediate followers, including James and Peter. It was Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, who introduced the idea of Jesus dying for our sins to save us from eternal damnation (see The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby, for a full argument), faith in this salvific death replacing the Torah, something neither Jesus nor his immediate followers ever intended to abrogate, an idea they would have been horrified even to contemplate.
Jesus saw himself as the Messiah in the traditional Jewish sense of the concept: descended from David (even Paul acknowledged this in Romans 1:3), a king “who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as ‘the kingdom of God’) for the whole world.” (Maccoby, page 15) He did not consider himself divine; such an idea was added decades later by the Pauline Church. For him, ‘Son of God‘ was not meant to be taken literally, but was rather expressive of how he was a righteous follower of God, as used in the Hebrew Bible.
Now, I don’t subscribe to Caleb Maupin’s notion that Jesus was a socialist, but this notion of Christ as a revolutionary, who didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34), is an inspiring concept for us anti-imperialists today. For as Mao taught us, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” and “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” As I will argue below, there are revolutionary things Jesus and his followers said and did that can inspire us socialists today, if in a symbolic, allegorical form.
Of course one wouldn’t know that Christ was a revolutionary to read the New Testament, since the followers of the Pauline Church, including the four evangelists, edited out and minimized all discussion of militant action. Only a few such remarks, such as the quote given in the link from Matthew in the previous paragraph, remain in the Gospels as, so to speak, Freudian slips that go against the tendenz of the general message, and therefore hint at the hidden truth.
Other examples of the truth slipping out include how Jesus’ disciples included one called “Simon the Zealot,” as well as the “Sons of Thunder” (or does Boanerges mean “Sons of Tumult,” or “Sons of Anger”?). Why would a mild-mannered preacher of peace and love, so willing to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” include a Zealot, as well as such aggressive types, among his disciples?
A more important question is why this militant, revolutionary message was edited out (with the exception of such oversights as those mentioned above). Though some scholars have claimed that Roman rule over Palestine in the first century CE wasn’t all that oppressive, others say it was. Romans crucified men for the crime of sedition, as I discussed in my analysis of Spartacus. Thousands of Jews claiming to be the Messiah were put to death in this cruel, excruciating way. Why kill them this way if the revolutionary threat wasn’t so great, and why risk such a painful death if one’s oppression wasn’t all that severe?
The earliest of the Gospels to be written was that of Mark, written around 66-74 CE, either just before or just after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The other three Gospels were written years, if not a decade or two, after this event, when the brutally defeated Jews were too demoralized to take up the revolutionary struggle so soon again.
For the early Christian Church, having just been persecuted under Nero, any antagonism of Rome would have been inadvisable, to say the least; whereas gaining as many Roman converts as possible would have been in the Church’s best interests. Hence, as appeasing an attitude to Rome as could be achieved, while also contradicting the known history as minimally as possible, was desirable to these early Christian missionaries.
Added to this issue was the growing antipathy between the original Jewish Jesus movement and the Gentile Pauline Church (In this connection, consider how defensive Paul gets in 2 Corinthians 11 against those “super-apostles” who doubt his authority as an apostle; consider also the controversy between Paul and the Jewish Christians as expressed in Acts 15.). It would work to the Church’s advantage to reinforce the bad Roman feeling against the Jews while as the same time ingratiating Rome. Hence, the Gospels’ shifting of the blame of Christ’s crucifixion onto the Jews and away from Rome.
Small wonder Jesus is understood to have said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36) This statement is a clever de-politicizing of the notion of the Kingdom of God as wiping out Roman rule and reinstating the Jewish monarchy. Small wonder, when the Jews insisted that Pontius Pilate release insurrectionist Barabbas and crucify Jesus (“His blood be on us, and on our children!” [Matthew 27:25]), the Judaean governor washes his hands of the decision, carrying out the Jews’ apparent wishes while absolving himself, and all of Rome, of responsibility.
It is also easy to see how all of this whitewashing of Roman responsibility, and placing it instead on the Jews, brought about almost two millennia of Christian, particularly European, antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust.
III: The Son of God, Figuratively to Literally
As I said above, the traditionally Jewish use of ‘son of God’ only meant someone with a special, close relationship with God, not one literally begotten of God, the way Zeus impregnated maidens to give birth to Greek heroes. Such a use originally applied to Jesus, too, though that would change over the decades and later New Testament writings.
Let’s start with Paul’s letters, the earliest New Testament writings, generally dated around 48-57 CE (i.e., Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans; all others attributed to Paul are either of doubtful authenticity or not considered authentically his writing).
One striking thing to note about this early Christology is that Paul doesn’t seem to know anything about the Virgin Birth. As I pointed out above with the quote from Romans 1:3, he said that Jesus was descended from King David, but that he was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4).
In other words, according to Paul, Christ wasn’t the pre-existing Word from the beginning (John 1:1); he was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), that is, born fully human. He became the Son of God when God rose him from the dead–no earlier.
Let’s move ahead a decade or two to the Gospel of Mark, which establishes Jesus’ Sonship, well, earlier, specifically, at his baptism, after which the Holy Spirit was said to have descended on him like a dove, and God declared that Jesus was “[His] beloved Son, in whom [He is] well pleased” (Mark 1:11). Still no mention of a Virgin Birth.
We get the Virgin Birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke/Acts, respectively believed to have been written around about 70-85 and 80-90 CE. There’s one little problem with this notion of a Virgin Birth, though: it’s based on a mistranslation.
Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 as follows: “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” The problem with this is that the author of Matthew was quoting the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which used parthenos, “virgin,” for the Isaiah verse; the original Hebrew Bible, however, uses almah, “young woman.” If the prophesy had intended to refer to a miraculous birth, why not use betulah, “virgin,” instead?
Another curious thing should be noted, one that will doubtless infuriate the fundamentalists, who insist that the Bible is ‘the inerrant Word of God.’ If one were to compare the genealogies of Jesus as given in Matthew and Luke, not only do the names differ so much as to be surely the genealogies of completely different men, but if one were to reckon only those names from King David to Joseph, one would find that in Luke, there are about fifteen more generations (Luke 3:23-31) than there are in Matthew 1:6-16.
In any case, we can see that Jesus was getting more and more divine by the decades. With Paul’s notion of Christ dying for our sins and being resurrected, we sense the, at least unconscious, influence on Paul of the dying and resurrecting gods of pagan mystery traditions (i.e., Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, etc.–see Maccoby, pages 195-198). As the notion of Christ’s divinity grows through the Virgin Birth, Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven and Earth, also slowly begins to acquire quasi-pagan/divine attributes.
We can see this Marian development already in Luke 1:28-55, from the angel Gabriel calling her kecharitomene up to the Magnificat. Mary has been full of grace right from the beginning of her life, as kecharitomene implies, according to the Catholic interpretation, which is used as proof of the Immaculate Conception. One doesn’t have to go far from this to the Cult of Mary (in spite of the Church’s condemnation of it), and thence to her role as Co-Redemptrix. Since Paul was, as I mentioned above, Apostle to the Gentiles, and Luke was written for a Gentile audience, notions of a dying-and-resurrecting son of God, born of an immaculate mother, must have inflamed their pagan imaginations.
Finally, it’s in the Johannine writings (the Gospel of John, in its final form, having been written probably some time between 90-110 CE) that we find Christ as the pre-existing Logos who was made flesh. He’s truly coming closer to God, though the Trinitarian doctrine isn’t yet quite fully established. An argument can be made that the Gospel of John is presenting the Arian position that Christ is homoiousios, not homoousios–similar to, but not the same, as God. After all, Christ seems to be denying his identity with God (John 10:30) to his accusers of blasphemy when he says, “Is it not written in your law, I said, ‘ye are gods?” (John 10:34-38).
The hypostatic union, that is, Jesus understood in the Trinitarian sense of being God and man, all in one indivisible whole, suggests that goddess-like status of Mary, the Theotokos, who couldn’t be merely the mother of a physical, but not spiritual, nature, as in the Nestorian heresy. The pagan influence on Christianity goes back pretty early, doesn’t it? Small wonder the Church was able to accommodate so many pagan traditions (i.e., transforming pagan gods into Christian saints, turning pagan holidays into Christian ones, etc.) so easily.
IV: The Ouroboros of Christ
So as we go towards the later New Testament writings, we go further away from the Jesus of history and more and more towards the Jesus of faith, or of myth, however you prefer to see it. As much as I see these later developments as ahistorical, though, I don’t see them as completely without merit or worth. I will, nonetheless, interpret their meaning in an unorthodox, metaphorical way.
In the last section, we saw Jesus rising from a man favoured of God to being man and God at the same time, since the Church insisted he must be both, for soteriological reasons. Now, however, we’re going to see Christ descend, though in a very different way. Here, I give you a new, metaphorical interpretation of the Christ myth, one that paradoxically uses the orthodox concepts to symbolize how we can think about the original, revolutionary message.
In the beginning was the already existing Word, the idealized, spiritual version of Christ, who dwelt with God. I like the New English Bible translation the best: “…and what God was, the Word was.” (John 1:1) It suggests the Arian notion of homoiousios, similarity between God and Christ, an emphasis of Jesus’ virtues and closeness to God, good qualities to have in a revolutionary figure.
When the Word was made flesh (John 1:14), though, a transformation of Christ occurred that requires us to take note of the influence of Gnosticism on Pauline Christianity. In particular, I’m referring to the dualism of the spirit vs. the flesh. Naturally, the spirit is idealized, Godlike, and the flesh is corrupt, evil, of the Devil.
Now, since Pauline Christianity is, as Maccoby conceived of it, a combination of Judaism, Gnosticism, and pagan mystery tradition, Paul was only a moderate Gnostic (Maccoby, pages 185-189). For Paul, the physical world and the Torah weren’t created by the evil Demiurge, but by God; instead, Satan took over this world from the time of the Fall, perceived as a radical plunge from God’s grace to the depths of sin (a notion whose logic I questioned here–scroll way down to find the relevant passage), and the Torah for Paul was only a temporary guide to be superseded by belief in Christ’s sacrificial death (Romans 8:3), the pagan element of Paul’s conception of Christianity.
So the physical world and the Torah aren’t evil in an absolute sense for Paul; they’re just inferior…bad enough. Indulgence in physical pleasure, and insistence on adhering to the Law, though, are evil for Paul; hence, his celibacy and recommendation of it to those who can resist sex (1 Corinthians 7:1-2), and “the power of sin is the Law” (1 Corinthians 15:56); also, there’s Romans 3:20.
My point in discussing this Gnostic influence on Paul, that the spirit is good and the physical is evil, is that it has a bearing on the Incarnation. As perfect as Christ is understood to be as both God and man, his very physicality is a descent from the absoluteness of that perfection. Small wonder the heretical Gnostic Christians couldn’t accept a Christ that came in the flesh (2 John 1:7); for them, he, not having a body, couldn’t be crucified, but someone else had to have been crucified instead (Simon of Cyrene), an idea that managed to appear in the Koran (surah An Nisa, 157).
Christ’s Incarnation is thus the beginning of his mythical descent, one that will end with his crucifixion, death, and harrowing of hell. His resurrection, in a spiritual body that’s incorruptible, is thus his return to that absolute state of perfection from the beginning, a coming full circle for him, which leads to a point I’ve made many times before.
I use the ouroboros as a symbol of the dialectical, unified relationship between opposites. I feel that that relationship is best expressed in the form of a circular continuum, with the extreme opposites meeting and paradoxically phasing into each other. For me, the ouroboros shows us that meeting of opposites with the serpent’s head biting its tail. Of course, every intermediate point on the circular continuum is corresponded to on the serpent’s coiled body.
Now, as I see it, the biting head of the ouroboros of Christ represents the pre-existing Word from the beginning of Creation up until just before he is made flesh. With the Incarnation, we shift from the serpent’s biting head to just after it, at the neck. The newborn baby is surrounded by the love of Joseph, Mary, the gift-bearing Magi, the shepherds, and the angels, but he is in the humblest of mangers.
Later, as a young man, Jesus is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). As we all know, he of course resists this temptation completely, but none of this is to say he doesn’t at all feel the itch of temptation: after all, without at least the urge to give in, it’s hardly temptation, is it? Thus, this is a further move down towards the tail.
After that, he begins his ministry, with the assembling of his twelve disciples. As we know, he performs many miracles–turning water into wine, feeding five thousand, walking on water, healing the disabled, etc.–so even though he’s gone further down the body of the ouroboros, he’s still in the upper half of it. At one point, however, he’s hungry and goes to a fig tree, one that is out of season; angry that it has no figs for him to eat, he curses it, causing it to wither away (Mark 11:12-14). This is hardly saintly behaviour, no matter how Christians try to rationalize or allegorize it. His enjoining us to forgive others so God will forgive our sins doesn’t seem to dovetail well with his cursing of the fig tree (Mark 11:20-25). Why couldn’t he forgive it? He has thus slipped another inch or two down the serpent’s body.
In his exorcising of evil spirits in a madman, Jesus sends them into a herd of about two thousand pigs, which immediately run into a sea and drown themselves (Mark 5:1-13). Why kill them? Couldn’t Christ have simply sent the demons back to hell? That large herd of pigs was surely part of a farmer’s livelihood. Couldn’t Christ have taken that into consideration? Again, he seems to have slipped a bit further down the serpent’s body in the direction of the tail.
One striking thing about his teachings, often in the form of parables, is that they’re part of the Pharisee style of teaching. Indeed, in spite of the hostility Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels as having showed the Pharisees (whose way of doing things would evolve into rabbinic Judaism), he seems to have been a Pharisee himself (see also Maccoby, chapter 4). Though the Pauline New Testament tries to vilify all Jews not converting to Christ, his real condemnation is towards only those particular Pharisees and Sadducees who were collaborators with Rome, outwardly appearing to be righteous, but inwardly full of hypocrisy and iniquity (Matthew 23:28).
Indeed, as the controversies between him and the Jewish religious establishment grow, we find that, because of his popularity with the regular Jewish people, those authorities are afraid of showing antagonism to him. Recall that Jesus was thoroughly a Jew, not at all intending to destroy the Law or the Prophets (Matthew 5:17). Those Jews who opposed him weren’t ordinary Jews, as John would have you believe (John 8:44-49)–those Jews in particular were collaborators with Rome.
Now, with these controversies come the nearing danger of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, which therefore brings him further down the serpent’s body and closer to the tail. Since he is opposed to these collaborators with Rome, they at one point try to test him on his position on taxation, to which he gives a cleverly ambiguous answer (Mark 12:13-17).
I referred to the “render to Caesar” quote above, giving the interpretation that favours acquiescence to taxation, and therefore to Roman rule. The opposing interpretation, though, I’d say is the far likelier one, given Jesus’ revolutionary bent, and that is that what is Caesar’s is nothing, while what is to be rendered to God is everything.
As for the nature of Christ’s revolutionary leanings, as I said above, he was no ‘socialist,’ or even whatever the ancient equivalent of that would have been. Nor was he, much to the chagrin of your typical Christian fundamentalist today, the ancient equivalent of a right-winger, in spite of his Jewish traditionalism, and in spite of the later Pauline Church’s acceptance of the master-slave relation (1 Peter 2:18).
Jesus spoke of a kind of egalitarianism that many right-wingers today would balk at as being ‘socialist,’ even though it was nothing of the sort; and as I said in my analysis of It’s a Wonderful Life, such talk of Christian charity as socialism tells us more about the mean-spiritedness of those right-wingers, who often consider themselves Christian, than it does of whether or not such charity is at all socialist.
Jesus told a wealthy man to sell what he owns and give the money to the poor, in order to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-22). A little later, he says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God (Mark 10:25); this goes hard against the Protestants’ notion of the “Prosperity Gospel,” in which the material success of certain Christians is supposed proof of God’s favouring of them, rewarding their faith with wealth. On the contrary: as Jesus himself said, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Mark 10:31)
In this connection, we must also allow for some nuance regarding this idea that one is saved only by faith in Christ’s death for our sins. The Gospel of Matthew, understood to have been written for a Jewish audience, seems to be an attempt to reconcile Pauline Christianity with the original Nazarene message, which insists on sticking with the Torah and even expanding on its morality (Matthew 5). After all, Jesus’ original teachings seem to have survived through an oral passing-on of them, as well as through the collection of Q sayings, so the Pauline Church would have had to address and reinterpret these words of his that wouldn’t go away.
The insistence on doing good works (Matthew 25:31-46) isn’t limited to Matthew: it’s seen also in the Epistle of James (e.g., James 2:17), which, as I see it, is another attempt to reconcile Pauline and Nazarene Christianity.
As I’ve been saying, Jesus has been slipping further towards the tail of the ouroboros, and he knows it. He predicts his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion (Matthew 20:18). Along with his lowering of fortunes comes more temptation not to have to endure the Passion, hence his grievous praying in Gethsemane, hoping that God will “let this cup pass from [him]” (Matthew 26:36-39). In his temptation, his fear of the terrible pain he is about to endure, Jesus is showing us more and more of his human, rather than divine, side.
Of course, he is then betrayed by Judas Iscariot, fortuitously named from the point of view of the increasingly anti-Jewish Pauline Church, and arrested. Jesus is now definitely down in the rear half of the ouroboros’ body, and getting closer and closer to the bitten tail. His suffering is vividly and graphically shown in Mel Gibson’s movie on the topic, the film that unfortunately affirms the antisemitic passages of the Gospels.
Jesus is beaten, mocked, and crowned with a wreath of thorns…he’s inching closer to that tail. This is quite a descent from the high position of the pre-existing Logos, from the loftiest honour to an abyss of degradation, culminating in what’s been represented in the pitiful images of those Ecce Homo paintings.
Nailed to the Cross, Jesus retains some of his nobility by saying of his persecutors, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), indicating that he’s still some way from the serpent’s bitten tail. Shortly before he dies, though, he quotes Psalm 22:1, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46). One would expect someone of moral perfection to suffer without complaint, knowing that God’s abandoning him is for the salvation of all of us.
With his death, understood to be confirmed by the spear in his side (John 19:34), and his descent into hell, we see Jesus reaching the bitten tail of the ouroboros. This is the lowest point of the low: his revolution has failed, it seems. His followers are all despondent.
A similar feeling has been felt in all the failed revolutions of history, including the short-lived Paris Commune, the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Spartacist Uprising, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, etc. After all the deaths and repressions, one can imagine the despair the insurgents felt.
Still, the early Nazarenes believed, apparently, that God rose Jesus from the dead (note that Paul also wrote of the passivity of his resurrection, as opposed to him raising himself from the dead). Now, we’ve gone past the bitten tail to the biting head of Christ’s return to glory. We also can see here the dialectical unity of his suffering, degradation, and death, on the one hand, and his resurrection in an incorruptible, spiritual body, in all his glory, on the other. The disciples’ hope has also been revived. To save one’s life, one must be willing to lose it (Luke 9:24).
V: The Resurrection and the Second Coming
We all know the traditional, literal meaning of Christ’s resurrection and Second Coming at the end of the world, so I have nothing new to say about that. Instead, given what we know of the original, revolutionary intent of the Nazarenes, I think it would be illuminating, and inspiring, to reinterpret the meaning of these two crucial Christian ideas in symbolic terms.
A revolution may fail; it may die…but it can be revived–it can come back to life, as it were…it can come a second time, or many times, until it finally succeeds. The Paris Commune failed, as did the 1905 Russian Revolution, but the revolution of 1917 succeeded (furthermore, the Soviet Union may have been dissolved, but that doesn’t extinguish the hopes of its return). The Cultural Revolution suffered many difficulties and setbacks…but look at China today.
The Messiah is supposed to come at the end of the world (or, for our purposes, the end of the world as we know it), establishing Zion and the Kingdom of God (hence Orthodox Jews are especially opposed to the man-made creation of Israel, along with a generally Jewish opposition to the oppression of the Palestinians, a situation that’s in ironic contradistinction to the plight of the Jews in first-century, Roman-occupied Palestine), a new era of peace and justice. For those of us who aren’t Bible-believing Christians, the resurrection and Second Coming can be seen to symbolize revived hopes of anti-imperialist revolution.
Of course, we have to believe, to have faith, hope, and love, those three things that last forever (1 Corinthians 13:13); recall Che’s words on revolution and love (the greatest of these), in this connection. Our love of the world drives us to try to make it better, to feed, clothe, house, educate, and give medical aid to the poor, as Christ would have wanted us to do (Matthew 25:40).
Now, the early Christians were no socialists, of course, but they did have some interesting practices worth discussing: they “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:45). Also, “the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” (Acts 4:32) These practices influenced Thomas More in his writing of Utopia, a book about a fictional Christian island with a form of welfare and without private property, ideas which in turn influenced socialism.
The Nazarenes may have failed to kick their Roman oppressors out of Palestine, but Paul’s Gentile Church, over time, accommodated itself with Rome, a kind of changing of the system from within. The problem with this takeover is that one authoritarian, oppressive system got replaced with another.
Indeed, the Church authorities, in replacing the pagan Roman ones, were rather like Orwell’s pigs in a manner that the Bolsheviks never were, in spite of the intended narrative of Orwell’s polemical allegory. Such examples as the Church’s stamping out of heresies (including the many thousands of lives lost over the iota that marked the difference between the orthodox homousios and the Arian homoiousios, as noted above–Hegel, page 339), including, for example, the horrors of the Inquisition, should be enough to illustrate my meaning.
This difference between the Nazarene and the Pauline Church’s way of dealing with the Roman Empire can be seen to symbolize the difference between the virtues of revolutionary change and the vices of accommodation with the imperialist system. There is no room for opportunism or compromise.
We wipe out imperialism and replace it with a “kingdom of heaven,” so to speak–‘heavenly’ in the sense that, ideally, it will provide for all human needs, and a ‘kingdom’ in the sense that all authority will be used to ensure that providing for those needs. We must believe in such a possible future world; have faith in, and hope for, it. In such a world, we’ll love our neighbour as ourselves (Matthew 22:39).
It was believed that the ancient Hebrews fell under the Babylonian captivity as punishment for their sins, which sounds suspiciously to me like blaming the victim (similarly, many who suffer under capitalism today blame themselves unjustly for their suffering [i.e., they ‘lack ambition and talent’], instead of blaming the system that is causing their suffering). Nonetheless, those ancient Hebrews saw their prophesied Messiah as saving them from their sins, as Christians see Jesus as having done.
We secular-minded people, on the other hand, can see Jesus’ death and resurrection as symbolic of how revolutions at first fail, then hope in them is revived, then a ‘second coming’ ultimately leads to the success of the revolutions. Belief in his salvific death can thus symbolize our faith in persevering in a painful struggle that, after so many failures (and an unjustified blaming of oneself for those failures, our ‘sins’), ultimately leads to success, a kind of ‘eternal life’ in a much-improved world.
VI: Conclusion
So, this is my secular, allegorical interpretation of the Christ myth, which I hope will inspire my comrades. Of course, many won’t be happy with what I’ve written.
Indeed, many will want to point out to me how my sources are at best controversial, and at worst, the validity of those sources has been eviscerated with criticism. The fact is, objectively, we don’t really know for sure what happened in first-century Palestine. One camp of scholars says this, another camp says that, using whatever arguments they have to back up their agendas; we all pick which story we prefer. As far as I’m concerned, criticism of the interpretation that my sources have given has less to do with their technical, historical inaccuracies than with hurting Christians’ feelings. It’s more about politics than logic.
So as I said above in the Introduction, if my reinterpretation of ‘sacred history’ is offensive to certain Christian readers who chose not to heed my warning not to read something they surely wouldn’t like, being abusive to me in the comments will neither change my mind nor do you much credit. So please, don’t waste your time with that.
Still, if what I’ve said here bothers you that much, perhaps there’s one thing you can do that will make you feel better.
Pray for me (Matthew 5:44).
Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1987
Michael D. Coogan, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001
Samuel Sandmel, general ed., The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961
Georg W.F. Hegel (translated by J. Sibree), The Philosophy of History, Buffalo, New York, Prometheus Books, 1991
The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador) is a 1962 Mexican surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel. It stars Silvia Pinal, who also starred in Buñuel’s Viridiana; other actors in the cast include Augusto Benedico, Claudio Brook, Lucy Gallardo, Xavier Loyá, and Enrique Rambal.
The Exterminating Angel was on The New York Times 2004 list of “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.” It was also made into an opera in 2016. The film received the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. At the 1963 Bodil Awards, it won the award for Best Non-European Film.
Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here is a link to the film with English subtitles.
Since this story is about a group of wealthy bourgeois who, after a night at the opera, go to the lavish home of Edmundo (Rambal) and Lucia Nóbile (Gallardo) for a dinner party, only to find themselves inexplicably unable to leave–it reminds me of the predicament in Sartre‘s 1944 play, No Exit, in which three characters are also unable to leave a room…which is literally Hell. It’s so obvious a comparison to make that I can’t avoid mentioning it, too.
Accordingly, all the bourgeois in The Exterminating Angel will experience their own version of “Hell is other people,” to be condemned to be seen and judged from the perspective of all the others, for as long as they’re trapped in that Hell of a house.
Ironically, the Hell of the Nóbiles’ home is on “Providence Street” (Calle de la Providencia), which is the first of several paradoxes in the film. The last of these, incidentally, is a Catholic Church in which all the clergy and churchgoers (including those bourgeois who have only just been freed from the Nóbiles’ house) are again not allowed to leave…the House of the Lord has been made a Hell.
The very title of the film–inspired from something in the Bible, but also, according to Buñuel, from a Spanish cult, the apostolics of 1828, and a group of Mormons–is a paradox on the heaven/hell theme.
Yet another paradox is what is confining the people inside. Not only is the barrier invisible, nor is it felt. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a barrier in the physical sense at all–it seems to be purely psychological; the guests simply won’t allow themselves to leave. Nothing is stopping them, but that nothing is everything.
This inability to leave is not universal, though: in fact, it’s the servants of the Nóbiles who not only leave at the beginning of the film, but leave urgently, as if they have some kind of clairvoyance about the impending trap that their employers are to be caught in. The only employee to stay, trapped with his bosses and their guests, is Julio (Brook), the majordomo; he is clearly a case of the exception who proves the rule, for he shows a near-bootlicking loyalty to his employers, not only by staying, but also by expressing his condemnation for the staff who leave.
The staff’s suddenly leaving the house, right when their employers are receiving a large number of guests for a dinner party, can be seen as symbolic of a revolutionary act, for in doing so, the insubordinate workers are demonstrating a truth that we leftists have known for a long time: the bourgeois need us; we don’t need them. Revolution is a dinner party, after all…as long as the workers are absent.
Julio thinks his coworkers are being traitors to their bosses, but it is Julio who is being the traitor…to his fellow workers. This currying favor with the bourgeoisie, far too common among pro-capitalist workers, is what thwarts our revolutionary potential.
Some odd repetitions occur during the film, especially towards the beginning. When Lucas (played by Pancho Córdova), the doorman and first to leave the house, isn’t available to take the guests’ coats, Edmundo tells them to go upstairs, where someone will take them. With their entrance, this going upstairs happens twice.
Another repetition occurs in the toast Edmundo makes to Silvia (played by Rosa Elena Durgel), an opera singer who performed that night just before the dinner party in his home. We see him give this toast twice; after the second toast, however, he frowns because no one is listening to him. They prefer to chat with each other.
Yet another repetition is in the greeting of Cristián Ugalde (played by Luis Beristáin) and Leandro Gomez (played by José Baviera). This one occurs three times: first, they meet as strangers, second, they greet each other with the warmest of friendliness; and the third time, they acknowledge each other coldly.
Finally, at the climax of the film, Leticia (Pinal) offers, as a solution to their inability to heave the house, the idea of everyone repeating what he or she did shortly before the realization that no one could leave, soon after the end of the playing of the Paradisi piano sonata by Blanca (played by Patricia de Morelos). The guests’ point-for-point repetition of what they did frees them.
Now, what do these repetitions mean? I believe they can be symbolically associated with Freud‘s notion of “the compulsion to repeat” traumatizing experiences, an illogical act that goes “beyond the pleasure principle,” and which in turn is associated with the death drive, which involves acts of aggression against the self and others as seen among the guests throughout the middle of the film, as they’re all going mad with despair at their inability to leave, and taking their frustrations out on each other.
Of course, there’s nothing particularly traumatizing about not having a doorman to take your guests’ coats in the Nóbiles’ foyer. Nor is giving a toast no one’s listening to a traumatic experience, or even two men addressing each other with icy hostility. But perhaps the point should be made in relation to Buñuel’s wish to satirize the bourgeoisie.
Edmundo loses face among his guests without a doorman to take their coats, and without any listeners to his second toast. What is a minor problem for most people is a kind of narcissistic injury to the proud capitalist, with whom Buñuel would not want us to sympathize. The same goes for Cristián’s and Leandro’s third and abrasive meeting, for the bourgeois can be as antagonistic to each other as they are to the proletariat, in their incessant attempts to outdo each other.
Leticia’s suggestion to have everyone repeat his or her actions to free them all from their confinement is a perfect example of repetition compulsion as an attempt to master and therefore overcome the traumatizing experience. The earlier repetitions, in establishing this idea as a theme in the film, are thus symbolic of repetition compulsion by their association with this climactic moment.
Leticia herself is a fascinating character, and not just for her beauty. She’s nicknamed “the Valkyrie” for her perceived savageness, and yet also for her virginity. Early in the film, we see an example of this savageness when she throws a glass at a window, shattering it. Yet her idea to free everyone through the repetitions make her the guests’ saviour.
This means that Leticia is both good and bad in the film. Consider Pinal’s characters in two other Buñuel films, the title role of Viridiana (1961), the nun who is so protective of her ever-endangered chastity; and her role as the breast-baring Devil in his 1965 short film, Simon of the Desert (which also had Brook playing the film’s title role). In the first film, Pinal plays the saintly thesis; in the third, she plays the sluttish negation; and in this second film, she’s the sublation of the two opposing roles.
Speaking of Hegelian dialectical opposites, yet another heaven/hell paradox can be found in Blanca’s performance mentioned above of the piano sonata by Pietro Domenico Paradies, or “Paradisi,” as he’s called in the film. This ‘paradise’ performance happens shortly before the guests’ realization of their ‘infernal’ entrapment in the house.
The idea that they can’t leave is only subtly introduced. It seems at first that the guests simply aren’t inclined to leave yet, for one reason or another. Blanca, for example, though too tired to keep playing the piano and wishing to go home, won’t go out of the room because she’s been sidetracked by a conversation and has forgotten to get her shawl. This kind of subtlety is part of what reinforces the idea that nothing is really detaining the guests but themselves.
Of course, it won’t be long before they find themselves getting more and more uncomfortable with having to stay. A few, including Lucia! are hoping to have illicit sexual encounters with their lovers, but finding the crowd of guests all around them to be a nuisance. Others are getting uncomfortable in their suits, taking off their coats and ties, which looks scandalous to Lucia.
They all have to sleep on the floor in the salon together, rather than enjoy the luxury of beds. The next morning, Julio has no food to serve breakfast to the guests, because the suppliers haven’t delivered any; so Lucia has him serve leftovers.
Such inconveniences as these are meant to help the pampered bourgeoisie to understand what it’s like to endure the way the working class must. A similar deprivation was experienced in Buñuel’s film of ten years later, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when the wealthy protagonists’ many attempts to eat dinner together are interrupted, leaving them all hungrier and hungrier.
By the next evening, everyone is beginning to lose his or her patience over this unending captivity. With no more clean water, they start using a closet for a toilet. Here we see the irony of staying in a luxurious home, yet living no better than those in the Third World. Bourgeois heaven has become hell…with all those other people.
Everyone is on edge, one’s normal sense of social graciousness degenerating into bluntness and aggression. Raúl (played by Tito Junco) starts blaming Edmundo for having invited everyone to his home, only to be trapped in it. Indeed, as I observed in my analysis of Wozzeck, it is the stresses of being poor and unable to pull oneself out of the mire, rather than some supposed social ‘inferiority,’ that is what makes one behave improperly, and we can see the proof of this observation in how these bourgeois are increasingly losing their sense of composure because of their ongoing plight.
In fact, one of their older guests, Sergio Russell (played by Antonio Bravo), has died. He earlier expressed a disliking for jokes and pranks when one of the staff serving food at the dinner table fell and dropped his tray all over the floor, getting laughs from everyone else. Lucia thus decided not to present a surprise involving a bear and three sheep out of a wish not to annoy him.
What’s the significance of these animals in the movie? Buñuel insisted that there was no intended symbolic meaning attached to them, saying instead that he got the idea from a party in New York he’d attended, in which the hostess brought in a bear and two sheep. He insisted that the use of the bear and sheep was arbitrary, just to include “some sort of disturbing image.”
Now, this may all be true, and it probably is. After all, surrealism is all about producing illogical, disturbing images as an expression of the non-rational workings of the unconscious mind. But we should emphasize this surrealist notion of expressing unconscious meaning. Buñuel’s conscious reasons for including the bear and sheep, as well as Pinal’s blindfolding of one of the sheep, may just be arbitrary ones, but his unconscious, surrealist reasons are freely open to interpretation. Buñuel may have dismissed many critics’ interpretations–i.e., the bear representing the USSR creeping in on the capitalist nations, and the sheep representing Christianity–as nonsense; psychoanalysts, however, may dismiss his dismissing as mere examples of denial and resistance.
Since Buñuel wanted to leave his film open to interpretation, his reasons for denying the validity of such critics’ interpretations as the examples given above can be seen also as a wish not to allow those interpretations to ossify and be deemed ‘the correct’ ones. I would agree that they shouldn’t be seen as the only interpretations to make, yet I wouldn’t say they’re wrong or invalid, either.
That the bear could, though of course not necessarily, represent Soviet Russia is so easy to see that it needs no further comment. Since the number of sheep (lambs, actually) are specifically three, and they are killed and eaten by the guests in a kind of crude Communion, it is again easy to associate them with Christianity; and the blindfolding of one of them can represent blind faith in that religion, something easily seen in many among the bourgeoisie. These, of course, don’t have to be the ‘correct’ interpretations, but they’re perfectly legitimate ones, in spite of Buñuel’s objections to them.
The guests cannot go outside; nor can anyone outside come in the house. The invisible barrier between the two groups of people can represent that of social class and therefore the impossibility of social mobility. There’s also Roger Ebert‘s interpretation that the barrier symbolizes the rigidity of the society of Francoist Spain. The symbolism of this rigidity is especially apparent at the end of the film, when the people are trapped in the church, while outside, soldiers are firing their rifles at the outside crowd of people, keeping anyone from entering the church. This is rather like the cherubim with their flaming sword to stop Adam and Eve from re-entering the Garden of Eden to get to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24)…only this Eden, like the Nóbiles’ house, is another hellish heaven, a church of Satan, if you will, from which there’s no exit, where hope is to be abandoned.
The barrier can also represent other aspects of Francoist Spain. There were all the leftists who lost in the Spanish Civil War and were kept in concentration camps. Buñuel turning the tables on the bourgeois dinner guests, them representing the Spanish ruling class, and trapping them in the Nóbiles’ house, is thus a kind of wish-fulfillment. Finally, Buñuel, being inimical to the Spanish fascists, had been living in exile from his home country for many years, like those people outside who can’t enter Edmundo’s and Lucia’s house.
Some of the guests are getting ill, physically and mentally, and Dr. Carlos Conde (Benedico) has no medicine to give them. How symbolic this is of the lack of adequate health care in Third World countries (Cuba excepted). Edmundo, however, has a stash of opiates, which he normally reserves for the naughty pleasures of himself and certain friends of his, but now he’s offering them to his guests to mitigate their suffering. How representative this is of how the poor often have to resort to drug use as a quick and easy way to soothe their pain!
…and here, we see the bourgeoisie reduced to having to resort to such extremes.
One night, Ana Maynar (played by Nadia Haro Oliva) dreams of a disembodied hand crawling about the room. Sweating from a fever and terrified at the sight, she tries to stab it with a knife after it tries to strangle her. This is one moment in the film that has caused some critics to call The Exterminating Angel a horror film. Later, other guests will have bad dreams.
Buñuel had used the image of a severed hand before. He wanted to use it in an aborted film project called The Beast with Five Fingers, a film that ended up being done in 1946 by Robert Florey. He originally used the image in a scene in Un Chien Andalou, in which a mannishly-dressed woman is using a phallic cane to poke at a severed hand (as Ana does with the knife to stab the hand)–symbolic of castration, as I mentioned in my analysis of that short film.
In the scene in The Exterminating Angel, Ana, the woman dreaming about the hand, has earlier mentioned her experience of having been on a train that suffered a derailment. That hand moves across the room in a manner that may remind her of the moving train. The length and hardness of the train could also be seen as symbolically phallic, just as the severed hand, symbolic of castration, can have phallic associations.
The derailment of the train, ‘cutting it off,’ as it were, from the tracks, and thus making it impotent and of no use, can also be sen as a symbolic castration, which in turn strengthens the train’s association with the severed hand. The hand choking her is threatening her life, just as the derailment was life-threatening.
Note that castration is symbolic of Lacan‘s notion of lack, which gives rise to desire, the desire of the Other, a desire to be what the Other desires, and to be given recognition by the Other. Such feelings bring us back to what I said at the beginning of this analysis, of how this film is comparable to No Exit, and how “Hell is other people,” because we can’t escape the judgement of those others whom we want to want us, and whom we want to give us recognition.
The lack that gives rise to desire is also the lack that the bourgeois guests are experiencing, a lack normally reserved for the poor: no food, no water, no escape from their trap. Because of this manque à avoir, the guests are coming apart emotionally, and lashing out at each other. During their sleep, an elderly man (Alberto Roc?, played by Enrique García Alvarez) even tries to take advantage of a sleeping woman or two. When the bourgeoisie lack what the proletariat have always lacked, the former prove themselves no better, no more refined, than the latter.
The guests reach such a bestial point that Raúl, always blaming their predicament on Edmundo, says that their only way out of it is to kill their host. Edmundo, always reacting to Raúl’s verbal abuse with a gracious, patient turning of the other cheek, is thus being made out as a Christ figure: his death will save them, it seems. Edmundo even agrees to shoot himself with a pistol.
This is when Leticia brings up her suggestion to have everyone repeat what he or she said or did just after the piano performance. The success of her idea, as over Edmundo’s redemptive death, thus demonstrates in symbolic form Buñuel’s rejection of the soteriology of Christ’s crucifixion.
Finally, the guests can leave. Similarly, those outside can go in. In fact, the staff by now have returned, too.
Now that their ordeal is over, most of the guests come together again to attend a Te Deum service at a church. But as I already mentioned, they will soon find themselves unable to leave. Once again, religion won’t help them any more than it could symbolically back in the Nóbiles’ house (i.e., when eating the three sheep, or killing Christ-like Edmundo). In fact, the film ends with a flock of sheep ominously entering the church.
How fitting it is to see an animal often used to symbolize passive, mindless obedience enter a place where people are trapped behind an imaginary, invisible barrier of their own making.
Infinite Ocean 
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