Category: Marxism

Fascism Has Two Wings (There, I Fixed It)

I’m not leaving a link for my original article, Fascism Has Two Wings, because frankly, I’d rather you didn’t read it. I wrote it during my early anarchist phase, lo those many years ago, and it’s really naïve politically. The only reason I won’t delete it, like all my early political posts (most if not all of which are badly written, except for the Shakespeare analyses and synopses), is because occasionally I like to look back at them and see how my thinking has changed and grown over the years. But my looking at them still makes me blush that other readers are ever looking at them.

Anyway, my idea for that article was to argue that, essentially, fascism has both a right wing and a left wing, though I presented the idea most clumsily, saying that some on the left may start there, then when in power, shift over to the right. This idea may be vaguely true of some liberals in, say, the Democratic Party (but were they ever truly left?), or of Nazbols and Strasserists, as well as some in the SA, who were later purged from the NSDAP when Hitler, having come to power, moved the party unequivocally to the far right, to please his new big business backers (and even the idea of ‘left-wing Nazis’ stinks of the libertarian agenda).

Well, now that I’ve transitioned fully from anarchism to Marxism-Leninism, I can see not only the wobbly aspects of those early arguments, but also the worst idea that I put forth in the article: namely, that the Bolshevik shift to authoritarian thinking was a move to the right. I now cringe whenever I read that misinterpretation of what happened back in the early 1920s. There, now you know all that you need to know of what I wrote in the original article, and you can spare yourself the pain of reading those oh, so poorly-conceived ideas!

Let us now move on to my more refined way of thinking about both left-wing and right-wing fascism. Now that I have a dialectical grasp on things, I can explain what I mean by ‘left-wing fascism.’ I speak in contrast to Marxist-Leninists when I call out the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultra-leftists.

Now, it’s not necessarily that they are fascistic in nature. They are generally sincere in their wish to make progressive change in the world, to establish socialism. The problem is their naïve utopianism, their wish to have pretty much everything all at once or as soon as they imagine is possible; and the danger of pushing for too much, too soon is that–taking dialectics into account–it can backfire and result in a swing to the far-right.

I’ve discussed in other posts my conception of the ouroboros as a symbol for the dialectical relationship between opposites. The serpent’s biting head and its bitten tail represent the meeting of extreme opposites on a circular continuum, which is symbolized by the serpent’s coiled body, along which every intermediary point of the continuum has its corresponding spot on the snake’s body. I feel that the image of the ouroboros makes it easier to conceive how the excessive, impatient demands of the anarchists, Trotskyists, and other ultras–their far-too-left leanings–slip over to the serpent’s bitten tail, then slide over to the biting teeth of fascism, even though this may not be the ultras’ conscious intention.

Lenin had to deal with the impracticality of the ultras, and he wrote of the problem in his “Left-wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder. They were unwilling to make necessary compromises, such as cooperating with parliamentary or reformist socialists. They were overly preoccupied with doctrinal ‘purity.’ These people were stirring up needless trouble at a time when the new socialist state was in dire need of stability, in the middle of the Russian Civil War. This kind of petty squabbling was the last thing Lenin needed as the invaders were trying to re-establish capitalism.

While Trotsky was useful at the time leading the Red Army against the invading White Army, after Lenin’s death, the power struggle between him and Stalin over who would succeed Lenin was, for Trotsky, less about what was right for the USSR than about his wish to lead the country and have power. In his book, The Revolution Betrayed, he went on and on about the perceived faults of the Soviet Union under Stalin, with the sole solution offered of overthrowing his rival for power, rather than simply suggesting ways to remedy those faults. After his exile, he was even willing to cut a deal with the Nazis and Imperial Japan if they’d help him oust Stalin! This sort of thing is what I mean when I talk about a fascist ‘left wing.’

To paraphrase something Michael Parenti once said, these anti-communist leftists love any kind of revolution except a successful one. After that, they only want to find fault with the new socialist system. Now, constructive criticism of the new system is a perfectly worthy thing to engage in, since it aims to make the system better; but the ultras’ fault-finding is generally meant to tear down the system for not being perfect enough.

These people will carp at you for ‘not being left-wing enough,’ for not being ‘politically correct’ enough. This sort of bickering only causes resentment and increases alienation; it can even make some want to give up on the left and switch to the right. The CIA appreciates this kind of bickering–it’s a kind of left-wing fascism.

We can often tell the difference between, on the one side, Marxist-Leninists, and on the other, the ultras, with the issue of the war between Russia and Ukraine. This is a very sensitive issue, since I don’t like war at all, yet the Russian people must be defended against an enemy that isn’t made up solely of Ukrainians, but also their US/NATO backers.

Many on the left, addled by the dubious reporting of the liberal mainstream media, think that the Russian invasion of late February 2022 was “unprovoked,” and that Putin is the bad guy behind the war. Now, to be sure, Putin is far from being my political ideal: he’s a bourgeois, reactionary politician; his stance on LGBT issues is far too conservative for my tastes. Still, we have to play the hand we’ve been dealt, and he’s the one who, with Xi Jinping, is leading the resistance to US/NATO world hegemony.

This left opposition to Putin is another example of the impracticality of the ultras. They want to oppose all bourgeois states at the same time, treating them all as equally oppressive, rather than considering the reality of primary vs secondary contradictions. No, the Russian Federation isn’t the Soviet Union, regrettably; but Russian communists have pushed Putin to do something about the ethnic cleansing of Russians in Ukraine for the eight years between the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 and the Russian intervention in 2022.

The ultras tend to want everything all at once, instead of being pragmatic and realizing that achieving our goals must be done in stages. The first priority is to deal with the primary contradiction I mentioned above, to wipe out US/NATO hegemony, which has had its boot on the head of the rest of the world especially for the past thirty years. Once that wiping out has been achieved, then we can think about such problems as reinstating a socialist government in Russia, dealing with income inequality in China, etc.

Rainer Shea recently wrote an article in support of the Russian operation in Ukraine; I shared it on Facebook, and I got a snarky comment from a “leftist” who’s all preoccupied with Russian “imperialism,” yet apparently oblivious to US/NATO imperialism. Here’s a quote of her comment:

‘Ukraine has a Nazi problem like the United States has a Nazi problem like Russia has a Nazi problem. 
‘I don’t wish death on all of them because a small percentage of them are Nazis. 
‘Putin is a fascist imperialist. I hope both the Russian and Ukrainian working classes come together and overthrow BOTH of their corrupt countries. 
‘It isn’t very “Leftist” to support imperialism either.’

Note how the first two lines of her comment trivialize the Nazi problem in Ukraine by implying it is a mundane problem of fringe minorities in countries around the world. While it is, of course, true that militaries in all countries attract at least a few fascist sympathizers (I saw a few when I was a reservist in the Canadian army in the early 1990s), such a smug generalization blinds one to the well-documented history of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers that goes back even before WWII and Stepan Bandera. (The mainstream media even used to acknowledge the truth of this sort of thing.)

These people, though a minority of Ukrainians, nonetheless have great influence over the Ukrainian government and military. The Banderites back in WWII helped Nazi Germany kill thousands of Jews and Poles, and today’s Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers, euphemistically called ‘nationalists,’ revere Bandera; they also like to tie Russian collaborators to lampposts. In their eight-year ethnic cleansing of Russians, about fourteen thousand people have died. No, Ukraine’s Nazi problem is far worse than that of most other countries; similarly, the American Nazi problem that my commenter mentions so briefly in passing has also been far worse, as seen in such issues as its helping of Ukrainian Nazis (link above), Operation Paperclip. and the employment of ex-Nazis in West Germany, NASA, and NATO after WWII.

To get to the second line of her comment, I see the most heinous straw man. I have never expressed a wish of death on all Ukrainians, nor did Shea in his article, regardless of whether the Nazi sympathizers in that country make up a small percentage or a somewhat larger percentage (something I highly suspect). Actually, whenever we hear the Western slogan “…to the last Ukrainian,” we can get a good idea as to who would actually like to see all the Ukrainians die. Since she has more sympathy for the West’s side in this conflict than for the Russian side, I suspect a little projection in her attitude about how wrong it is to want all Ukrainians killed.

Next, we have the ridiculous “Putler” argument in the third line. As I said above, Putin is not my political hero. I won’t put up Russian flags or pictures of him on my social media profiles, as a number of my Facebook friends have done. Still, while as I said, I don’t approve of his conservative stance on LGBT issues, calling him a ‘fascist’ on the basis of that is a bit much (fascists have treated LGBT people far worse than his laws have, and there’s much more to being a fascist than discriminating against that community), and to call him an imperialist, while making no mention at all of the Anglo-American/NATO globe-spanning empire, with US military bases all over the world, is an obscene misuse of the word.

While the Russian oligarchs probably do have some ulterior motives for waging this war (ulterior motives whose significance must be qualified with an understanding that Putin tried everything to secure peace, through the Minsk Accords with people who were hardly cooperative in the negotiations), any ‘Russian imperialism’ is minuscule compared to that of the US and NATO, who have had threatening troops along the Russian border for years, and while the US military has been occupying a third of Syria (stealing their oil and wheat), and surrounding China with military bases and navy in the South China Sea..

Indeed, with the reunification of Germany came a promise from the West that NATO, never a friend to Russia, wouldn’t move an inch to the East. Now, several former SSRs are NATO members, and they’re working on getting Sweden and Finland (the latter of which shares a long border with Russia!) to join. This Western imperialist aggression against Russia is the context needed to understand the Russian intervention in Ukraine.

Ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the US imperialists have worked in the hopes of never allowing any other country to grow in power and thus be a threat to American global hegemony. This is why the PNAC was founded.

The Western imperialists are fond of using the word “dictator” to describe the head of state of any country that challenges or defies the US and the “rules-based international order.” Calling Putin, who has clearly been one of these challengers and defiers, a “fascist imperialist” is just another way of saying “dictator,” which is used as a rationalization to bully a defiant country into submission to US imperialism.

Such a bullying into submission has been done to Russia before, back in the 1990s, with the forcing of “free market” capitalism on a Russian people who, contrary to popular belief, mostly wanted to keep the Soviet system. The Western imposition of capitalism on Russia all but destroyed their economy; attempts to bring back socialism were frustrated by the West’s puppet, Yeltsin. Putin’s real crime was making Russia strong again. People like the woman who commented on my Rainer Shea post clearly either haven’t studied the history, or are lying.

Let’s examine this ‘Russian fascism’ claim a bit more closely. Apart from what I said above, on the one hand, about there always being at least a small percentage of fascist sympathizers in the armies of any country in the world, including Russia, and how, on the other hand, accusing Russians of fascism is a slap in the face to the roughly 27 million Russians who died fighting Nazis (with whom Ukraine collaborated, remember) in WWII, I must react to a video an anarchist Facebook friend of mine once shared, a man who hates Putin with similar virulence; this video (one of many, I’m sure, that exist in the mainstream liberal media) dismisses, without any contrary evidence to justify the dismissal, the significance of Ukrainian Nazis while propagandizing about Russian fascist organizations, tempting me to do a similar dismissal.

How can I confidently dismiss this video’s claim of a hornet’s nest, if you will, of Russian fascist organizations as, in all likelihood, a wildly exaggerated misrepresentation of a few fringe groups, for the purpose of vilifying Putin and manufacturing consent for an increasingly dangerous confrontation? For starters, consider Russia’s 2014 Law Against Rehabilitation of Nazism, something the neoliberal, Russophobic Western media would naturally try to invalidate. If the Russian government wants to criminalize any historic denial of Nazi atrocities, they’ll probably want to criminalize Nazism in general, I imagine, thus making the fascist groups in the video far more marginal that it suggests.

Yet even if this speculation of mine proves to be untrue, something else must be considered, something that should make you take this anti-Russian video with a generous dose of salt. While we’re always hearing about how we shouldn’t let ourselves be duped by “Russian propaganda,” so many of us naïvely assume that the news we receive on CNN, the CBC, the BBC, MSNBC, Fox News, etc., is all objective reporting, ‘the straight facts.’ Funny how it’s always only other countries that propagandize, but never our own!

The fact is, a crucial part of Western empire management is control over media narratives, because the only way the masses in the West would ever go along with war after war these past twenty to thirty years is to keep us all believing that we are ‘the good guys,’ that Putin, Xi Jinping, Saddam, Gaddafi, Assad, Milosevic, etc., are and were ‘the bad guys,’ and therefore all of our wars against them were, are, and will be justified and necessary.

The fact that we realized the media lied to us about Saddam’s “WMDs,” and therefore the Iraq invasion was a cruel, unjustified act of US imperialism should have been enough to give us pause about any subsequent American accusations of ‘cruel dictators’ and insistence on the ‘need’ for regime change. We should have demanded proof instead of propaganda; skepticism about the real motives of the US government should have been our default position.

Instead, over the 2010s and 2020s, most of us have become all the more gullible, uncritically believing lie after lie about Gaddafi, Assad, and now Putin and Xi Jinping. None of this propaganda has made the world safer: in fact, we’re now in a new Cold War that has needlessly brought us to the brink of a very possibly nuclear WWIII.

It shouldn’t be surprising to find all of this media mendacity, especially over the past thirty to forty years. Beyond Operation Mockingbird (which could still be going on), first there was the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine in 1987, meaning the news no longer had to present all sides of a controversial issue. Then, the Clinton administration enacted the Telecommunications Act of 1996, allowing mergers and acquisitions in American media, which has led to 90% of American media being controlled by only six corporations; this means that the super-wealthy capitalist class controls most people’s access to information in the US! And in today’s late stage capitalism, this control is applied in an imperialist context–hence, the media vilification of anyone (Putin, Xi, Assad, Maduro, etc.) who dares defy the American empire.

Now, this media consolidation isn’t limited to the US. As the Swiss Policy Research website has noted, we can see a media consensus among other Western countries, including European ones. It makes sense, given these countries are NATO members, and therefore have the same agendas.

But the worst, most blatant example in recent years of Western media bias has been the decision, from the beginning of the Russian/Ukraine war, to blot out and censor all Russian media, so people in the West can gain no access to it. You can complain all you want about the pro-Putin bias in media sources like RT (the former Western reporters of which, incidentally, will tell you they were never told what and what not to report): a truly free media will allow all sides of a story to be told (recall the abolishing of the FCC fairness doctrine). The fact that Russia’s side of the story isn’t allowed to be told in the West is the essence of real propaganda.

People complain about how authoritarian Russia and China are…and of course they are, to quite an extent. But are the Western, NATO-allied countries really any less authoritarian, with so strictly-controlled a media that gets so much money and influence from right-wing billionaires? The way Covid was dealt with in the West can only be described as authoritarian. People running for the heads of state of these countries must be given bourgeois approval, hence “liberal democracy” is really just a euphemism for dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Indeed, the worst kind of dictatorship is the one that fools people into thinking it isn’t one…and in a society where the rich keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer, many in the West are being fooled.

My commenter’s next point was about her wish that the people of Ukraine and Russia would all rise up and overthrow their corrupt governments…dream on. We won’t solve the problems of the world by wishing for solutions; we’ll solve them through action. The idea of ordinary Ukrainians spontaneously rising up against their government, in the middle of a war zone, with their Nazi soldiers forcibly conscripting untrained men to fight and die, is beyond ludicrous. As for Russia, Putin’s approval rating has generally been high, so I’d say an uprising against him is unlikely, too.

Now, what has Putin been doing? Not only is he standing up to the real empire, the Western one, he’s also helping with the de-dollarization of the world, which will be a major move in putting that empire to an end. This will replace the current unipolar world with a multipolar one, which should in turn move us in the direction of world peace, with its balance of power. The multipolar world will be far from ideal, but it will put us in a position to make socialist agitation far more doable, with an at least greatly weakened American government far less likely to interfere.

But again, this kind of wishful thinking of hers is typical of a lot of the ultras, who want all social problems remedied at once instead of proper organizing and waiting for a revolutionary situation. But worse than all of this is how, in vilifying Putin while either ignoring or giving short shrift to what should be the obvious evils of US/NATO imperialism, these ultras are helping, either tacitly or actively, the fascist elements in Ukraine that are destabilizing the country and pushing us all closer to WWIII.

This support of US/NATO/Ukrainian aggression against Russia, forcing Putin to respond in kind, is what I mean by a left-wing form of fascism (it’s also what Shea was referring to in his article, though by social fascism, he was talking about left-of-centre social democracy, which Stalin called “objectively the moderate wing of fascism”), an idealistic insistence on pushing for so extreme a ‘pure’ form of leftism that it pushes us past the bitten tail of the ouroboros to its biting head, from extreme left to extreme right.

So I’ll say to my commenter that yes, she’s right to say it’s hardly leftist to support imperialism. She’s only wrong in where she attributes the actual imperialist aggression in the world. She is either egregiously ignorant of recent history, or she’s being most dishonest about it, rather like the mainstream Western media now.

Either way, her projection of guilt is remarkably shameless.

So anyway, when all is taken into account, mine is a moderate support of the Russian operation (hoping the horrible war will end as soon as possible), a support that far from idealizes Putin or his bourgeois government, and has no illusions about its hidden agendas. Nonetheless, the US/NATO imperialists are the far greater global threat, and we have no one else at the moment to repel them, so it looks as though it will have to be Putin’s government and military, as well as those of Xi Jinping, to lead the struggle against them. Once the Western empire is decisively defeated, then we can work on fixing the imperfections and genuine faults in Russia, China, and elsewhere, however great or small those faults may be.

Criticism of Russia and China are valid to a certain point, but it mustn’t be done to the point of brushing aside the far greater evils of the Western imperialists. To do so would be to aid those evils, however tacitly that aid might be given. And in a world in which fascism is coming back in style, it’s the far more blatant fascism that must first be fought…not helped by the ‘left’ anymore than by the right. .

Analysis of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’

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

Horizons

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.

Cliffs

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.

Analysis of ‘A Farewell to Kings’

A Farewell to Kings is the fifth studio album by Rush, released in 1977. The album demonstrates remarkable musical growth in the band, with their shifting away from their original, Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock sound and into the realm of progressive rock.

To this musical end, the trio expanded from a basic guitar/bass/drums sound to one incorporating not only six- and twelve-string acoustic guitars, but also classical guitar (by Alex Lifeson). Furthermore, singer/bassist Geddy Lee adds a Minimoog, and both he and Lifeson play bass pedal synthesizers; this electronic sound would be further expanded to the use of more synthesizers by the 1980s, this being a dominant aspect of their music throughout that decade.

Drummer Neil Peart adds a wide array of percussion instruments on this album, including glockenspiel, tubular bells, Vibraslap (heard during Lifeson’s solo on “Closer to the Heart“), and Chinese temple blocks. These new musical colours, combined with Peart’s growth from his original Keith Moon-inspired aggressive drumming style to one of prog rock virtuosity, show the newer influence of the crackingly precise chops of Carl Palmer and Bill Bruford.

But just as newer musical ideas are being phased in, so are older ideas being phased out. As I said above, the hard rock sound, though still present to a large degree, is noticeably less here than on previous albums. And although Lee’s soaring head voice (with its grating vibrato) is as evident as ever here (in fact, on “Cygnus X-1,” he hits his highest note ever, a B-flat 5…or 6?), it won’t be long after this album (two albums later, specifically) that he will phase out the use of head voice and limit his highest notes generally to those within mixed voice, and focus on his lower, chest voice.

A Farewell to Kings is an album that Rush were most pleased with: Lee has never found fault with it, and Peart said that the title track “seems to encapsulate everything that we want Rush to represent.” It’s one of my personal favourites of the band’s, if not the favourite–it’s the first of theirs that I’d heard as a little kid, not long after it was released. Apart from all the musical colours I described above, A Farewell to Kings is genuine art rock, not only with long songs divided into sections, but also with a more prominent use of odd time signatures and superb musicianship that had since become synonymous with Rush.

Here is a link to all the song lyrics on the album.

The cover, by Hugh Syme, shows a demolition site in the background as juxtaposed with, in the foreground, a king slumped on a throne and made to look like a marionette. The picture expresses some of the themes of the title track, and by extension, those of the rest of the songs on the album, as I’ll explain below.

Decades ago, I spotted the obvious theme of morality, but a much more important theme is idealism, particularly the idealizing of the past as against the disillusionment felt in the modern world. Also, there’s the theme of the danger of recklessly seeking to attain those ideals, leading to one’s self-destruction.

The title track begins softly, with Lifeson playing a classical guitar melody with one bar in 3/4, then three bars in 4/4 before returning to the 3/4 beginning, and playing the whole cycle all over again. He plays it a third time, but with the first two of the three 4/4 bars, replacing the third with a transitional bar in 5/4, then one in 4/4, to introduce a middle passage with Lee’s Minimoog and Peart’s glockenspiel.

The first theme returns with all three instruments, and with the 5/4 theme played three times. Though this gentle introductory tune includes a synthesizer, the classical guitar’s lute-like sound makes one think of a time hundreds of years ago. The music’s tranquility makes one imagine, correctly or incorrectly, that that old time was a better, more peaceful one.

A sharp contrast is heard when the electric guitar, bass, and drums come crashing in, suggesting the turmoil of the modern world, a sad decline from that (perceived) idyllic opening. We hear two bars of 4/4, then a switch to several bars of 7/4 before returning to 4/4.

Now, the lyrics come in, Lee singing what amounts to be a conservative’s complaint of “Whatever happened to the good old days?” (If one didn’t know any better, one might think of Archie and Edith Bunker singing “Those Were the Days” at the piano.)

Added to this conservative lament is the use of medieval imagery in Peart’s lyric (i.e., references to “castles,” all things “kingly,” and “nobles”). Let me just get this straight: a farewell to kings, that is, to feudalism, is a bad thing? Morality can be upheld only through the absolute power of a monarch, the ‘divine right’ of kings?

Such would be a very strange position for three young, long-haired rockers (who only the previous year sang of the pleasures of dope in “A Passage to Bangkok“) to take. Either Peart was being ironic, or he was being metaphorical in his references to kings and castles as an ideal, or the lyric is in the voice of a reactionary whose political ideals are in sharp contrast with those of the band.

I’d say that a hint to what Peart was really writing about, perhaps by way of a Freudian slip, is in the line “Ancient nobles showering their bitterness on youth.” Does this line not encapsulate what the whole lyric presents to the listener–grumpy old men griping about all these bad kids, with their long hair, loud rock music, and sex and drugs, only it’s expressed with all this medieval imagery, just to reinforce how “ancient” the complainers are?

One thing to remember about Rush, and about Peart in the 1970s in particular, was the influence of right-wing libertarianism, and of “the genius of Ayn Rand” in their reworking of her novella, Anthem, in their side-long suite, “2112” (not to mention their song of the same name as her book, and in the name of Rush’s record label). Surely, these three haters of ‘Big Brother government’ weren’t holding up the monarchy as a fitting alternative. And if the idealizing of monarchy is meant as a metaphor, then for what?

I want to give Rush credit here, and say that this song, however much Peart insisted would “encapsulate everything that [they wanted] Rush to represent,” is meant as an ironic presentation of the views of authoritarian conservatives “showering their bitterness on youth.”

In other words, Rush represents ironic tongue-in-cheek.

Sandwiched in between these verses is a tight instrumental section in alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Lifeson doing a solo with a delightfully angular tone on his Gibson ES-355 over Lee’s Rickenbacker bass octaves in A, and Peart’s tight drumming. Lifeson stops soloing for a moment and plays an A-chord with Lee’s A octaves and Peart’s drumming of the 4/4 and 2/4 rhythm; then we have just 4/4 and a chord progression of A major, G major, and D major, over which Lifeson resumes soloing before a reprise of the “Cities full of hatred…” verse.

A final verse, to the same music as that of the reprised verse, ends with the hope for a world that’s “closer to the heart,” an allusion to the famous song that acts as a solution to the problem presented in the title track. More on that later, of course.

Though lyrically, “Xanadu” is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem “Kubla Khan,” Peart’s idea originally came from the classic film Citizen Kane, in which the titular character (based in part on William Randolph Hearst) owns a mansion called Xanadu. Just as the title track yearns for an ideal morality in the feudal past (metaphorically, if not literally), so does “Xanadu” involve a quest for the ideal of eternal life.

As with the title track, “Xanadu” begins with birdsong (indeed, Messiaen would have loved it!). We also hear a low E played on the bass pedal synthesizer, along with Lifeson soloing with a volume pedal, and Peart playing the Chinese temple blocks, swiping the chimes, and tapping an E on the tubular bells.

Next, Lifeson plays–no longer with the volume pedal–a seven-note cycle of E–E (octave higher)–A–B–E-flat–A-flat–A, which then brings in the bass and drums. After this passage in 7/8, we return to 4/4, still in E major, with a riff including a whirlwind of notes starting on D, in the E-Mixolydian mode. Then, we’re back to 7/8 (Rush’s favourite odd time), with Lifeson quickly strumming chords of E-major, D-major, B-major, A-major, and G-major, but with an open high E string (he does a lot of this–playing E-shape barre chords, but with the high E-string open, without the barre–at various points in the song). Peart joins in with cowbells of different pitches, and Lee with the bass pedals set at a treble range. The bass and drums soon join Lifeson in this 7/8 passage.

The instrumental opening goes on for about five minutes before Lee finally begins singing, making allusions to Coleridge’s poem. “Drink[ing] the milk of Paradise” is what the speaker hopes will confer immortality onto him, though the milk, combined with honeydew, also suggests the use of narcotics (recall, in this connection, “A Passage to Bangkok,” as well as Coleridge’s own drug use).

The speaker seeks the ideal of eternal life, and hopes to find in Kubla Khan’s “pleasure dome” the ideal abode, paradise. But just as hoping for moral ideals in a romanticized past in “A Farewell to Kings” is foolish, so is the speaker’s hope for happiness in immortality in Xanadu foolish.

A thousand years pass, and the speaker has no hope of dying. He yearns for the end of the world, hoping to be destroyed with it, and thus to be freed of the “prison of the lost Xanadu.” Just as Charles Foster Kane can find no happiness or fulfillment in his wealth and power, the speaker, in his “bitter triumph,” cannot find any in honeydew and the milk of paradise.

Wealth, power, immortality, ideals…these don’t provide happiness. That’s what A Farewell to Kings is all about.

Now, “A Farewell to Kings” may have presented the problem of immorality (just as “Xanadu” explored the problem of immortality), but “Closer to the Heart” presents an attempt at finding solutions. Obviously, “the heart” is meant to indicate that we need a world of love as the solution, though as I’ll later argue, the solution as given isn’t adequate.

From a formal, structural perspective, the song’s lyrics (written by Peart, but inspired by a verse by Peter Talbot, a friend of the band’s) are cleverly written, with parallel structure from verse to verse. Examples of such parallelism include the rhyming last words of the third line of each verse (“reality,” “creativity,” “mentality,” and “destiny”); in the first line of each verse are references to different careers one could have (“men who hold high places,” “the blacksmith and the artist,” “philosophers and ploughmen,” and “captain”); the blacksmith would “forge,” and the artist use his “creativity,” ploughmen “sow” the philosophers’ “new mentality,” and the captain goes “sailing into [the] destiny” of “the chart” that “I will draw.” The most obvious parallelism is the repeat of the song’s title in the last line of each verse.

Now, this all makes for fine rhetoric, which again uses archaic diction, as in the album’s title track, the question song to which “Closer to the Heart” is the proposed answer. Here’s the problem: nothing in the song actually details how we are supposed to move towards a more loving world.

Matters start to get a little disturbing when we consider how the band that’s preaching how we must move “closer to the heart” was only the previous year touting the ‘philosophy’ of an embittered Russian bourgeois expat in the US, she who wrote of The Virtue of Selfishness, which espoused “rational egoism,” or as I would call it, rationalized selfishness.

In all fairness to Rush, and to Peart in particular, when they recorded these 1970s albums, they were young and naïve about the world. Their expertise was in music, not politics. Given the intense anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War, the kind that raised a hack writer like Rand to fame (seriously, I read Anthem when I was young and, being similarly naïve at the time, was more sympathetic to the story’s anti-socialist message, and even then, I was not impressed with her prose), it’s easy to see how Peart could have been seduced by her ideas, as so many have been. And to be even fairer to Peart, in the last decade of his life, he confessed that he’d renounced Rand (who, incidentally, was no libertarian, but rather an advocate for capitalist government) and begun calling himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian“…translation: a liberal. Indeed, it was the individualism of her message, not the pro-capitalist one, that he’d always liked, anyway.

As for those conservative politicians whose Rand influence has stayed with them, look over the past forty years of neoliberalism and ask yourself honestly if their politics have steered the world any “closer to the heart.” Tax cuts for the rich have resulted in their wealth ballooning to the point that they can essentially buy politicians and both American political parties, ensuring that the owners of the big corporations determine the direction the world goes in, which means more for them and less for the rest of us (all of this has given a new, bitter irony to Peart’s complaints of “the seeds that we let grow”). As I’ve explained in other posts, the “free market” dialectically leads to “corporatism,” or the capitalist government that Rand wanted, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

So, with the song’s championing of a more loving world, with its clever rhetoric and a lack of a concrete plan for realizing its goal, “Closer to the Heart” is another example of the album’s theme of idealism. Note that utopian thinking exists on the left and on the right. Everyone has his or her own notion of the ‘perfect world’: there are, for example, the Nazi ideals of Lebensraum and judenrein, though decent people would never espouse such horrors. “Free market” fundamentalists’ notion of unbridled capitalism, through the voodoo of the invisible hand, leading to happiness and harmony is another utopian fantasy: how does unchecked selfishness help the world? It’s easy to see how it results in unaccountable corporate tyranny, though. And leftism isn’t necessarily all idealistic: contrary to popular belief, Marxism is not, as I explained here, utopian socialism, but scientific, grounded in revolutionary theory.

Now, “Closer to the Heart” may have failed to provide a method for achieving the more loving society, but Lee’s lyric for “Cinderella Man” gives us something of an idea. Just as “Xanadu” was inspired (in part) by a classic old black-and-white movie, so was this one: namely, by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, one of Lee’s favourites.

Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper) is dubbed the “Cinderella Man” by a newspaper reporter, named Louise “Babe” Bennett (played by Jean Arthur), because of his sudden rags-to-riches inheritance of his late uncle’s $20,000,000 fortune. He’s from a town called Mandrake Falls, and he goes to New York to get the money.

Since Deeds eventually decides to give all of the money to poor, starving farmers (the 1936 film is set during the Great Depression), powerful men scheme to get their hands on his money by having him declared insane, and therefore too mentally incompetent to be trusted with the responsibility of managing and dispensing with so huge a sum of money. His eccentric behavior, which includes suddenly punching men for no apparent reason, walking in the rain, and feeding a horse an excess of donuts, seems to confirm that he’s insane. In fact, a psychiatrist deems him to be a manic depressive. In the end, though, they “just couldn’t beat him.”

So, Lee’s lyric tells the plot of the film in an extremely abbreviated form. The proposed ideal moral solution to the problem of poverty is, essentially, a kind of charity, acts of generosity done of one’s free, individual will, as opposed to the workers’ revolutionary seizing control of the means of production, resulting in a state-planned economy providing free healthcare, education, housing, and full employment.

It’s interesting to note, in light of Rand’s influence on Peart, that Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a film by Frank Capra, who also did It’s a Wonderful Life, another film about the value of Christian charity, and one despised by the likes of Rand, who have idiotically claimed it is a “communist” film. Capra, a kind of right-wing libertarian in his own right, didn’t even like FDR’s New Deal, which was meant to keep the Depression-era American working class from agitating for a socialist revolution. As I argued in my analysis of this latter film (link above), the notion that altruism of any kind can be airily called “communist” really only displays the mean-spiritedness of the “rational egoists.”

“Madrigal” is a simple love song, with a sweet melody that Lee plays on his Minimoog, and with Peart’s drums recorded in an echo room. Even this love song can be seen as a manifestation of the theme of ideals, for when one is in love, one idealizes the love object, ignoring his or her faults, and exaggerating his or her virtues, especially as a contrasting bulwark against this harsh world we live in, as expressed in Peart’s lyric. That the song is called madrigal is again, as with much of the diction of its lyric, an example of the use of archaic imagery (suggesting associations with courtly love poetry, which idealized the Lady as love object), reinforcing that sense of idealizing a distant past against our troubled modern world.

“Cygnus X-1 Book One: The Voyage” is, in contrast to the previous songs’ settings at different points in the past, a science fiction story about going “across the Milky Way” in a spaceship to reach a black hole “in the constellation of Cygnus.” It’s in four parts, the Prologue opening with an electronically-altered narration by Terry Brown, the producer of A Farewell to Kings and all the other Rush albums from their second, Fly by Night, up to Signals.

1 is very brief, with Lee singing of how entry “through the void” of the black hole leads one “to be destroyed,” or could it be a wormhole into either another part of the universe, or a door to a parallel one? Our protagonist dares to find out.

Lee begins playing broken-up segments of the bass line that, when Lifeson and Peart join in, will comprise a riff in 3/4, 7/8, 3/4, and 4/4. Soon after, a frantic riff comes in with chords of C-sharp minor, E minor, and G-sharp minor, which we’ll hear again at the climactic end of the song. A guitar line of G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads into a riff in 11/8, 12/8, and 11/8, with chords in C minor, a passing chord of B minor to F-sharp major, E-flat minor, and a passing chord of D minor back to C minor. The Minimoog eventually comes in, largely doubling the chords.

2, narrated by the protagonist, describes the flight on his ship, the Rocinante, which is named after the horse ridden by Don Quixote, a foolish idealist who, having read so many chivalric romances, fancies himself such a hero, a knight-errant in search of adventure. He’s an awkward fool, engaging in a task far beyond his abilities. The protagonist in the spaceship is similarly foolish and idealistic, engaging in a dangerous quest (though, in “Book Two: Hemispheres,” he enters–through a wormhole, presumably–the world of the Apollonian and Dionysian battle of the mind and heart, achieving the ideal of balance between the two).

Beginning this section is an upbeat chord progression of C major, F major, D major, and G major, musically suggesting the rosy optimism of the protagonist. Things don’t stay positive for long, though.

A repeat of the G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads to a solo by Lifeson with the wah-wah pedal. Next is a quieter section suggesting the traveling of the Rocinante deep into space, with Lifeson playing octaves of C, A-flat, and B. Backed by Peart’s drumming, Lee comes in with his bass soon after, with fragments of his bass line from that frantic, climactic progression heard in the Prologue and soon to be heard again–notes of C-sharp, E and G-sharp…hearing this is a foreshadowing of the protagonist’s doom. Fittingly, the bass line does a bitonal clash with the guitar line, reinforcing the sense of tension building up to the climax. But just before that climax, there’s a louder section in E, in 4/8, 3/8, and 4/8.

3 has the Rocinante spinning out of control as it reaches the black hole, with that frantic chord progression fully developed in the form of C-sharp minor, E minor, G-sharp major, and G major, then C-sharp minor, E minor, and C minor, all in 6/8. The protagonist screams out that his “every nerve is torn apart.” (The tragedy of his self-destruction in his spaceship is paralleled by the farce of Don Quixote charging, on his horse, the windmills.)

The song ends with soft but eerie chords of C minor, E-flat minor, and E minor added ninth, then E minor again, but without the ninth. This fades out, suggesting the fading out of the protagonist’s life.

The protagonist thus goes through the whole Hegelian dialectic of being, nothingness, and in Book Two, the sublation of being and non-being, that of becoming, the balance between the two (as well as that between the Apollonian mind and the Dionysian heart), the achievement of the Hegelian ideal.

But this ideal isn’t to be reached until the next album. Instead, as far as A Farewell to Kings is concerned, our quixotic hero just destroyed himself, as does the drinker of the milk of paradise in the other long song ending Side One of this album. The first hero destroys his mind in madness, and the second destroys his body; the first erases the possibility of his non-existence, the second erases his existence…both heroes doing so in the foolish pursuit of unattainable ideals.

Analysis of ‘Easy Rider’

Easy Rider is a 1969 film produced by Peter Fonda, directed by Dennis Hopper, starring both of them, and written by them and Terry Southern. The film co-stars Jack Nicholson (in a role that made him a star), Karen Black, Toni Basil (later of “Mickey” fame), and Luke Askew.

A landmark counterculture film, Easy Rider not only explored the rise of the hippie movement, drug use, and communal lifestyle, but it also helped spark the New Hollywood era of filmmaking in the early 1970s. Real drugs were used in the film.

Critics praised the performances, directing, writing, soundtrack, and visuals. Easy Rider was nominated for two Oscars, for Best Original Screenplay and for Best Supporting Actor (Nicholson).

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Though the film is understood to be a film for ‘rebels,’ one needs to look deeper. Wyatt, or “Captain America [!]” (Fonda), and Billy (Hopper) have names inspired by Wyatt Earp and outlaw Billy the Kid, reinforcing their image as anti-establishment rebels by associating them with the rough and violent types of the Old West. Instead of horses, they’re on bikes. What immediately should strike one with suspicion, though, is Wyatt’s display of the Stars and Stripes on his black leather jacket, helmet, and the chopper he buys after he and Billy profit off of a sale of cocaine. Wearing such colours indicates the duo’s acceptance of the values of American capitalism, not a rebellion against them.

Indeed, the film begins with Wyatt and Billy in Mexico, riding on dirt bikes to a bar where they’ll buy cocaine so they can smuggle it into the US to sell for a much higher price. Their clothes are as humble as their bikes at this time. They sell the cocaine to their “connection” (played by none other than Phil Spector, of “Wall of Sound” fame) outside at an airport, where airplanes are flying noisily overhead, as if representing the heavenly host watching over Wyatt and Billy, and judging them for their sins.

And what is their sin? I’m not so much interested in moralizing about their drug trafficking as I am in discussing what Marx wrote about in Capital, vol. 3, about “Commercial Capital” (chapter 16, pages 379-383). A merchant buys a commodity from a producer, then sells it again for a higher price to obtain a profit. Wyatt and Billy sell the cocaine they bought in Mexico to their American connection for a much, much higher price. Some might call this white Wyatt’s and Billy’s exploitation of the poor Mexicans they bought from.

Small wonder we hear, right at the end of the deal with the American connection, “The Pusher,” in which originally Hoyt Axton sang “Goddamn the pusher man” because he “is a monster,” selling you hard drugs like heroin or cocaine, and not caring “if you live or if you die.” (In the film, though, we hear Steppenwolf‘s cover of the song.) We hear these lyrics as Wyatt is stuffing their dollar bills down a plastic tube hidden inside his US-flag designed chopper. Hence, his bike is symbolic of American capitalism…Wyatt and Billy are just as much the establishment as are all the hicks who later antagonize them.

So when we see these two cool dudes riding their new choppers on the road, and we hear “Born to be Wild” by Steppenwolf as the credits flash across the screen, we have to be clear about what the contradiction is that is examined in Easy Rider. It isn’t between the right and the left: both sides here are capitalists through and through. It’s between conservatives and liberals. This distinction is important to make because there are many politically illiterate people out there who confuse the left with bourgeois liberalism (e.g., hippies, the Democratic Party, etc.). It’s significant that we hear Steppenwolf perform both the Hoyt Axton song and “Born to be Wild,” one immediately after the other, at this point in the film; this juxtaposition of songs emphasizes the dual nature of Wyatt and Billy, being both establishment (commercial capitalists) and anti-establishment (biker rebels) at the same time.

Now, conservative capitalists–owners of such private property as motels–won’t accommodate these two liberal capitalists. This lack of shelter for Wyatt and Billy puts them in a paradoxical situation: that of being, on the one hand, a pair of privileged white men with that secret stash of cash in Wyatt’s bike, their profit from the drug deal; and on the other hand, two men reduced to the status of the homeless.

Bourgeois lumpenproletariat: who’d a thunk it? In a sense, one might even think of what happens to King Lear.

One is reminded, in contemplating how the conservative capitalists are bullying these two liberal capitalists, of something Marx said in Capital, vol. 1: “One capitalist always strikes down many others,”(Marx, page 929)…or in this case, some capitalists often strike down these two others.

…and some far-right dummies out there equate the likes of Wyatt and Billy with communists. Give me strength.

Still, we see these two riding their choppers on roads with beautiful American landscapes and scenery on either side. One thing to remember about this land, though, is who it belonged to originally.

In a movie largely about white male rebels, we might not pay too much attention to those who are marginalized in it…probably because these people are so very marginalized: blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and women. It can be just as instructive to note who or what is not seen in a movie as who is seen in it.

Our two biker rebels stop at the home of a humble farmer to fix a flat tire on Wyatt’s bike. They have dinner with the farmer’s family, who say Grace before eating. This is a humble, conservative Christian family, though the father is liberal and unprejudiced enough to marry a Hispanic Catholic. Still, he expects her to run off and get more coffee.

What should be noted is not so much the contrast between, on the one side, Wyatt, Billy, and the hippies they’ll meet soon enough, and on the other side, the bigoted and outright dangerous conservatives. One should rather see these opposing sides as on a continuum with people like this farmer’s family as somewhere in between. All of these people play a role of some kind in the white settler colonial state that is the US. It is those aforementioned marginalized people (including the Mexican seller of the cocaine and the farmer’s wife) who should be set in opposition to all the others, including Wyatt and Billy, in this film.

Indeed, this dinner with the farmer’s family has a double in the later dinner at the hippie commune, before which they also pray, the camera slowly moving and showing us the faces of everyone about to eat. We’ll see that the hippies, for all their drug use and practice of free love, have a lot more in common with the Christian farmers than meets the eye.

Wyatt and Billy ride on, and soon they pick up a hitchhiking hippie, a Stranger on the Highway (Askew). When at a gas station, the hippie fills up Wyatt’s bike, having taken off the gas cap and leaving the possibility of him seeing the plastic tube with all the money in it, Billy gets nervous and wants to stop him. He’s just as protective of his wealth as any capitalist would be.

At nightfall, the three stop by the side of the road to smoke some grass, then to sleep. When Billy asks the hippie where he’s from, he’s evasive in his answer, feeling that all cities are the same. People who’ve done LSD, something the hippie will give Wyatt and Billy to do at a fitting time later, often sense a unity in everything and everyone, that everywhere is ‘here,’ so to speak. The hippie would also have Wyatt and Billy take heart of how this land they’re sitting on has its original owners, the Native Americans, buried under it.

He says that Wyatt and Billy could be “a trifle polite” in their attitude towards those dead aboriginals whose land the white man has taken from them. Billy chuckles at the hippie’s words; his attitude should be a reminder to us, as much as Wyatt’s Stars and Stripes, that these two bikers are not sticking it to the Man the way they should be.

All the two men want to do is pursue a life of physical pleasure: drugs, drinking, chasing women, and freely riding their choppers along the American landscape…from a land taken from the aboriginals. Wyatt and Billy are going to New Orleans to enjoy the Mardi Gras festival: “Fat Tuesday,” a great indulgence in pleasure before the great abstinence of Lent…in which they, of course, have no interest.

Their rebellion is against repressive, right-wing conservative authority, but it doesn’t go far enough. One cannot just do one’s own thing while coexisting with those reactionary types, for the reactionaries refuse to coexist with society’s long-haired rebels, as we’ll see by the end of the movie. Those reactionaries must be defeated and wiped out, not merely given the finger to, or else they’ll wipe out the rebels. This is the reality as understood in the intensification of class struggle, and why a dictatorship of the proletariat is needed to prevent the return of reactionary capitalism.

Wyatt and Billy take the hippie to his commune, where we see two young women who show an immediate sexual interest in the two bikers, just as they’ve been openly affectionate with the hippie. (One of these women thinks Wyatt is “beautiful,” in his Stars and Stripes outfit, which should tell you something about her and her attitude towards straight America.) Billy briefly plays ‘cowboys and Indians’ with the children of the commune, an indication not only of the spirit of levity felt by these whites towards the genocide of the Native Americans as noted above, but also how these hippies, in not teaching their kids that even playing war might lead to a warlike mentality when they grow up, don’t seem all that committed to the anti-war cause, a reminder that hippies are liberals, not revolutionaries–they’re the phonies that Zappa accused them of being.

Yet there are right-wing morons out there who claim that hippies are communists. Pathetic.

Other examples of traditionalism among these hippies–which give the lie to their ‘anti-establishment’ and ‘counterculture’ posturing–include, apart from the prayer before eating mentioned above, their singing of old-fashioned, traditional songs like “Does Your Hair [originally “Do Your Ears”] Hang Low?” and “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” (as opposed to singing, for example, 60s antiwar/pro-drug songs), and their reluctance to accommodate any more visitors. Such a reluctance isn’t too far removed from when Archie Bunker refused to accommodate two unmarried hippie visitors to his house.

As I said above, all these groups of people in Easy Rider lie on a continuum, ranging from the bigoted hecklers and killers of Wyatt, Billy, and George Hanson (Nicholson) on the far-right side, then a little to the left of the bigots, there are the Christian farmer and his Catholic, Hispanic wife, then a little further left from them are the people in this hippie commune, then further left are Hanson, then Wyatt and Billy, and finally the hippie hitchhiker, who acknowledges the genocide of the aboriginals (without helping to do anything about it), on the other side. A real far-left opposition would include people like the Black Panthers and any Native American activists struggling against white settler colonialism, something we’ll never see in this film. To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, the mainstream media ensures a very narrow, but lively, range of debate between the “left” and the right.

Wyatt and Billy–after engaging in skinny-dipping and free love with those two women from the commune, then taking some LSD from the hippie hitchhiker–continue on their way into a town in New Mexico where a parade is going on. They ride their choppers along with the parade, as if to join it, then they get arrested for “parading without a permit.” Actually, the cops just don’t like long-haired men.

Here is where they meet alcoholic Hanson, himself locked up for having overindulged in booze the night before.

Now, George Hanson, as a lawyer who has done work for the ACLU, is rather square, but also liberal and open-minded, as well as knowledgeable about the social issues of the day. He knows that this town they’re in is full of right-wing reactionaries who’d love to shave the heads of Wyatt and Billy, taking away their symbol of rebellion…like taking away Samson‘s strength by cutting his hair.

George can help Wyatt and Billy get out of jail as long as the two bikers haven’t done anything like killing someone…white, which George says with a sardonic grin, indicating his awareness of his society’s double standards against the marginalized black community.

He gets them and himself out of jail, has a bit of the hair of the dog, sees their impressive bikes, and learns of their plan to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. George is so intrigued that he’d like to tag along; he even tells them about a whorehouse there, calling the girls “US prime.” Once again, we see that these ‘rebels’ can be just as marginalizing of people as the ‘hicks’ they’re rebelling against.

So George rides as a passenger on Wyatt’s bike (something Nicholson would metaphorically be in a later film also dealing with an uncommitted progressive), wearing his nerdy helmet. They stop somewhere off of the road, as usual, that night and smoke some marijuana, which George has for the first time, him at first being reluctant, then opening his mind to it.

As they’re getting high, Billy speaks of a ‘satellite’ he’s just seen in the night sky (which, incidentally, can be vaguely associated with those airplanes flying overhead during the cocaine deal). George tells him and Wyatt about the “Venusian” pilots of the UFOs, about whom the world governments apparently know, but keep a secret for fear of creating a general panic among the world population.

Apparently, these “Venusians” have a far more advanced civilization than ours: egalitarian, pacifist, money-less, and with futuristic technology. George says they’ve been coming here since 1946…which by the way was around the beginning of the Cold War. They’re people just like us, George says, working with us all over the Earth in an advisory capacity.

These “Venusians” sound an awful lots like communists (egalitarian, money-less, and with advanced technology) and Marxists (i.e., leftist professors in Western universities–working ‘in an advisory capacity’) to me. The capitalist governments don’t want us to know about them (as they did so embarrassingly, via McCarthy, during the 1950s) because our antiquated capitalist system, with our leaders, is no match for theirs.

You don’t believe me? That’s because the US government doesn’t want you to know how the Soviet Union went from a backward, agrarian society in the 1920s to a nuclear-armed superpower that won the space race in the late 1950s…technological advances all achieved within a mere three decades, along with progress towards equal rights for women, universal housing, education, employment, and healthcare for all. To this day, Stalin–far from being regarded as a ‘cruel dictator,’ is loved by millions of Russians for his leadership in defeating the Nazis, and majorities of Russians have consistently preferred the Soviet era, for all of its imperfections, to current-day, capitalist Russia. The same can be said of China, from the Maoist era to today.

Now, Billy, like most people brainwashed by bourgeois propaganda, thinks that what George is saying is “a crackpot idea,” because he and Wyatt are, at heart, not all that far from establishment thinking as they might seem to be. The two bikers just want to get stoned, each of the two an easy-going rider of a chopper.

…and the two of them lead me to my next point.

Duality is a major theme in Easy Rider. Apart from the two biker protagonists, there are two cocaine deals: first, the buying of it in Mexico, then the selling of it in the US–M-C-M’, or money to commodity to valorized money, that is, money with a profit, or increased value.

Wyatt and Billy visit and eat at two farms: that of the man and his Catholic wife, and that of the hippie commune, both of which include prayers before eating, and both of which have their own mixture of traditional and liberal values, in itself another duality in the film.

There are airplanes and satellites (or UFOs) flying overhead.

Wyatt and Billy spend time with two male companions, the hippie hitchhiker, and George Hanson, both of whom share valuable insights about the world while smoking dope with them (i.e., insights about the marginalized aboriginals buried in the ground where they are, and the marginalized “Venusians,” or communists, as I interpret them to be).

Wyatt and Billy have sexual encounters with two pairs of women: the two hippies they skinny dip with, and the two prostitutes they do the LSD with in New Orleans.

There are two parades: the one in New Mexico, and the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans.

There are two violent assaults with intent to kill: the first in which George is bludgeoned to death at night, and the second at the end of the film, when Billy, then Wyatt, are shot and killed on their bikes.

These pairs of incidents have their parallels and their dialectical contrasts. Billy is more adversarial and self-centered; Wyatt is more laid-back and generous. The first coke deal is the buying of it: the second, a selling of it.

The first farm they visit is more conservative; the second is more liberal. The first flying machines are very real, the second are more imaginary.

The hippie hitchhiker and Hanson, as well as the pairs of women, are, in their respective ways, thoroughly paralleled.

After the first parade, Wyatt and Billy are put in jail. After the second parade, their minds are ‘freed’ with the LSD.

The first violent assault leaves Wyatt and Billy hurt, but still alive. The second assault leaves them dead.

Furthermore, there are two kinds of drugs enjoyed in this film: the narcotic kind (cocaine, marijuana, and LSD), and the religious kind (the “opium of the people“). Both kinds are attempts to escape, rather than solve, the world’s problems.

There are also doublings of performers playing songs on this famous soundtrack: I already mentioned the two Steppenwolf recordings; there are also two songs by Bob Dylan and performed by Roger McGuinn–“It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Ballad of Easy Rider.”

There is also a duality of time, the present vs the future, in the form of the film’s “flashforwards” that occur at various points in the story, a quick flashing ahead to the future, then back to the present. The most important of these is when Wyatt and Billy are in the New Orleans whorehouse: Wyatt reads something about death freezing one’s reputation forever, then there’s a premonition of his death, his chopper in flames and flying in pieces by the roadside. Such a fusing of present and future symbolically suggests the feeling of timelessness experienced when using psychedelic drugs.

Now, the ultimate duality–or rather, the ultimate two dualities, as I’ll explain immediately after–is the conservative vs liberal contradiction. Since the liberals here are capitalist white men enjoying the privileges of US settler colonialism not all that much less than the conservatives are, then the conservative/liberal contradiction is really hiding a much more profound contradiction that one can only see if one is paying close attention. This is the white bourgeois vs the marginalized black/aboriginal/proletarian contradiction.

Indeed, as Wyatt and Billy are riding their choppers, or walking the streets of New Orleans, we get brief peeks of rural black families, or blacks playing music during Mardi Gras, or someone dressed as a Native American in the Mardi Gras parade. All marginalized people.

To get back to the story, Wyatt, Billy, and George continue on their way, while we hear “Don’t Bogart That Joint,” by Fraternity of Man, then “If 6 Was 9,” by Jimi Hendrix. Both of these songs reflect our bikers’ attitude to life in general, and to reactionaries in particular: just keep on smoking dope, and who cares what’s going on in the rest of the world? We do our own thing, and who cares if the conservatives don’t like it?

Umm…actually, Wyatt, Billy, and George do need to care.

They stop off in a little diner where the locals make no secret of their surprised reaction to these three strangely dressed visitors. Once again, there’s a duality in these reactions: first, a bevy of cute teenage girls finds the three men handsome and fascinating; second, all the men, being bigoted, narrow-minded conservatives, engage in non-stop heckling of Wyatt, Billy, and George.

It doesn’t take long for our three heroes to face the fact that they’re clearly not welcome, so they leave, in spite of the girls’ coming out to talk to them at their bikes.

That night, Wyatt, Billy, and George camp outside as usual. George laments the direction he sees his country going in. He says, “This used to be a helluva good country.” He’s wrong. A country founded on black slavery and the genocide of its aboriginals was never a good country. What’s more, these old sins laid the foundation for the three men’s current predicament.

Though lip-service is routinely paid to the notion of the US being a country founded on the principles of “freedom and democracy,” a deeper investigation of the intents of the Founding Fathers reveals that these land-owning, upper-class white men were primarily out to protect their class interests. They made a few concessions to working class Americans as a result of indispensable political agitation.

Nonetheless, those class interests have to this day been continually maintained in such divide-and-conquer forms as racism against blacks, Native Americans, Hispanics, and all non-WASP immigrants; other forms of the divide-and-conquer of the proletariat have included sex roles, keeping women in the home and away from such things as voting, and belief in such nonsense as ‘capitalism is freedom,’ the ‘free market,’ the ‘American Dream,‘ and the ‘land of opportunity.’ These illusory freedoms are what the reactionary nemeses of Wyatt and Billy will fight to the death for (as George explains), while condemning the freedom that our two protagonists practice.

As soon as the illusory form of freedom is exposed as such by the real exponents of freedom, these reactionaries further expose their fascist mentality through violence. This expression of violence is why one cannot coexist with these kinds of people: they must be fought and defeated; if they aren’t defeated, they’ll not only defeat, but also kill us. This harsh reality is what Wyatt and Billy won’t accept, and it’s also what gets them and George killed.

Freedom does not come for free.

One cannot escape the fascist mentality through drugs, though Wyatt and Billy continue to try to after George’s murder.

The two get to New Orleans and decide to find the brothel that George recommended. As they’re dining in a restaurant, getting drunk, and talking about going to the brothel, we hear a song by The Electric Prunes that does a psychedelic rendition of the Mass’s Kyrie. We continue to hear the song as they wander into the brothel and look around at the artwork. These two druggies are pursuing pleasure while we hear more music about the opium of the people.

They get two prostitutes, Karen (Black) and Mary (Basil), and all four of them drop the hippie hitchhiker’s acid after entering a cemetery in New Orleans’s French Quarter. As they’re all tripping out, we hear the voices of other people there reciting the Credo, Ave Maria, and Pater Noster. Again, we have a juxtaposition of drug use with the opium of the people.

Mary gets naked, and she and Wyatt screw. Karen has a bad trip. Wyatt embraces a statue of a goddess, and, weeping, complains of his abusive mother as if the statue were of her. He seems to be having an epiphany that Billy, unfortunately, isn’t having: Wyatt seems to realize that his rebellion against society is based on his rebellion against his parents, which would seem to be the basis of Billy’s own social revolt. This is why the two bikers can’t be revolutionaries: they won’t take on the system because all they want to do is stick it to their parents, their Oedipal, love/hate relationship with their parents being a universal narcissistic trauma.

The two bikers ride out the next day, and that night, camping out as usual, they chat for a while before sleeping. Billy is thrilled to be rich from their cocaine deal, thinking with the materialism of a typical capitalist and equating their material success with freedom. Wyatt, however, knows better, saying they “blew it.” That acid trip must have helped him understand how superficial their “freedom” is.

A common experience during an acid trip is a dissolving of the barrier between self and other. One feels a sense of unity between oneself and all of humanity, like the equating of Atman with Brahman, resulting in stronger empathy. Wyatt could very well have felt such an emotional connection with the marginalized aboriginals, blacks, and female lumpenproletariat (i.e., those two prostitutes, Karen and Mary). This would have made him realize that mainstream American liberalism just isn’t progressive enough.

Accordingly, he wears his “Captain America” leather jacket far more sparingly, that is, only outside at night, when it’s much too cool not to wear it. When Billy is shot by the man in the truck, the hick who doesn’t like his long hair, Wyatt rides back to help Billy and puts his star-spangled jacket on Billy’s wounds.

He’ll die anyway, because the gunman shoots Wyatt next, destroying his star-spangled bike. What does all of this mean, symbolically? It means that the American flag won’t heal your wounds, and that American capitalism will one day destroy itself through the violence of its own bigoted, reactionary, fascist mentality. Interpreted this way, the ending of Easy Rider can be seen as a prophetic warning of what would happen to the US, and to the world it dominates, decades after the film was made.

Please indulge me in a digression through recent political history.

The US of the mid-twentieth century–with its strong unions, high taxes for the rich, and welfare, to say nothing of the birth of the Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, and gay liberation–had enormous progressive potential. The American government, however, was also giving safe haven to former Nazis in NASA, NATO, and the West German government, all rationalized as part of the effort to contain communism.

This tolerance of fascism (as seen in an allegorical sense in Easy Rider in the form of these reactionary hicks who are never properly fought off) has led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which, for all of its imperfections, was an effective counterweight against US/NATO imperialism, aiding liberation movements in the Third World and goading the US government to adopt more economically progressive policies to keep the American working class from resorting to socialist revolution.

Without the USSR as that effective counterweight, the US government has since been able to do anything it wants with impunity: hence, the gutting of welfare, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed the mergers and acquisitions of American media until now only six corporations control most of Americans’ access to information. Then, there’s been one imperialist war after another: Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and the ongoing threats of war with Iran, Russia, and China.

Hollywood liberals (including one or two Jewish ones) are now cheering on a Ukrainian government and military under the strong influence of Neo-Nazis. Instead of using its revenue to help the poor (a huge section of which are, of course, aboriginal, black, and female), to repair roads and crumbling infrastructure, to end homelessness, to fund education and healthcare, and to create jobs, the US government sends billions and billions of dollars to those Ukrainian Nazis in a proxy war to weaken Russia (as it had in the 1980s in Afghanistan), as part of an ambitious, yet maniacal, plan to go after China in a similar way (through Taiwan). All of these events risk a nuclear WWIII, which would kill everyone on the planet.

This is what happens when we let things slide, like an easy rider on the road that leads to the far right. The violent hicks who kill Wyatt, Billy, and George aren’t literal fascists, of course, but they share the same vicious, intolerant mentality; hence, they can be easily seen as representative of the fascists I mentioned in the previous paragraphs. If one can’t tolerate something as simple as longer hair on a white man, one isn’t going to tolerate much of anything else. These intolerant people, however, have been tolerated by liberals, not just in the film, but in our society for all these decades, leading not only to the film’s ending, but also to our current political predicament, which is why I brought it up.

The hicks fear the freedom of the longhairs because such freedom has the potential to lead to the liberation of the marginalized groups I mentioned above, including, ultimately, the liberation of the global proletariat (not that the liberals, as represented by Wyatt and Billy, are doing anything to pave the way towards such liberation). The hicks have a black-and-white view of the world in which one is either absolutely like their reactionary selves, or absolutely like long-haired ‘commies’…and the only good commie is one that’s dead, remember. This conception of the world is what links the violent end of Easy Rider to the precarious state of the world today.

Once again, the hicks are coming to get us. We’ll have to do a lot more than just give them the finger.

Analysis of ‘Rocky’

Rocky is a 1976 film directed by John G. Avildsen and written by and starring Sylvester Stallone. It also stars Talia Shire (who is also known for being in The Godfather trilogy), Burt Young, Carl Weathers, and Burgess Meredith.

Rocky was the highest-grossing film of 1976, and it received critical acclaim for Stallone’s writing and acting. Rocky received ten Oscar nominations, including ones for Stallone for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay; it won three of those–Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Film Editing. It has been ranked by many as one of the best films of all time, spawning five sequels and two spin-off films, Creed and Creed II. Creed III is planned to come out in 2023, and there have been discussions about a prequel film about Rocky’s younger life.

Here is a link to famous quotes from Rocky, and here‘s a link to the script.

The film’s enduring appeal, as is true of all the films of the Rocky franchise, is of course its portrayal of a sympathetic underdog boxer, Rocky Balboa (Stallone), who gets a chance to beat the world heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Weathers)…and Rocky almost does. We all love to cheer for someone prevailing against impossible odds.

What should be emphasized, however, about this first, and best, film in the franchise is that our underdog and champ are much more than what we see and hear on the movie screen. Great stress is put at the beginning on how poor and starving of confidence Rocky is, and how proud, overconfident, and smug Apollo is.

This contrast is significant because, since Apollo wants to promote a bicentennial boxing event to reel in lots of money in an appeal to American patriotism, we can see Apollo–wearing the colours of the American flag on the night of the fight and saying, “I want you!” like Uncle Sam–as personifying American capitalism. Working-class Rocky, on the other hand, personifies the struggling global proletariat. Now the masses really have reason to chant his name.

The film begins with his name in big letters on the screen and Bill Conti‘s “Fanfare for Rocky.” Normally, a fanfare is music played on brass instruments to introduce someone of the importance of, say, royalty. This music, however, is a kind of ‘fanfare for the common man,’ a raising of the proletariat to a dignity normally reserved for the ruling class.

We see a shot of a large picture of Jesus holding the Holy Chalice and the Host. The camera goes down to show us Rocky receiving punches from Spider Rico (played by Pedro Lovell). It’s a juxtaposition of two struggling proletarians with an icon representing the opium of the people up above. Eating the flesh and drinking the blood…isn’t that what boxers do, in a way?

This “opium of the people” should be kept in mind when we remember not only Rocky’s Catholic leanings (e.g., doing the Sign of the Cross before a fight, or wearing a crucifix), but also how “Apollo Creed” sounds like a pun on “Apostles’ Creed.” The capitalist class has always used religion to control the people, and the reciting of the Apostles’ Creed is a lot like the automaton-like way the Pledge of Allegiance sounds. Control the people’s creed, what they recite and are therefore indoctrinated to believe, and you control them.

Though Rocky wins the fight against Spider after being enraged by a head-butt, and Rocky tries to be as proud of his win as he can, always saying, “You shoulda seen me,” he is repeatedly called “a bum,” or a fighter of little to no worth, the lowest of the low. Even when Rocky later boasts of his win to trainer Mickey Goldmill (Meredith), Mickey dismisses Spider as “a bum,” too. Bum sounds like derelict, the lumpenproletariat, whom Marx and Engels considered lacking in revolutionary potential.

When Rocky and Spider are paid for the fight, we also hear the deductions taken from their pay: for their lockers, shower, taxes, etc. One is reminded of how the pay of the working class in general is brought down to a minimum.

As he walks home that night in his trademark black hat and jacket, bouncing his ball, he passes by the pet shop where his love interest, Adrian (Shire), works, all while the movie credits are being shown. Then he walks by a group of street singers, led by Frank Stallone, singing “Take You Back“…doo-doo-doo-doo. Rocky encourages them, just as he’s tried to win Adrian’s heart by charming her with corny jokes. In the alienating working-class slums of the Kensington section of Philadelphia in late 1975, Rocky tries his best to connect with people.

In his home, he feeds his turtles, Cuff and Link, and brings over the fishbowl of “Moby-Dick” so his turtles can have some company. If only he could do something about his own loneliness.

He goes up to his mirror, where he has photos of himself when much younger. He practices a new joke he’ll tell Adrian the next day, but he gets frustrated with his clumsy delivery and gives up; then he takes one of the photos, one of him as a kid, presumably a school portrait from before he dropped out. He looks at it and frowns; now that he’s thirty and getting nowhere in life, he’s wondering what he’s done with it.

The juxtaposition of seeing himself in the mirror and trying–and failing–to tell the joke reflects the contrast Lacan noted between the ideal-I in the reflection versus the awkward person looking at himself. As a struggling, working-class boxer, he’s alienated from society; he’s also alienated from himself, from the man he wants to be as reflected in the specular image, from the man who can tell witty jokes and win Adrian’s heart.

The next day, he goes to the pet store to tell Adrian the joke. His desire is the desire of the Other, for the recognition of the Other, for what he believes the Other desires, to have the Other want him as much as he wants her. This is what he wants from ever-timid Adrian, just to have her look back at him, like the ideal-I in the mirror reflection, to be united with that person over there. He likes her because, in her shyness, he sees a reflection of his own lack of self-confidence. He sees himself, his own lack, in her.

At the gym, he’s annoyed to learn that Mick has emptied his locker of six years (to give to another, more worthy boxer, in his estimation) and put his things in a bag on “skid row.” This is the contempt Mick holds Rocky in: not because of a lack of talent, for Mick acknowledges that Rocky has “heart,” but because as we learn later, he has wasted his talent as a fighter by working as a collector for Tony Gazzo (played by Joe Spinell), a loan shark, which leads to the next point.

Rocky’a alienation from himself, as we observed from his inability to measure up to the ideal-I in the mirror (as successful boxer and charmer of Adrian), extends to his alienation from his species-essence as a leg-breaker for Gazzo, a job Rocky has to do to live, but one that he, with his sensitive heart, doesn’t want to do. Small wonder he doesn’t break the thumbs of Bob, who’s failed to pay Gazzo back the full $200 he owes.

Gazzo’s annoyance with Rocky only encourages Gazzo’s driver, who despises Rocky, to mouth him off all the more. Gazzo as a mafia man represents capitalists, as I’ve observed before: here we see all the more alienation for Rocky.

Rocky’s impoverished self-worth (further compounded when 12-year-old Marie [played by Jodi Letizia] says “Screw you, creepo!” to him after he tries to give her advice about avoiding hanging out with bad influences) must have been a semi-autobiographical element from Stallone, who in 1970 suffered homelessness and, desperate for money, ended up starring in a softcore porno film called The Party at Kitty and Stud’s. (Years later, it would be renamed The Italian Stallion upon the success of the Rocky franchise.)

With not only Stallone’s success but also Rocky’s in his defeat of Apollo in Rocky II and afterward, we see a change in the erstwhile underdog in regards to his place in the capitalist world. We see Rocky’s acquisition of wealth and property in Rocky III, then his symbolic defence of capitalism against Soviet boxer Ivan Drago in the blatantly anti-communist propaganda of Rocky IV (despite its liberal critique of over-the-top American jingoist Apollo), his loss of his wealth in Rocky V, and his re-emergence as the owner of a restaurant in Rocky Balboa (with the film’s embrace of petite bourgeois Christian values and a ‘You shouldn’t blame others for your difficulties’ attitude, a neoliberal attitude of the 2000s as I described it in this post). In the sequels, therefore, we see the evolution of ‘left-leaning liberal’ (which actually meant something back in the 70s, if not very much) to the Reaganite right-turn of politics from the 80s to the present day; this is in a way fitting, given Stallone’s somewhat Republican leanings.

To get back to the story, Rocky meets up with Adrian’s brother, Paulie (Young) in a bar, asking him why his sister is so unresponsive to him. Paulie dismisses her as “a loser,” and it’s clear from his abrasive manner that he emotionally abuses her–small wonder she’s so shy and terrified of the world. He’s mean to her because it’s the only way he can feel less shitty about himself…already a hard thing for him to do, especially in an alienating capitalist society.

Meanwhile, Apollo is trying to find a boxer to replace Mac Lee Green (who has injured his hand) for a fight in Philadelphia for the United States Bicentennial on New Year’s Day, 1976. All other contenders are either booked or unavailable for some reason. Apollo proudly points out that they’re all just too scared to fight him, since they haven’t a hope of “whipping” him. The overweening pride of Apollo, who recall personifies American capitalism, thus represents the hubris of ‘exceptional‘ US imperialism, the belief that “there is no alternative,” and that the West can’t be defeated.

Allied to this hubris is the fake modesty assumed in the notion that America is “the land of opportunity,” that with grit, hard work, and determination, supposedly anyone can succeed and become stinking rich. Therefore, Apollo decides to give a local Philadelphia boxer a shot at the Heavyweight Championship of the World.

George Jergens (played by Thayer David), the promoter of the fight, likes Apollo’s idea, calling it “very American!” Apollo correctly says, “No, Jergens. It’s very smart.” One should not confuse Rocky with any endorsement of “the American Dream”: like The Great Gatsby, Rocky exposes the myth of The American Dream. Rocky almost wins the fight against Apollo not as a vindication of that fantasy, but in spite of it. He almost wins out of his own personal volition and determination. Apollo and Jergens never take seriously the idea that Rocky might win, just as the American ruling class, while promising wealth and abundance to the lower and middle classes if they work hard enough, have done everything they can to thwart such hopes for the great majority of the American population.

It’s significant that Rocky’s first date with Adrian is on Thanksgiving. On their date, Rocky and Adrian essentially save each other, that is, from lives of loneliness and self-hate. In keeping with the American theme of this film, we know that the origin of Thanksgiving is in the Native Americans’ having taught the white settlers how to prepare for and survive the harsh winters of a place the Europeans weren’t used to, that is, having saved their lives. (How the white man eventually ‘thanked’ the aboriginals is, of course, another story for another time.)

Rocky wants to show his sensitivity and thoughtfulness to Adrian by paying to give her ten minutes to skate on a rink that’s closing for the night. We see him grab her arm when she’s about to fall, and her enjoyment of the skating helps her to relax and open up to him as he tells her of his boxing and being a southpaw. In such a chilly place, the two are warming up to each other.

The most difficult part of the date, of course, will be Rocky getting her to trust him alone with her in his home that night. She–a timid, petite girl in the home of a large, muscular man, a boxer!–has every reason in the world to be afraid of him. He, having a sexual/romantic interest in her, is groping (pardon the expression) to find reasons for her not to be afraid. Since he knows he’s a nice guy–but she has no way of knowing that, beyond his considerateness at the rink–he can only hope she’ll trust him anyway.

On a date, one should never be expected, let alone pressured or forced, to be sexual, but one does explore sexual possibilities when dating. She’s afraid, but she does find him attractive…especially in his sleeveless shirt with his muscles showing. Being a good man, he’ll never force himself on her…all he wants her to do–all he needs–is for her to accept him. The scurrilous, misogynist violence of incels is of course never to be tolerated, rationalized, or in any way sympathized with–they certainly have no right at all to demand sex from a woman–but the pain emanating from their hearts (which, again, should never be translated into violence) is from their loneliness and sense of rejection, a universal pain felt by incels and non-incels alike.

Rocky, not having the bent towards violence against women, but feeling that loneliness and fearing that rejection from Adrian, just needs her to accept his love. His tactful and sensitive overture to her is to say he’d like to kiss her, though she doesn’t have to kiss him back if she doesn’t want to. For a guy who takes it and dishes it out so brutally in the ring, he is beautifully gentle with his frightened but fascinated date. The beautiful song “You Take My Heart Away” is playing during this scene; it shares a similar theme or two from “Gonna Fly Now,” suggesting the same sense of encouraged aspirations to something better, which leads to the next point.

Her acceptance of his kisses, her kissing him back, marks the turning point in the film. Both of them, instead of seeing their self-confidence continue to wither, are seeing it begin to come back to life. All those self-help books, and all that pop psychology, tell us about the importance of self-love, of building self-esteem from within; but it can only grow from ‘other-love,’ if you will, from receiving the love of others. We are social beings, and we can only grow in love by being together and supporting each other in communities, in loving solidarity.

Right after this date, Rocky receives the news about facing Creed. His self-love is only beginning to grow at this point, so doing anything more than being a sparring partner for Creed–especially fighting him for the heavyweight title!–seems way out of Rocky’s league. When he initially refuses the opportunity offered by Jergens, you vividly see the frown of self-loathing on his face.

Jergens talks him into fighting Apollo, though, and we see the two boxers on TV, with Rocky, Adrian, and Paulie watching the broadcast in her home. Apollo, of course, isn’t taking the fight seriously, and so he makes an ethnic joke against Italians about their stereotyped cooking skills. Naturally, Rocky, Adrian, and Paulie, being Italian-Americans, are not amused.

This leads us to an interesting point about race and ethnicity as regards this fight, something the news reporter says about this American bicentennial fight being between black Apollo and white Rocky. That Apollo is black, however, in no way detracts from his personification of American capitalism, something we normally associate with white men; one must steer clear from the distraction of identity politics when it comes to critiquing capitalism. As we now know, four decades since the beginning of the Rocky phenomenon, the first black American president, despite all the idiotic complaints from the right that he was a “socialist” or a “communist,” was no less capitalist or imperialist than any other US president before or since.

Similarly, Rocky’s being white doesn’t detract from him being the underdog. Though, as Apollo earlier pointed out when choosing Rocky for the fight, an Italian, so they say, discovered America (Cristoforo Colombo, who subsequently abused the natives)–in fact, America was even named after an Italian (Amerigo Vespucci)–Balboa is still working class as against wealthy Apollo, and Italian-Americans have experienced plenty of bigotry from WASP America, as blacks have suffered. So the skin colours of our two fighters make for an intriguing paradox in terms of how the men represent oppressor and oppressed, and their struggle.

Another interesting point should be made about when Apollo chose Rocky as his challenger. He says, with a chuckle, “Apollo Creed meets the Italian Stallion: sounds like a damn monster movie.” One might think of those Japanese kaiju films–Mothra vs Godzilla, King Kong vs Godzilla, etc. Godzilla is a metaphor for Japan’s collective trauma after the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an American imperialist war crime resulting in a pop culture icon that Apollo finds amusing, since this “monster movie” title will make for an alluring promotion of this most profitable fight.

Apollo’s not the only one hoping to make a buck or two off of this fight: Paulie will have advertising of his meat-packing business sewn on the back of Rocky’s robe. Also, Mickey has suddenly warmed up to that “dumb dago,” and offers to be Rocky’s manager. Though Rocky at first is too proud to accept the help of a trainer who’s only treated him with contempt until now, he realizes that Mick’s decades of experience will be a great help to him.

During his jogging down the streets of Philadelphia, Rocky stops by Paulie’s meat-packing place of work. Obviously envious that Rocky and his “loser” sister have fallen in love while he, the real loser, still has no girl of his own, Paulie pries into the more intimate aspects of the couple’s relationship using vulgar language. He further annoys Rocky by saying he ‘stinks’ and by punching a piece of meat, inspiring Rocky to do the same. Paulie later has the local TV news show Rocky demonstrating his punching of raw meat; Apollo’s trainer, Tony “Duke” Evers (played by Tony Burton), watches the demo on TV, anxious to have Apollo watch, too.

Tony tells Apollo that Rocky “means business.” Apollo answers that he also means business, that is, of the literal, capitalist kind: he’s preoccupied with advertising and promoting the fight, getting tax breaks, and ensuring that many luminaries attend, for the sake of making as much money as possible. In this sense, Creed is a pun on greed.

Paulie’s envy of the happiness of his sister (along with his fear that she’s lost her virginity), and of Rocky’s newfound success–while he can’t even get Rocky to put in a good word for him for Gazzo–causes him to lash out at Rocky and her one time too many, driving her to tell him off once and for all. Just as Rocky’s confidence is improving, so is hers.

Speaking of Rocky’s growing self-confidence, we’ve come to the famous moment when we see him vigorously training, and “Gonna Fly Now” is heard. Since I’ve said that Apollo personifies American capitalism, and Rocky represents the global proletariat, the underdog fighting against US imperialism, we can think of this emotional moment as something to inspire us and steel our hearts in our current struggle against the oppressive ruling class and its brutal war machine.

I find it ironically useful in this connection to mention a parody of this iconic scene in the otherwise egregiously Zionist film, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, in which the titular character’s Palestinian nemesis (played by John Turturro) goes through an inspiring training routine like Rocky, with a Middle Eastern variation on “Gonna Fly Now.” In spite of how nauseatingly pro-Israel this piece of Hollywood garbage is, this one scene is like a Freudian slip, reminding us of which people in that hateful conflict are the real underdogs to be sympathized with. It also reinforces my idea that Rocky represents all such Third World underdogs as they try to resist Western hegemony.

So let us be moved when we see Rocky run up the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and he holds his arms up triumphantly at the top. In spite of all the alienation he’s experienced as a poor man in this city, we can be reminded that Philadelphia means “brotherly love,” and thus we can remember the importance of solidarity.

Recall Che’s words: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”

Rocky visits the arena where the fight will take place, and he notes how on his poster, the colours of his boxing shorts are reversed, a careless oversight reminding him of how no one is taking him seriously as a challenger. Jergens is there, noting how the error “doesn’t really matter.” All of the confidence Rocky has built up to win has just been deflated.

He goes back home to tell Adrian that he has to be honest, that he has no hope of beating Creed. He does, however, still have one significant hope: that he can go the distance, something no boxer has ever done with Apollo. Sometimes, setting a more realistic, attainable goal for oneself is better than dreaming the big dream.

Because sometimes, the realistic goal pulls one much closer to attaining the big dream than we expected it would.

Recall Lenin’s words: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

Recall also that this is Rocky’s dream, not the ‘American dream.’ Here, he achieves great things not because he lives in the ‘land of opportunity,’ but because he has chosen to set those achievements for himself, of his own accord.

Now, for those who may still not accept my idea that Apollo personifies American capitalism, consider his entrance on the night of the fight, and try to deny it. First, he’s dressed like George Washington while the “Marines’ Hymn/Yankee Doodle” is heard; then, he’s dressed like Uncle Sam, shouting, “I want you!” over and over.

Apollo’s pride is therefore the arrogance of “American exceptionalism,” and just as Rocky’s confidence is rising, so is Apollo’s pride about to fall. The commentators note that this fight will be “the caveman against the cavalier,” contrasting Rocky’s slow, brutish, “goddamn ape” fighting style with Apollo’s quick, skillful, and graceful style–Dionysus vs. Apollo, Romanticist Rocky’s “heart” against Apollo’s Classicist technique.

In Round One, though Rocky is slow and awkward with his swings, easily dodged by Apollo, he gets one lucky punch in and knocks Apollo down for the first time in his career. Apollo’s ego is as wounded as his face. His pride is further wounded when, contrary to his smug prediction that he’d “drop him in Three,” he finds Rocky going the distance, something else that’s never happened to Apollo before.

Rocky was made just a few years after the end of the Vietnam War, when the Viet Cong were the underdogs fighting the behemoth of the American army. Charlie, too, went the distance, and proved to the world, just as Rocky is doing to Apollo, that the US war machine isn’t the invincible juggernaut it seems to be.

Rocky sustains some terrible injuries, including swelling over his eye that makes it hard to see, prompting him to tell Mick to cut the skin where the swelling is. Apollo, too, has sustained terrible injuries, including a broken rib. Such injuries are comparable to, on Vietnam’s side, the napalming and trauma of people like Phan Thi Kim Phuc; and on America’s side, all those veterans with PTSD. Small wonder the commentators say we “are watching a battle,” and in Round Fifteen, “They look like they’ve been in a war, these two.”

The last round ends with Apollo saved by the bell after Rocky has pounded his face so hard, it seems as if, had Rocky been given a little more time, one or two more hits would have knocked Apollo down for a KO.

The split decision gives the fight to Apollo, though as Mickey says at the beginning of Rocky II, Rocky was the real winner of the fight. The split decision reminds one of how some patriotic Americans might try to save face by saying, as Otto (Kevin Kline) did in A Fish Called Wanda, “We did not lose Vietnam. It was a tie.” But Archie (John Cleese) knew better, as we all do.

In any case, Rocky doesn’t care who’s won the fight: he’s gone the distance with Apollo, and has come a split hair away from winning–good enough. He just wants to have Adrian by his side. Hearing her tell him she loves him is all the victory he needs.

We, the global proletariat that he represents, likewise don’t need to win all at once. We can enjoy every small victory, one at a time, before the final great revolutionary victory comes. In the meantime, our mutual love and solidarity, like Rocky’s and Adrian’s love, will keep us going.

When that final victory does come, though, we must beware against letting it make us so comfortable that we become the liberal Balboa in Rocky IV, out to propagandize against all that was fought for, however symbolically, in this first great film of the franchise.

Birds

What’s
supposed
left wing is, seen more closely,
in the centre, which in turn
moves to the right.

A
bird
in flight, whose flapping wings are
left here, over there on the right,
is only so depending on your
point of view.

If
it’s
flying forwards, you will see
the left wing where it ought
to be, and where the right
should be.

If
it’s
flying backwards, right at you,
the left, centre and right
may seem a confused
monstrosity,

as
has
been the case, increasingly,
for the past forty years.
As it nears,

the
bird,
which is an eagle, quite the hawk,
shows no signs of slowing down
as it reaches us,
its prey.

Not
knowing
the left wing from the right,
we will be snatched up
in its claws, fed
to its chicks.

Analysis of ‘Masculin Féminin’

Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (“Masculine Feminine: 15 Specific Events”) is a 1966 French New Wave film written and directed by Jean-Luc Godard (who died just over a month before I began writing this up). It stars Jean-Pierre Léaud (who also played Tom in Last Tango in Paris, by the way), Chantal Goya, Marlène Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, and Michel Debora.

The film uses many of the then-innovative film techniques of the French New Wave, such as oddly disjointed scenes without the sense of a unified, flowing narrative, existentialism and absurdism, and breaking the fourth wall.

Considered by some to be representative of 1960s France, Masculin féminin is among Godard’s most acclaimed films. At the 16th Berlin International Film Festival, the film won the award for Best Feature Film Suitable for Young People. Jean-Pierre Léaud won the Silver Bear for Best Actor for his performance in the film. The film was prohibited to French viewers under 18, however, because of its sexual subject matter; this annoyed Godard, since he’d intended the film to be seen by French youth.

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

The main theme of Masculin féminin is alienation, a particularly bad problem for the protagonist, Paul (Léaud), who fancies himself a good communist but isn’t respectful to women; neither is his friend and fellow leftist, journalist Robert Packard (Debord). These two idealistic, would-be revolutionaries don’t seem to have taken to heart Mao’s dictum, “Women hold up half the sky.”

Indeed, these two young Frenchmen are what many people today would call “brocialists.” They oppose the Vietnam War, sign a petition to free political dissidents in Brazil, yet repeatedly appraise women’s breasts in public.

The jumpy, disjointed narrative of the movie, broken up into “15 Specific Events,” apart from being a standard experimental technique of the French New Wave, is also symbolically one of the many ways of conveying the sense of alienation that pervades this film. This alienation stifles potential for socialist revolution, a necessary condition of which is proletarian solidarity. This condition cannot be met if sexism contaminates the proletarian movement, and this sort of thing is a problem all the more today, with the degraded state that Western leftism has sunk to.

Paul frequently whistles, as we hear him do during the opening credits, an earnest whistling of “La Marseillaise,” a tune used to celebrate the revolutionary forming of the First Republic. Immediately following this whistling is Paul, writing in a restaurant, expressing the theme of alienation. So in the film’s beginning, we have dreams of revolution juxtaposed against the kind of alienation that vitiates such hopes.

“Never do two gazes meet,” he says and writes. “No sign of life. Silence. Emptiness.” How can one even hope to bring about a revolution as Earth-shaking as that one that started in 1789, if one can’t even make two gazes meet, not even one genuine moment of human connection?

He likes to put a cigarette in his mouth by tossing the filter end in, as if he were doing an impressive trick. This is our first suggestion of the kind of narcissism he will show later on, the kind that will doom any revolutionary movement.

It is with this introduction of Paul that his soon-to-be love interest, Madeleine Zimmer (Goya), enters the restaurant and meets him. He asks her if she can help him get a job at the magazine where she works, though she wants to quit the place to be a pop singer of the “yé-yé” style.

His dissatisfaction with this job or that, quitting one to find another (as he’ll do later on), ties in with his general alienation from society, since this dissatisfaction is worker alienation. Similarly, the cutting up of the film into fifteen segments, as I said above, is symbolic of alienation, in particular from oneself, for if we were to think of the film as personifying someone like Paul, it would thus be alienated from its species-essence, as Paul undoubtedly feels.

The way alienation, as presented in Masculin féminin, is lethal to revolution reminds one of what the Marquis de Sade says in Marat/Sade: “Marat/these cells of the inner self/are worse than the deepest stone dungeon/and as long as they are locked/all your revolution remains/only a prison mutiny/to be put down/by corrupted fellow-prisoners” (Weiss, page 99).

As we will see in this film, the men who would make revolution (Paul, Robert, the blacks on the train) will “be put down/by corrupted fellow-prisoners” (the women with pistols, as well as the girls in Paul’s ménage à quatre, as I speculate is what really happens to him at the end of the film.)

Paul’s conversation with Madeleine is interrupted by a fight between a man and his wife. The woman leaves the restaurant in a huff, but the man tries to take their child from her, so she stops him by getting a pistol from her purse and shooting him outside.

This act of violence symbolically sets the tone for another important theme in the film: feminist rebellion against male authority. To a great extent, Masculin féminin is thus titled as an expression of the battle of the sexes, much more so than as an expression of the sexual relationship between them. The wife’s gun, just like that of the racist white woman with the two black men on the train, is a symbolic phallus, her taking of power into her own hands, a power that is normally seen as men’s.

In the next scene, Paul has left the restaurant and gone to a smaller cafe where he meets up with Robert, who says they’re on strike at the newspaper where he works.

A man enters the cafe and asks a lady working there where the stadium is; she tells him where, and he leaves. Then Paul gets up from the table where he’s been sitting with Robert, and he asks the lady the same question. Robert asks him what he was doing by asking the same question, and Paul says he was putting himself in that other man’s shoes…and that it was all for nothing.

Paul’s spontaneous…and “pointless”…imitation of the visiting man is another example of how severe alienation is in his life, that he can’t bring himself to empathize with others, to put himself in their shoes. For Paul, to do so is at best an empty charade; this inability to feel genuine empathy for others will not only poison his budding relationship with Madeleine, but will also prove how pointless all of his leftist activism is. (Recall in this connection what Che once said about the true revolutionary and love.)

Indeed, just after this imitative asking about the stadium, Robert goes over to the table of a lady whose breasts he admires, and he asks her for some sugar. Paul then gets up and asks her for some sugar, too, and he agrees with Robert about the quality of her breasts. Now here is an instance when he can put himself in someone else’s shoes. If only he could put himself in the shoes of a woman who’d rather not have her breasts appraised by a lecherous young man.

Next, we see Paul working at a desk in his new job at the magazine. (A brief interruption of this scene is one with Madeleine and Elisabeth Choquet [Jobert], shopping in a department store. Madeleine is pregnant, and therefore this interpolation seems to be sometime after the end of the events of the film, for we can safely assume she is having Paul’s baby.) He leaves his desk to go talk with Madeleine about going out with her.

She insists that she never agreed to go out with him, and he calls her a liar. During this conversation, we get alternating shots of the two, each with just one of them while both of them exchange words. Each of these shots carries on for a while before switching to one of the other character; we get this instead of the more usual quick switching back and forth of them when it’s either’s turn to speak. The effect of each long shot of one person is to make both of them seem mutually isolated, rather than together, during the conversation. This isolation thus reinforces the theme of alienation.

When she asks him why he wants to go out with her, he answers by complimenting her on her appearance; he does so, however, with a rather cool expression on his face, as though his words are insincere, just him feeding her lines. His eyes also seem to be bordering on looking at her obsessively, like a stalker. She wonders if, by taking her out, he means to take her to bed. He responds to her question with a disquietingly long pause and a cool stare; in fact, instead of directly stating his intent, he later admits that he’d like to sleep with her.

He also admits he likes to go out with girls from time to time, girls like Madeleine. He admits to having been with prostitutes, though he says he doesn’t like being with them because of a lack of warmth or feeling. This is an odd comment to make from a young man who is pursuing Madeleine without much of any warmth or feeling.

He asks her if she’s going out with a man that night, a man he’s seen her with before, a very tall and presumably desirable man. Paul’s question suggests the beginnings of the film’s theme of jealousy, something to be developed further when he’s in the ménage à quatre with her, Catherine, and Elisabeth. He asks what she’s thinking when she looks him in the eye; she says, “Nothing.”

Next, she has a question for him: what, for him, is the centre of the world? He finds her question surprising, but his honest answer would help her to gauge the extent to which he is narcissistic. His answer is “Love,” which hardly sounds honest. She imagines–and quite correctly, as we’ll gradually learn over the course of the movie–that he’d say, in all honesty, that he considers himself to be the centre. He hesitates again when she asks if he thinks her supposition of his honest answer is strange. He simply thinks it’s natural to see, hear, and think of things primarily from his own perspective, but she means more than that.

This scene is one of many cinéma vérité-style interviews in the film of characters coolly asking each other questions that the one being asked finds strange, surprising, or discomfiting. The emotional disconnect that these questions cause, and are caused by, reinforces the sense of alienation between the interviewer and interviewee.

The fourth segment is introduced with the sound of a gunshot heard many times throughout the film. As a reminder of the opening scene with the woman in the restaurant shooting the man, that gunshot reinforces the theme of woman’s violent rebellion against the oppressive men in her life, a necessity that our two brocialists don’t understand.

We see the two young men walking together outside, carrying cans of paint. Paul, in a voiceover, comments on the changing times of the mid-Sixties. He speaks of James Bond and the Vietnam War, two indicators of the Cold War, in pop culture and historic form. He also mentions the hopes of the French left with the upcoming elections; any real communist, however, would reserve hope for revolutions, not for elections.

The boys meet up with Madeleine, who introduces her two roommates to them. Robert fancies Catherine (Duport) in particular, though the feeling is by no means mutual.

During segment “4A,” Paul and Robert, still with their paint, encounter a US Army car, the driver of which is distracted by Paul as Robert paints “Peace in Vietnam” along the passenger’s side of it. When the car is driven away, Paul and Robert chant, “US, go home!” Once again, we see how puerile and ineffective their would-be anti-imperialism is.

The next segment, introduced with another gunshot sound, begins with a voiceover of Madeleine while we see a train go by on an overpass. Paul’s relationship with her is getting more and more physical; Elisabeth, who it’s implied has lesbian feelings for her, is getting jealous. Madeleine is happy to have Paul’s love, but she hopes he won’t be a pest; this hope of hers ties in with both the train and the gunshot sound, as we’ll discover by the end of the film, as with the upcoming scene in the train with the two blacks in their conversation with the racist white woman.

At night, we see Paul leaving a building (Madeleine’s apartment building?) through the front doors of a store. He’s staring at the camera as if we were extras in the film; then he gets on the train. He sits with Robert.

They overhear, across from them on the train, a conversation between that white woman and the two black men that I mentioned above. This conversation is, in fact, an extremely abbreviated version of Dutchman, a short play by Amiri Baraka (then known as Leroi Jones). Here is a link to the play, and here is a link to a British made-for-TV movie of it, with Al Freeman Jr. playing Clay, and Shirley Knight as Lula.

The white woman making racist generalizations about “niggers” is of course Godard’s equivalent of Lula, and the black man with the hat parallels Clay; the other black man, in the white coat and sitting next to “Lula,” represents the young black man at the end of Baraka’s play, with a book in his hands, Lula’s next victim.

Naturally offended by the racist attitude of “Lula,” “Clay” discusses how white people love the music of Bessie Smith, yet they don’t understand what she’s really singing about. She’s actually saying, “Here’s my big, fat black ass…telling you to fuck off.” (Or, as she says in Dutchman, “Kiss my black ass.”

Next, “Clay” mentions Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, again whom his white fans don’t understand. Bird, like Bessie Smith, would kill all white people, except their music expresses their anger instead. Now, in the play, Lula stabs Clay with a knife; in Godard’s film, however, “Lula” shoots “Clay” with a pistol, that recurring phallic motif of women’s liberation, except that here, the gun is an instrument not of feminism, but of white supremacy.

So this segment, too, reinforces the theme of alienation, which ruins the hopes of proletarian revolution by diverting one’s rage from the ruling class and, instead, redirecting it against one’s fellow proletarians. Class antagonism is obscured by racial hatred, or hatred between the sexes.

In the next segment, Catherine and Elisabeth discuss which parts of the body reflect the essence of sexuality. For Elisabeth, it’s the genitals; for Catherine, it’s the skin. The touch of the skin, for Catherine, is the basis of human connection. Elisabeth wonders if such connection can be made with the eyes. In any case, little real connection occurs in this film.

The next segment shows Paul and Madeleine enter a restaurant. He wants to propose to her, but several things frustrate his attempt to tell her. Firstly, she has little time. Secondly, they sit at a table close to where two men are reading aloud an erotic story whose objectification of a woman is making Paul and Madeleine most uncomfortable. Finally, they move to another table, where they overhear a man telling a woman his unhappy story of his wife’s death and his need to start his life all over…again, something not easy to hear when a man is trying to propose.

Madeleine’s time has run out, and she must go, pressing Paul to blurt out his proposal in an awkward hurry. She says they can discuss it later, and leaves. Once again, an attempt at human connection is thwarted by the many symptoms of an alienating society.

As she’s leaving the restaurant, we hear one of her songs, “Laisse Moi,” in which she sings–it would seem, to Paul, “Let me go on just being me.” She would just be friends with him, and wishes he would leave her alone so she could be herself, as the lyrics tell us. It’s significant that he has slight regard for her music, since it expresses feelings he refuses to acknowledge.

As the song continues playing, we see Paul being the pest that Madeleine fears he will become. In her home with Catherine, she is reading a magazine that Paul grabs from her and throws back at her.

Just before and after this shot, we see shots of middle-aged Frenchwomen (mostly) either crossing the street of a shopping area, or entering and exiting a department store. Amidst all of the alienation in human relationships, there is the capitalist spectacle of consumerism. The desire to buy things has largely replaced the wish to be with people.

We hear Madeleine’s song again as she’s dancing with Elisabeth and others in a club, though Paul isn’t interested in dancing. Next, we see Paul, Madeleine, and Elisabeth buying some drinks, but the girls are annoyed with him and leave him alone to pay. A young prostitute offers to sell him a private moment in a photo booth, but he doesn’t have enough money to pay to touch her breasts. He leaves her abruptly in a huff.

Next, he goes into a neighboring booth to record himself telling her, in an attempt at romantic, poetic language, how much he wants to spend the rest of his life with her. This romanticism, just after considering using a prostitute and brushing her off so rudely!

Another of Madeleine’s songs, “Tu M’as Trop Menti,” is heard while Paul plays bowling in a small arcade. She sings, again, as if to him, that she has heard too many of his lies to believe him anymore. He approaches a man playing pinball; bizarrely, the man pulls out a knife and threatens Paul with it before stabbing himself in the gut. When you cannot project the pain of your own alienation onto others, it eats you up inside.

We see Madeleine and Elisabeth walking along the street at night among other window shoppers, this after having left Paul to pay for the drinks. Again, we see consumerism replacing healthy relationships.

Paul enters a laundromat and meets Robert there. Oddly, instead of telling Robert about the surely traumatizing experience he just had with the man with the knife, Paul tells him about men following him. These men each apologized for having scared Paul. It’s as if Paul is processing the trauma of the man with the knife by making it seem less severe, just men following him.

Robert is reading a newspaper article about Bob Dylan, whom he calls a “Vietnik,” which is a portmanteau of Vietnam and beatnik. Such a juxtaposition of ideas, like “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” reflects another theme of this film: the dialectical relationship between the socialist ideal and all that which vitiates the realization of that ideal.

Ho Chi Minh‘s Vietnam, like Marx, represents the socialist ideal, while the beatniks whom Dylan represents (and by extension, the hippies and modern-day liberals who have come since the Dylan of the mid-sixties), and the corrosiveness of popular soft-drinks like Coke, represent the vitiating of that ideal, just as ‘brocialism’ does. Capitalist South Vietnam and liberal opportunism (which includes the progressive posturing of beatniks and hippies) were and are similarly corrosive…in a metaphorical sense.

Reading the Dylan article, Paul sings of Hitler, Stalin, and Johnson having only one thing to do: “kill ’em.” The equating of these three most dissimilar men is a typical tactic of today’s political establishment, though the liberals keep propping up the political party that gave us LBJ, who helped escalate the Vietnam War, as if it were the only one worth considering.

Paul also complains to Robert about his woman problems; he contemplates dumping Madeleine, even just after saying he wants to marry her. He also hopes to move in with her after being kicked out of his own place. He of course will move in with her, enflaming Elisabeth’s jealousy.

Robert still likes Catherine, who still doesn’t like him. He once asked her about her bra size, and she slapped him hard. Just then, a woman enters the laundromat and walks by the two seated young men, and true to their nature, they loudly appraise her breasts favourably. Paul has Robert stick out his finger, and Paul makes his hand into a yoni, then the two hands jokingly simulate sex. Paul jokes crudely, but he’s unhappy because of his faltering relationship with Madeleine. Men often don’t realize that their addiction to lewdness stems from sadness.

Robert notes that in the word masculin are two hidden words: masque and cul (“mask” and “ass”). In féminin, however, there is nothing. One is reminded of the Renaissance-era slang use of nothing, or “no thing,” or “an O-thing,” to mean vagina. We’re also reminded of how Madeleine looked into Paul’s eyes and felt…nothing. Paul frowns upon hearing Robert say “nothing.” Could this “nothing” be because of the masculine use of social masks in a quest for the feminine “no thing” and ass? Is this the true meaning of the title Masculin féminin?

In the seventh segment, we see Madeleine and Elisabeth in a cafe while Paul, in voiceover, talks of his sadness. The jealousy felt between him and Elisabeth over Madeleine (recall the implied lesbian relationship between the two girls) is the basis of the tension in the film. Jealousy is a narcissistic trait, with its origin in the Oedipal relationship with one’s parents: we would selfishly hog the loved parent to ourselves while shoving the hated parent away. As we get older, we transfer the love/hate relationship with our parents onto new people we meet, as Paul and Elisabeth have done onto pretty Madeleine. They would each hog her to themselves while shoving the other away.

A female voice (Elisabeth’s?) predicts a future sex toy that will give the user perfect satisfaction. Madeleine in a voiceover says that if we, the commodity-addicted consumers, would have our TVs and cars, we would be delivered from freedom. Who needs freedom in the capitalist world when you can simply buy stuff?

Next, we see Paul and Catherine at the dinner table at home. He has moved in, and he wonders, in an implied tone of jealousy, “Where the hell are they?”, that is, where are Madeleine and Elisabeth (“Qu’est-ce qu’elles foutent?” or, “What the fuck are they doing?”). The two girls come home soon after.

Madeleine speaks of how her music is doing on the charts in Japan: she’s trailing behind the Beatles, France Gall, and Bob Dylan. Paul, apparently annoyed with her success, reads from a blurb in a magazine on her, reading in an affectedly overly-enthusiastic way, saying the words with frantic speed. Now she is annoyed with his making fun of her.

Indicating his continued lack of interest in Madeleine’s music, he puts on a record of classical music and listens, rapt. Madeleine and Elisabeth shower together, giggling [!]. The two of them go to bed, but with Paul lying in between. Elisabeth is reading a book with her nose clearly out of joint as Paul and Madeleine lie close together, touching each other.

After this, Paul sees Catherine playing with a miniature model of a guillotine. She has the figurine of a man whose head is to be put in. She asks Paul if he’s ever heard of the Marquis de Sade, who of course was much involved with the French Revolution, which in turn was of course notorious for its use of the guillotine.

As she puts the figurine’s head in the guillotine, we hear a fiery, dramatic speech in voiceover, one addressing Mitterrand, and mentioning the dethroning of twenty kings for the sake of liberty. Again, we have the ideal of revolution juxtaposed with a left-wing leader who would, in time, prove to disappoint. (Mitterrand wouldn’t have been explicitly known as a disappointment until the 1980s, but any Marxist worth his salt–like Godard–would have already known in the 60s not to trust the results of mainstream voting.)

Paul will come to dislike his job at the magazine, and he’ll quit, soon to find a job interviewing and polling people for IFOP. We see an interview he has with a girl named Elsa, a friend of Madeleine’s. The whole time, we see only Elsa, hearing Paul’s questions and her answers. As with the other interview-like dialogues occurring before and after this “Dialogue With a Consumer Product,” there is a sense of alienating disconnect between man and woman here, reflected in seeing only her face and never his, instead of the camera going back and forth between speakers.

He asks her a number of questions concerning politics and other subjects she feels unqualified to answer, and therefore questions that make her feel awkward. He often interrupts her when she answers. It’s as if he were trying to impose his ideology on a girl who clearly prefers the liberal democracy of the US to socialism. We socialists won’t win people over to our cause with Paul’s tactics.

Outside the room they’re having the interview in, we hear, from time to time, the giggling of girls (Madeleine? Catherine? Elisabeth?). The implication is that women live much happier lives without pests like Paul around.

In the ninth segment, we see Paul playing pinball in a restaurant; Elisabeth is there, too, using the phone. (We also hear another of Madeleine’s songs, “Si Tu Gagnes Au Flipper.“) He rudely calls out to her to sit with him and eat. As they’re eating, she mentions a man that Madeleine has been with, enflaming Paul’s jealousy, something it’s safe to assume that Elisabeth is trying to do. Madeleine will join them soon.

During his chat with Elisabeth, we see included in the shot a German man sitting right next to Paul, though he’s of course not at all involved in the conversation. This man will later sit at a booth with a German-hating prostitute who Madeleine recognizes as the same woman who shot her husband at the beginning of the film.

The alienation is swelling now.

The German tells the prostitute that he dissociates himself from his country’s Nazi past. (Actually, it was the East Germans who successfully dissociated themselves from it), since she hates the Germans for what they did to her parents in the concentration camps.

Next, Elisabeth notices a man talking to Brigitte Bardot about some lines she is to recite, lines he feels she’s been saying too slowly. His criticisms tie in with the theme of alienation in how we often communicate poorly. We saw this in Paul’s interview of Elsa for the IFOP, and Paul himself, by the end of the film, realizes the error of his questioning methods during those interviews.

After this scene, we see Paul, Madeleine, Elisabeth, and Catherine go to the movies to see a Swedish film about a woman abused by her man (It seems to be Godard parodying Ingmar Bergman‘s The Silence.). We hear “Comment le Revoir,” another of Madeleine’s pop songs playing as the usher helps the four find their seats.

Elisabeth doesn’t like Paul sitting next to Madeleine, for obvious reasons, so she puts herself between Madeleine and him, angering him. He also changes seats, but not sitting on the other side of Madeleine in Elisabeth’s original seat–he sits on the other side of Catherine instead, to spite Madeleine for her acceptance of Elisabeth at her side.

The film they’ve come to see begins: we see the dominant man going after his woman outside on the winter streets, to grab her and control her. Later, we’ll see them in their apartment.

Paul needs to use the washroom, but in there, he finds two gay men kissing in one of the toilet stalls. Paul’s homophobic disgust at them is presumably mainly for the usual reason, but these two male lovers probably also remind him of a certain pair of female lovers. (Incidentally, we will soon see Elisabeth’s hand stroking Madeleine’s hair as they watch the movie.)

Paul has little interest in it, but he goes out and complains to the projectionist about the format of the film (e.g., its aspect ratio, etc.; they are all, in Paul’s opinion, not acceptable). The point is that he’s so disconnected from human communication that he focuses more on the technical aspects of the film than its expression of one of the fundamental problems of male/female relations: the abusive dominance of one over the other. This oversight of Paul’s also reflects his own refusal to acknowledge his disrespectful attitude towards women.

The brutish man in the film, who typically grunts his commands at the woman and makes her perform sexual acts on him, is quite the animal. Indeed, he looks at himself in the mirror, seeing it distort his face as if to tell him that he truly is bestial. He pouts at what he sees. Soon after, we see him kissing the woman in front of the mirror, holding her by the hair to control her. One imagines him pleased to see this in the reflection, his Lacanian ideal-I as a powerful man in the specular image.

Paul frowns as he watches the film, with the abusive man making the woman, it would appear, perform fellatio on him. Paul the idealist wants to see romanticized images of men and women on the screen (much as how the abusive man wants to see himself in the mirror as a desirable lover, rather than as a controlling man), not the unsettling reality of relations between the sexes as seen in the film…or as seen in Paul’s own actual relations with women.

The twelfth segment is introduced with the gunshot sound again. At home, Catherine and Robert are having a conversation that parallels the one between Paul and Madeleine when he was asking her to go out with him. Robert, however, is much less successful with Catherine, of whom he can’t take the hint that she doesn’t like him. Again, we usually only see the face of the one, or that of the other, for long stretches of the conversation, reinforcing the sense of mutual alienation.

She’s eating an apple, like Eve with the forbidden fruit (or like Lula and her apples while aggressively coming on to Clay in Dutchman–links above): does her rejection of Robert at all compare with the ruin of Adam, or of Clay? In any case, we see in all these scenes more of the tensions between the sexes, the kind that ruin all possibility of proletarian solidarity.

Catherine asks Robert if he has ever been with prostitutes, as Madeleine asked of Paul; Robert admits to it with a smile, making him all the less attractive to Catherine. He asks her a number of personal questions she feels are none of his business. He speaks of his plans to bring about “a complete revolution,” yet he’s so charmless that he can even connect with a girl like her. The sense of mutual alienation between them is such that, even in those shots that include both of them, his head is obscured by the door of a cupboard (they’re in her kitchen), a symbolic expression of that estrangement.

He’s jealous because he thinks she’s in love with Paul, which she isn’t–she just doesn’t like Robert. She notes at the start of their conversation how difficult it is for him to talk: this inability to communicate is, with jealousy, one of the main themes of this film. We hear Madeleine’s song, “Sois Gentil” during this chat: it’s as if she’s telling Robert to be more of a gentleman on Catherine’s behalf.

His chatting with her about politics is as awkward as it was between Paul and Elsa. Interrupting their chat, ever so briefly, is another shot of women shopping in a department store, another iteration of the theme of consumerism trumping human connection. As we can see, revolution is not possible in such an alienating society that prefers commodities to community. Small wonder this film is “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola,” stated in a famous inter-title with the gunshot sound to introduce the next segment.

Paul and Catherine walk down the street. A man borrows Paul’s matches without giving them back, but using them to immolate himself as a protest against the Vietnam War. One is reminded of the Buddhist monk in South Vietnam who did the same thing a few years before this film. If only Paul had the strength of character to protest the war in such a brave way.

Paul and Catherine visit the recording studio where Madeleine is recording “D’Abord Dis Moi Ton Nom.” Paul, still with no interest in or respect for her music, walks right into the recording area, as if her talking to her narcissistic boyfriend were more important than her art.

Paul, Catherine, and Madeleine go outside, where a music journalist asks her a few questions. She mentions loving Pepsi–once again, such commodities as cola get in the way of Marxist revolution.

In the next segment, we hear Paul speaking in voiceover, acknowledging how misguided his questions for the IFOP polling have been. This admitting of bad communication will be too late, though, for he will soon die. During his speaking of his need to change his interviewing style, we see lots of shoppers on the streets, another juxtaposition of the failure to communicate with a fetishizing of commodities.

In the fifteenth and final segment, also…and most significantly…introduced with the gunshot sound, we see Catherine and Madeleine in a police station telling the officer there how Paul died, him having fallen from a window of his recently purchased apartment in a high rise. The girls insist his death must have been an accident rather than a suicide. When Catherine says it was “a stupid accident,” she looks down and away from the officer, suggesting she’s lying.

Significantly, I believe, Elisabeth isn’t there to talk to the officer, but we learn that, while Paul wanted Madeleine to move in to his new place, she wanted Elisabeth to move in with them, too, which of course jealous Paul would never have accepted. There was fighting, then the “accident.” I don’t believe he killed himself in heartbreak over learning of his woman’s lesbian relationship with Elisabeth, which they, having all lived together for so long, couldn’t have kept secret from him for so long. He must have already known for at least quite a while, and he and Elisabeth were competing for Madeleine, which finally came to a head.

I believe the girls are covering up how jealous, lesbian Elisabeth actually pushed Paul off the building (it fits in with the theme of women killing men that has appeared in so many forms throughout the film). One can sense a trace of guilt in pregnant Madeleine’s eyes, especially since she’s contemplating…however hesitantly…getting an abortion.

The film ends with the word “féminin” shown on the screen, then with the gunshot sound and the “émin” removed to indicate “fin.” Indeed, the film ends with the women, who without the proper masculine support, won’t ever join in proletarian solidarity with them.

We’d kill a man, rather than go after The Man.

So Undeserving

In spite of how logically indefensible as the belief in a just world is, in spite of how high the evidence is piled against believing in such an absurdity, many people out there still believe in it.

The reasons for having such a belief range from the religious, or a notion of philosophical idealism (the mind, or soul, determines how the world is), that ‘God’ is watching over everything and therefore He in His infinite wisdom will set everything right sooner or later, to the emotional need to feel safe and comfortable in such a disordered and scary world. If I’m good, nothing bad will happen to me, and if it does, with a little patience, I’ll see the wrong turned to right.

If not, then I must have deserved the wrong.

Here is where belief in a just world is not only logically indefensible, but morally indefensible, too, for victim-blaming is about as despicable as despicable gets.

In a previous post, I wrote about how wrong it is to think it’s cowardly and weak to say that we aren’t where we want to be because of other people’s thwarting of us in some way. There may be individual instances when it’s nobody’s fault but our own, but one would be amazed to find out how often our misery is caused at least partly, if not wholly, by others.

Similarly, the individualist capitalism of our day all too often attributes the great successes of those in our billionaire class to their own individual talent, while saying little (if anything at all) about the many people who helped those fat cats get so fat. Little attention is given to the people who were stepped on as those billionaires made their ascent to success, too.

The idea that the global poor ‘deserve’ to be as they are in ‘God’s just world’ because they are ‘lazy’ and ‘stupid’ is itself an intellectually lazy–and therefore stupid idea. The poor work very hard because they have no choice but to do so…otherwise, they’d starve. If they seem ‘stupid’ to you, consider the fact that they typically don’t have the money to get a proper education.

That the rich supposedly deserve to own millions or billions of dollars, while paying minimal if any taxes, because they ‘work so hard’ is also a dubious argument. There are only twenty-four hours in a day: how much ‘hard work’ can be done in a day for someone like Jeff Bezos…justifiably…to make $321 million per day?

It’s elementary Marxism (a materialist philosophy, as opposed to the idealism of the just-world fallacy) to know that capital is accumulated through the exploitation of labour, that is, the overworking and underpaying of workers–the talent and hard work of the capitalist, however present they may be, are if anything, more of a detail than a central element of his success, which is typically being born into at least some degree of affluence. Consider, on the other hand, the slavish suffering of Amazon workers, who have to piss in bottles so as not to be late with deliveries, and so Jeff could go up into space in his cock-rocket.

So undeserving, on both sides.

Did so many get plunged into poverty, often even greater poverty, over the past two years because they were ‘lazy’ or ‘stupid,’ or was it because of ill-advised lockdown policies and the exploitation of the pandemic (whose danger many of us still insist has always been exaggerated) by the capitalist class, causing the wealth of men like Bezos and Gates to go through the roof?

So undeserving, on both sides.

So many of us have lost work, going from fully employed to underemployed or completely jobless, and facing the danger of no longer being able to pay our rent or other basic necessities. Is this our fault? Not at all. The capitalist class–with its crises of overproduction and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, problems we have known about and been able to foresee happening for decades if not centuries–are the ones to blame, as they are for the exacerbation of this problem with their exploiting of Covid as described in the paragraph before my refrain:

So undeserving, on both sides.

The capitalist class thrives, while the rest of us suffer. These economic problems have been further exacerbated by the backfiring sanctions on Russia, and the refusal to allow Europe to use Nordstream 1 and 2, just to kowtow to the US imperialists in their anti-Russian agenda, means Europeans will have to endure a winter without gas, or to buy the much more expensive American gas. This, even though Putin is willing to boost gas supplies to Europe after repairs (following sabotage that, in all likelihood, was caused by the US).

[These macrocosmic, global injustices have their parallel on the microcosmic level, in families and other social groups tainted with narcissistic abuse. The narc enlists flying monkeys and other enablers to assist in bullying and scapegoating the chosen victim, typically a highly-sensitive person who sees through the falsely altruistic veneer of the narc, calls him or her out for it, then suffers the consequences, being publicly shamed for merely telling the truth. Meanwhile, the narc continues to be admired and is never suspected.]

So undeserving, on both sides.

Now, we can see, as I observed in my post, The Toxic Family of Imperialism, how the global media celebrates political villains while scapegoating political victims, as is happening with the dangerously escalating war between Russia and Ukraine, one that–contrary to popular belief–was anything but “unprovoked.” Many of us have been trying to tell the uninformed and propagandized that Russia’s intervention had been thoroughly provoked for a period of eight years since a 2014 US-backed coup d’état replaced the democratically elected, pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych with a government and military that includes Russian-hating Neo-Nazis. They make up small percentages, but they’re politically very influential.

These Ukrainian fascists have been discriminating against, physically attacking, and killing ethnic Russians in the Donbass region for eight years. Putin has tried to establish peace negotiations, first with the thwarted Minsk Accords, then in April of this year (thwarted by an intervention by BoJo), and recently with the Zelenskyy and American governments, both of which have refused to talk to Putin. Meanwhile, everyone demonizes Putin for merely trying to protect his country.

Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian Nazis are celebrated and regarded as heroes, and the US and NATO are perceived as ‘defending freedom and democracy,’ while they use this ridiculous slur on their scapegoat: “Putler.”

So undeserving, on both sides.

As I’ve said in previous posts, I don’t regard Putin as any kind of political ideal. He’s a bourgeois, reactionary politician who assuredly has his own secret, ulterior motives for wanting Russian control over the newly-annexed, formerly Ukrainian territories. But I see no reason not to regard the referenda results, of the people living there who mostly voted to join Russia, as legitimate. (I don’t trust the Western media bias against the Russian referenda; the West refused to legitimize them before they even got the results, as they were biased against the Crimea referendum.)

A great many of the people living there are ethnic Russians, and most eastern Ukrainians speak Russian (a language the Ukrainian Nazis wanted to prevent them from speaking): why would they want to stay in a country unprotected against Russophobic fascists? In any case, whatever faults are to be found in Putin are minuscule compared to those of the US/NATO warmongers (who have military bases all over the world, and are stealing oil and wheat from Syria, of which they’re controlling a third), who are pushing us all to the brink of WWIII and nuclear annihilation…all because the American ruling class refuses to accept the emerging multipolar world.

None of us is deserving of being killed in a nuclear holocaust.

Now, some of you who have read my posts on what I call The Three Unities, those being the Unity of Space, of Time, and of Action, may be thinking that, as they read this little rant of mine, I’m being hypocritical and self-contradicting. My discussion of The Three Unities, as well as my post, Beyond the Pairs of Opposites, in no way necessitates a belief in a just world. I’m not saying that the ups and downs of life are somehow equalized, and therefore ‘just.’ On the contrary, I stressed that the evils of the world “are all unqualified evil.” Good can flow from those evils as a dialectical response to them (and through human effort), though it far too often doesn’t.

Our negative belief systems (e.g., the illusion of a separate ego, black-and-white thinking, capitalist apologetics, bigotry, etc.) cause our problems to a far greater extent than the external difficulties of life. My Three Unities are an attempt to remedy those bad beliefs, not to deny the existence of evil.

Indeed, the belief in a just world is one of those very negative beliefs. The paradox of such a belief is that it leads to less empathy, or to no empathy at all, for those who suffer (i.e., victim blaming). Granted, to be fair, such a belief doesn’t absolutely lead to no empathy or to victim-blaming, but it does tend toward such an attitude.

On the other side of the coin, acknowledgment of the many injustices of the world tends to prod people towards trying to right those wrongs…again, I mean this as a tendency, allowing for many exceptions.

So, what should we think about the idea of a ‘just world’? It shouldn’t be conceived as already existing; it should rather be something to strive for, with all our hearts.

Don’t see a just world…make a just world!