Analysis of ‘It,’ Part II

Here’s a link to Part I, if you haven’t seen it yet.

VI: Derry: the First Interlude

As Mike has written in his notes about Derry, “Can an entire city be haunted?” (page 189, King‘s emphasis) The entire city of Derry can be seen to symbolize the mind, a kind of collective mind, peopled with a host of characters who could thus represent everything from Melanie Klein‘s internal objects, both good and bad, to Carl Jung‘s archetypes.

The surface world of the town, from the ground up, would represent consciousness, where all is sunny and sweet. The underground, the sewers, and the cellars of each house, as I mentioned in Part I, would represent the unconscious mind. It, that is, Pennywise, would thus personify the Collective Shadow, normally repressed and dormant for about 27 years at a time, then let loose for about a year. One tries one’s best to repress, hide, and forget about trauma, but it eventually will out all the same.

The whole adventure that the Losers go through, once as kids in the late 1950s, and again as adults in the mid-1980s, can be seen as allegorical of what Jungians call Shadow work. In order to heal from trauma in a lasting way, one must face one’s traumas, and this is what we see the Losers doing (in an allegorical sense), first only partially achieving it as kids, then thoroughly achieving it as adults in their final confrontation with Pennywise.

Though confronting one’s Shadow, where all the dark traumas of the unconscious reside, is necessary for the sake of healing, it’s also dangerous. Jung himself, in his explorations of his own unconscious through Active Imagination, Shadow work, and other methods of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of his mind, brought himself dangerously close to a total psychotic breakdown.

In their final confrontation with It, Eddie dies; the surviving Losers aren’t even able to carry his body out from the underground. What’s more, this confrontation happens during a huge storm, the worst in Maine’s history, with rains reminding us of the Great Flood and that rainstorm at the beginning of the novel, an apocalyptic storm that causes the downtown area of Derry to collapse. This collapsing of downtown Derry, which is a merging together of the upper and lower worlds, is symbolic of that necessary but dangerous integration of the conscious and unconscious through Shadow work.

VII: Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

As Ben sits on his airplane flight to Derry, “as drunk as a lord,” according to the stewardess observing him (page 211), he finds the old memories finally starting to come back to him. In his state of drunkenness, as well as his hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness, he finds “the wall between past and present disappear[ing]” (page 215). He is entering a world of non-differentiation, the traumatic Real, as Lacan would have called it.

It is fitting that Ben is drunk and falling asleep as he is starting to get these old memories back. As Nietzsche noted in The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus, the god of wine, chaos, irrationality, emotion, and disorder (as opposed to Apollo as god of logic, clarity, the sun, and the principle of individuation), is also a god of unity, of non-differentiation. So drunk Ben, between wakefulness and sleep, is also experiencing a blur between the past and the present, the trauma of non-differentiation.

This is also rather like the non-differentiation of the Great Flood as paralleled in the rainstorms at the beginning and climax of the novel, when the waters above meet the waters below, recreating the primordial Chaos, tohu wa-bohu, in chapter one of Genesis.

Ben’s memories of being a kid at school, when he was fat and therefore an easy target of bullies like Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss, were also a disordered mix of good and bad, because it was also then that he had his crush on Beverly (pages 216-217). He demonstrated his poetic talent by writing his verse celebrating her beautiful, fiery red hair…”winter fire,/January embers” (page 246).

His trip down memory lane is compared to the adventures of the time-traveller in HG Wells‘s classic story; in particular, we’re reminded of “the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night” (page 215). This hellish, subterranean world is easily associated with the underground of Derry: its sewers, cellars, and representation of the unconscious and the Shadow, personified by that ultimate Morlock, Pennywise.

Henry is mad at Ben for not letting him copy his test answers in class. Henry likes to call overweight Ben “Tits” (page 252). We soon learn that Henry is much worse than your average bully: he’s a violent psychopath, a fact proven when he takes out a knife, has Belch and Victor hold Ben, then digs the blade into Ben’s gut.

That cutting into Ben’s flesh, apart from the obvious pain and terror it causes the boy, is a violation of the boundaries between self and other, that traumatic non-differentiation of the Real, of Dionysus.

It’s significant that Ben escapes Henry and his gang by falling through the fence separating the street they’re all on and the Barrens, which is a stretch of scrub land next to Derry, a swampy area where the sewers are. The Barrens, therefore, can also be symbolically linked with the unconscious…perhaps with the preconscious, since, though lower, it’s still outside. Ben’s breaking through the fence is also representative of a non-differentiation between consciousness and unconsciousness.

VIII: Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (1)

Just as Ben has been flying in a plane on the way back to Derry, going from utter oblivion to flashbacks of childhood memories, so has Bill. And just as Mike’s writing about Derry has been a form of therapy for him, so has Bill’s writing of horror novels been a form of writing therapy for him.

All the stories he’s written, all the novels–they came from Derry, Bill muses (page 283). They came from that summer, when George died. They came from his trauma. His interviewers would ask him where he got all of his ideas from, and he’s answered by speaking of the inspiration coming from his unconscious…yet he’s doubted, more and more as the years go by, if there ever was such a thing as an unconscious (page 284). This unbelief in the unconscious comes from his total forgetting of Derry.

Eventually, though, a memory starts coming back, one of “beating the devil.” (page 285) The unconscious, be it a Freudian or Jungian version of it, doesn’t come back to Bill as a subterranean world of Morlocks, as it has for Ben; it’s just Derry. Bill’s focus on the conscious world of Derry is his resistance against confronting the unconscious.

Bill remembers his old bicycle from his childhood, named Silver, after the Lone Ranger’s horse. Bill is indeed a hero on that bike, beating the devil on it as he rides dangerously fast on it to save a life, be it Eddie’s, when he has to race off on it to get the asthmatic’s medicine, or be it Audra‘s at the end of the novel, when he races on the bike with her, risking a crash for both of them, to get her to snap out of her catatonia.

Beating the devil is just like beating Pennywise. Fittingly, as Bill rides the bike, he imitates the Lone Ranger, calling out, “Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY!” (page 288) His risk of death, on both occasions on that bike, brings him to the brink of hell, then past it, coming around to salvation in heaven, as it were, for Eddie’s and Audra’s sakes. Bill is thus like a Christ figure, harrowing hell, then causing a resurrection of sorts (Audra’s), and ascending to a metaphorical heaven. In this way, he’s beaten the devil.

Bill wants to help Eddie because he failed to help his little brother. First, he helps Eddie with a nosebleed he gets after an altercation with Henry’s gang; Bill helps Eddie the way Bill’s mom used to help Georgie when he had nosebleeds (page 292). And when Eddie’s aspirator is empty, Bill rides off to the drugstore for his medicines…which, as it turns out, is mere tap-water (page 302).

When Bill goes off to get the ‘medicine,’ Ben stays with Eddie in the Barrens, where he’s met the two just after escaping Henry’s gang and getting the knife cut in his gut. After Bill returns with the ‘medicine’ for Eddie and rides off, Eddie tells Ben about the murder of Georgie, that it happened “right after the big flood” (page 311).

Eddie, as a double of Georgie, dies when the second “big flood” happens, and not too long after that, adult Bill rides dangerously on his bike for Audra’s sake, beating the devil once again.

Bill may have saved Eddie in the Barrens, but the boy cannot get over having failed to protect his little brother, and the night of that very day in the Barrens, when Bill is back home, he has a terrible fright reminding him of his guilt over George.

He remembers when Georgie was alive, and the two boys were arguing in front of the TV over who got to eat the popcorn (page 313). This kind of sibling jealousy and rivalry would have been part of the basis for Bill’s unconscious wish to get rid of his little brother, an unconscious wish that, in turn, has become Bill’s guilt now that George is really dead.

Bill goes into George’s bedroom and takes out an old photo album with pictures of the little boy in it. A shocking thing happens, something that has now happened a second time, the first time being the previous December, after which Georgie was killed.

Bill has been looking at a picture of George “fixedly for some time” (page 319). He’s about to close the photo album when he sees Georgie roll his eyes in the picture, then turn them up to look in Bill’s eyes. Then, with “a horrid leer,” Georgie winks his right eye at Bill (page 320). Apart from the obvious supernatural aspect, Bill’s fear stems from his guilt regarding the original wish-fulfillment of a dead, still, smiling Georgie, changing into a living, moving, vengeful little brother.

IX: One of the Missing: A Tale from the Summer of ’58

We learn of a ten-year-old boy named Edward Corcoran, who went missing back in the summer of 1958. He and his four-year-old brother, Dorsey, were abused by their stepfather, Richard P. Macklin, who actually beat Dorsey to death with a hammer, though he lied about it, claiming the little boy died of a fall from the top of a ladder. (Chapter 6)

Edward’s teacher reported seeing bruises all over his body, and she was so concerned for him that when she heard that he’d gone missing, she prayed every night that he’d run away from home, sick and tired of his stepfather’s abuse, rather than killed from another of Macklin’s beatings.

Though Macklin was suspected in the disappearance of Edward, we learn that It really killed the boy, It in the form of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, though originally appearing in the form of Dorsey (pages 336-341). Still, it could be argued that Macklin indirectly killed Edward, since his repeated physical abuse of the boy drove him to run away from home, thus exposing him to the danger of It. Besides, It–as the personification of trauma throughout the novel–is the killer of the boy only insofar as trauma killed him, the trauma inflicted on him by his raging stepfather.

Family abuse, of course, isn’t limited to the Corcoran family. As we know, Beverly suffered it from her own father, who is incorrectly referred to as her stepfather on page 330–a fortuitous error in that it helps to link the Corcoran boys to her through the theme of family abuse.

Edward Corcoran’s death is further linked thematically with the Losers’ experiences on pages 330 and 331 by a kind of synchronicity. On June 19th–though Macklin had nothing at all to do with the boy’s death (in the literal, physical sense, of course)–he died when Ben was watching TV with his mom, Eddie Kaspbarak’s mom was neurotically worrying about her boy possibly catching “phantom fever,” Bev’s “stepfather” [sic] kicked her in the derrière and told her to dry the dishes, Mike “got yelled at by some high-school boys…not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers’s crazy father,” Richie was looking at pictures of half-naked girls in a magazine, and Bill was throwing the photo album across the room because Georgie’s photo winked at him.

All of the Losers “looked up at the exact moment Eddie Corcoran died…as if hearing some distant cry” (page 331). It, the creature, was behind this synchronicity, a synchronicity of shared trauma and abuse.

Mike couldn’t sleep on the night of the beginning of summer vacation, so soon after Corcoran’s death. He went out, rode his bike for a while, then parked it and walked to the Canal (pages 341-342). On the way, he found a pocket knife with the initials EC on the side. He also saw grooves in the grass leading to the Canal. “And there was blood.” (page 343)

The horror of these sights, where Corcoran died, brought back memories in Mike’s mind of a giant bird attacking him. We see how all of these traumas are thus interlinked.

It would be interesting to look at, compare, and contrast three mythical creatures in It. We’ve already looked a bit at the Turtle. There’s also the actual form if It as a giant spider. And now, we have the giant bird Mike confronted.

The first two giant animals, as representations of good and evil, have in common the fact that they crawl. This comparison suggests that It, the Satan of this cosmology to the Turtle’s God, is trying to do an evil emulation of good, is being parasitical to good. Satan is sometimes described as being an imitator of good, of wanting to be like Him.

“The prince of darkness is a gentleman,” Edgar says in King Lear. ” ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” Antonio says in The Merchant of Venice. And in Paradise Lost, Book IV, Satan says, “Evil, be thou my good.” Pennywise similarly starts off with friendly charm before killing Georgie; his crawling on spiders’ legs can thus be seen as an imitation of the Turtle’s crawling on its legs.

Now, the giant bird that Mike has to fend off is, of course, evil, and contrary to the first two giants that crawl, this one is way up in the sky. On the other hand, when Stan has to fight off It as a child, he uses nothing other than a book of birds to help him. Crawling creatures can be good or evil; flying creatures can also be good or evil. Dualities of this sort pervade It.

X: The Dam in the Barrens

As Eddie Kaspbrak is driving a Cadillac in Boston, on his way to Derry, he’s thinking about such things as the subways, bad places to go, like tunnels (page 373). Such subterranean places would remind him of the Derry sewers, the Barrens, and the dirty cellar of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, in one of the windows of which he, as a child, saw a leper.

Such underground places–like the realm of Ben’s Morlocks–are crawling with germs, the sources of all of Eddie’s fears. Indeed his very sickness is his fear, the poison of his childhood memories (page 373).

Eddie remembers the day, when they were all kids, that Ben, whom they’d all recently met, decided to build a dam in the Barrens. On this same day, Bill talks about his experience seeing Georgie wink at him in that photo. It’s a brave confession on Bill’s part, him risking ridicule and disbelief; but since Eddie, Ben, and Stan have had–and Richie in the not-too-distant-future will have–comparable supernatural frights, they all hear Bill with sympathetic ears.

Interestingly, when Ben decides to build the dam, using his already remarkable talents as an architect, he says, “We could flood out the whole Barrens if we wanted to.” (page 376) The dam’s stoppage of the river water doesn’t, of course, flood out the whole Barrens, but this choice of words is still significant in how it can be linked with the rainy day when Georgie died, as well as with the flooding and destruction of downtown Derry during the climax of the novel.

These associations with the Great Flood suggest the washing away of all evil and the ultimate defeat of Pennywise. Building the dam, stopping and thus controlling the waters of the Barrens, which are associated with the turbulent world of the unconscious and the Shadow, thus represents a conquering and controlling of the boys’ fear.

This day is also a great bonding moment for these Losers. The building of the dam is actually a rebuilding of a dam destroyed by Henry and his gang. Rebuilding it, and bonding with each other, is doubly therapeutic for the boys, as is the beginning of a discussion about It.

Since It personifies trauma, talking about It is a kind of talk therapy for healing trauma. When Bill can talk about his photo album and George’s wink, Eddie can find it easier to talk about the leper in the cellar of the house on Neibolt Street, Ben can talk about his close encounter with It, and Stan can talk about his scary experience.

Eddie uses one word to describe the moment when he knows it’s finally safe to talk about his traumatic experience: “Recognition.” (page 395) The boys are sharing a mutual validation of their trauma, and building the dam on the same day, after their bullies destroyed the first one, is well juxtaposed with this talk therapy, for they are all beginning to rebuild their lives as well as the dam–as new friends.

I mentioned earlier how duality pervades It, in the form of mixtures of good and bad: good and bad birds, good and bad crawlers. There is also good and bad in, on the one hand, experiencing trauma, and on the other, talking about trauma, releasing the pain, and bonding with friends as a result of the discussion of trauma.

Similarly, there’s the horror of Eddie’s seeing a leper crawling out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, and hearing him offer the boy “a blowjob for a quarter” (page 400). A blowjob in and of itself is a pleasant thing, but not given to a child by a leper! My point is that we see dualities of good and bad mashed together on many occasions in It.

Remember also that the Shadow is not always evil; it’s just the ego-dystonic aspects of our minds, the things we want to reject. These things are often evil, but sometimes they’re hidden talents we’re afraid to acknowledge in ourselves because acknowledging them might force us to rise up to challenges we’re afraid of facing. Eddie has to learn to accept the reality of germs and sickness, that using his immune system will strengthen him against sickness. Facing and defeating It will turn the Losers Club into the Winners Club…even if a few of them die trying.

Now that Bill has told his photo album story about George, Eddie can tell them all about the leper, Ben can tell them about seeing the clown in the form of the mummy, and Stan is about to tell them about his experience of It, but all of them are interrupted by Mr. Nell (page 412), a police officer who reprimands them for building the dam and making a mess of the river in the Barrens. The water that’s being dammed up is waste from the toilets and dirty, used sink water; it’s all a great congregation of germs that would make Eddie retch if he knew.

Part III is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part I

I: Introduction

It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King. The story is told in a kind of non-linear narrative, alternating between two time periods separated by a 27-year interim: the late 1950s, when the protagonists are kids, and the mid-1980s, when they are adults with established careers, many of them married.

King conceived of the story back in 1978, and he started work on it in 1981, finishing it in 1985. The titular antagonist was originally meant to be a troll as in “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” but inhabiting the city’s sewer system instead of living under a bridge.

It won the British Fantasy Award in 1987, and it was nominated for the Locus and World Fantasy Awards the same year. Two major adaptations of the novel have been made: a two-part TV miniseries in 1990 starred Tim Curry, Richard Thomas, John Ritter, Tim Reid, and Annette O’Toole; and two films–It and It Chapter Two–came out in 2017 and 2019 respectively, starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, and Bill Skarsgård, among many others.

As in many of King’s novels, novellas, and short stories, It is set in Maine (him being a native of Durham), in particular, in the fictional town of Derry, a place that seems pleasant and normal on the surface, but underneath (literally!), there are hidden evils. In the sewer system, and even in the cellar of the Denbrough house, there is the symbolism of hell, the unconscious, and Jung‘s Collective Shadow.

II: General Thoughts

It is a novel of such massive, epic scope that I cannot be expected to do justice to all of its oh, so many aspects, but I’ll deal with as much of it as I can, and I’m dividing it up into parts so that its admittedly tedious length can be bearable. The page numbers I’m using to quote or reference scenes are based on this edition.

I’ll start by mentioning the more obvious themes of the novel, including childhood trauma brought on by bullying, family abuse, and ethnic and racial prejudice. With this trauma comes repressed memory causing a total forgetting of all that happened in Derry, both when the protagonists (“the Losers Club“) were kids and immediately after having killed It once and for all. Connected to this forgetting is, in turn, the collective looking-the-other-way that the residents of Derry always do whenever something evil happens.

On another level, one hardly dealt with beyond brief nods to it in the two movies, and not dealt with at all in the TV miniseries, is the dualistic cosmology of It. While It, in Its typical form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, is the principle of darkness, evil, and chaos, the principle of light, good, and order is represented in the form of a giant turtle named Maturin, which was little doubt influenced by various myths about the world being supported on the back of a giant turtle.

So Maturin, having vomited out and thus created the universe, is like God to Pennywise’s Satan. Maturin would be maturing, putting away the childish things of clownish Pennywise, just as the Losers’ quest to defeat Pennywise and thus face their fears ridding themselves of their traumas, is their own putting away of childish things.

III: After the Flood (1957)

To keep the Biblical allusions coming, the story begins with a rainstorm in Derry, and in the neighbourhood where Bill and George Denbrough live, little Georgie wants to play with a paper boat–made by his big brother Bill–his little ark in the Great Flood. “By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks.” (page 4)

To finish making the paper boat for George, Bill-being too sick in bed with a fever to get it himself–wants George to go down to the cellar and get the paraffin. The cellar–which as I said above, is as symbolic of hell, the unconscious, and the Collective Shadow as is the sewage system–is terrifying to the little boy.

The smell of the cellar is awful, made worse by the flood (page 9)–recall the Great Flood allusion made above, and connect this all with the apocalyptic deluge ending of the novel. Down there, Georgie sees an old can of Turtle Wax; he stares at it in a daze for almost half a minute (pages 9 and 10). Naturally: in such a devilish dungeon, the frightened little boy would want to bond with Pennywise’s angelic opposite.

Though annoyed and impatient with his little brother’s fear of the cellar, Bill nonetheless loves him, and shows that love by making the paper boat as well as he can for little Georgie’s enjoyment. The little boy goes out in the rain in his raincoat with the boat, innocently unaware of how the Great Flood allusions are foreshadowing of his imminent, violent death.

When the paper boat slips into the storm drain, he’s so preoccupied with getting it back that he doesn’t seem anywhere near as scared of the dark underground as he was of the cellar. And instead of seeing the God-like turtle, he meets Satanic Pennywise, who like the Big Bad Wolf to Little Red Riding Hood, puts on the charm for Little Yellow Rain-Slicker. (Note in this connection that, in Charles Perrault‘s version of the children’s tale, she is eaten up by the Big Bad Wolf [symbolic of a child molester], and that’s the end of her–she simply dies, just like Georgie.)

In this iconic scene, which is probably the first that comes to mind when anyone thinks of It, just before Pennywise bites off Georgie’s arm and leaves him to bleed to death, he says, “Everything down here floats,” after saying, “when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too” (page 18). Everything floats like a balloon filled with air; every dead soul floats down in Hades, the air of its spirit wandering aimlessly and hopelessly.

The violent tearing-off of Georgie’s arm is a symbolic castration of the sort, given his age (six), that represents, in Lacanian terms, the traumatic shift from the comfort of the dyadic, Oedipal, mother-to-son relationship to one with the larger society, as personified by the intervention of a third party, the father. Properly understood, the Oedipus complex in its expanded sense is a universal, narcissistic trauma, in which the child must learn to give up the dyadic, one-on-one relationship with one parent (traditionally, the mother), a relationship in which the child wants to hog the one parent all to him- or herself, and the child must accept sharing this parent, as well as all other people, with the world.

This giving-up of the one parent who’s done everything for you to share him or her with others, who has been conceived as an extension of oneself, and going from other to Other, to use Lacanian terms, is too difficult for some to do, as Georgie’s death can be seen to symbolize (i.e., he leaves his house, goes out into society, and he gets killed). This stage in life is a shift from the dyadic, narcissistic Imaginary (represented by seeing oneself in a mirror, or looking in the loving eyes of one’s smiling mother, whose face is a metaphorical mirror) to the social, cultural, and linguistic norms of the Symbolic, the entering of people other than one’s Oedipally-desired parent into one’s life, forcing one to interact with many people.

This is a traumatic change in a child’s life. The difficulty of accepting the social world of the Symbolic, wit its shared language and customs, can result in a clumsy adjustment to it, as symbolized by Bill’s stammer. His trauma over his little brother’s death stems from guilt over having failed to protect Georgie, which in turn can be seen to have stemmed from an unconscious wish to remove Georgie, so Bill can have his mom and dad to himself.

This trauma of entering society, sharing those you love with others, and dealing with nasty people is dealt with and developed in many different forms throughout the novel. Bill is bullied for his stutter; Beverly Marsh is bullied for being a girl who hangs out with a bunch of boys (i.e., she’s slut-shamed); Stanley Uris, a Jew, has to deal with antisemitic prejudice; Mike Hanlon has to put up with, among other things, being called a “nigger”; Ben Hanscom as a kid is bullied for being fat; Eddie Kaspbrak is picked on for being weak, an asthmatic hypochondriac, and having an overprotective mother; and Richie Tozier is bullied for his loudmouthed antics and his often inappropriately-timed attempts at humour (being a “four-eyes” doesn’t help him, either).

IV: After the Festival (1984)

Another example of the nastiness of entering society, as opposed to staying only with the one you love, is when, in 1984, Adrian Mellon and his partner, Don Hagarty, are harassed by a group of homophobic punks, the situation escalating to Adrian’s murder, him being thrown off a bridge. While the group of punks clearly parallels Henry Bowers’s gang of bullies who terrorize the Losers in the late 1950s, with Adrian’s death is also the presence of Pennywise (pages 23-24).

The point is that, on the literal level of It, Pennywise is the killer, but on the symbolic level, he personifies trauma and the frequent inability to overcome that trauma. It’s especially difficult for little kids to do so, and that’s why Pennywise typically kills children. When King created It as appearing usually in the form of a clown, it was because he concluded that children fear clowns “more than anything else in the world.” It feeds on people’s fears.

One way we could think of calling the monster “It” is as a pun on id, that part of us that desires, wants, and craves, typically to the point that is socially unacceptable or wrong. It craves the kids as food, satisfying Its hunger on them.

Now, of course, to say that It is merely a personification of the id is a grotesque, even absurd oversimplification, since there’s obviously so much more to It than animalistic desire. Still, seeing “It” as a pun on id is helpful in that it orients us in the right direction as to understand what the monster in the sewers really symbolizes. The id is completely repressed and in the unconscious…not partially–fully. Those sewers are the unconscious. They represent repressed memory; this is why the Losers forget everything that happened in Derry when they were kids…all except Mike, who never left the town, and has worked there as a librarian right up to the 1980s part of the story.

So when It has finished Its 27-odd-year hibernation, It resumes Its preying on kids in the town, the way repressed traumas keep coming back to the surface in some form or another. No matter how hard we try to hold the traumas back, they keep resurfacing, coming back up from the dark, smelly sewers of our minds.

V: Six Phone Calls (1985)

And so, remembering the promise that all of the members of the Losers Club made when they were kids after defeating It in the late 1950s–that if It came back to terrorize Derry again–that they would all come back to Derry, too, and kill It once and for all, Mike starts calling up all of his old friends to tell them about the problem.

Even as adults, some people cannot handle facing their old trauma head on, so when Stan Uris receives his phone call from Mike, instead of packing his things and heading back to Derry to keep his promise, he goes into his bathroom ostensibly to take a bath, but gets razorblades, and “slits his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow” (page 76). With his blood, he uses his finger to write IT “on the blue tiles above the tub” (page 76).

Before Stan even receives the call from Mike, there is a long section describing how his life has been since the late 1950s, and sandwiched in between many of these events is a brief reference to those scary days, a kind of God-is-dead moment of despair, foreshadowing Stan’s suicide “The turtle couldn’t help us.” (page 62, King’s emphasis)

The Losers each have different ways of hanging onto their traumas. We’ve seen how Stan has hung onto his so much that he’d rather kill himself than face them again. Mike has hung onto his by being the only Loser to stay in Derry and to research the history of Pennywise; his writing down and journaling of events is his way of processing his traumas.

Bill processes his traumas by writing about them in the form of horror novels; he’s so focused on depicting the traumas vividly that he’s developed a talent at it and become a successful author, even married to a movie actress, Audra.

Other Losers have ways of hanging onto their traumas in a way best described through object relations theory, that is, how one’s early childhood relationships (e.g., with one’s parents) become repeated in later relationships. We see these repeated patterns in Eddie and Beverly.

Eddie’s mother is obese and overprotective of him, instilling an intense hypochondria and fear of germs in him. His choice of a wife, Myra, is similar in both her physicality and personality. Eddie “looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother.
“They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close.” (page 118)

Beverly’s father, Alvin Marsh, is abusive and controlling, always ‘worrying about her,’ and suspecting she’s been fooling around with boys. She ends up marrying Tom Rogan, also an abusive, controlling man. Eddie and Beverly continue in dysfunctional relationships because they know no other way to relate to people. Someone like Tom preys on emotionally vulnerable women like Beverly, and he was able to spot her vulnerabilities easily: “But she was weak…weak somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive.” (page 137)

Richie Tozier has always dealt with his trauma through his joking around, a defence mechanism for coping with the terror around him by psychologically running away from it and reaching the opposite, happy side. In this way, his humour is a kind of manic defence, an avoidance of pain and sadness by putting on a happy, excited front. Connected to this avoidance of reality through frivolity is his vast array of fake Voices, which are the wearing of a False Self to hide his True Self. Though not on a pathologically narcissistic level for Richie, this fakery of his is narcissism on a small scale, a defence against the psychological fragmentation that could result if his childhood traumas, exacerbated by Pennywise, were to push him over the edge.

When Mike phones Richie to come back to Derry, the latter is again doing one of his Voices, not one of the comical ones he does on the radio as a DJ, “but a warm, rich, confident Voice. An I’m-All-Right Voice. It sounded great, but it was a lie. Just like all the other Voices were lies.” (page 77) So Richie has hung onto his trauma through this ongoing comic routine, and through the use of these fake Voices.

The record collection he has as a DJ, the vaults of records, his collection of Golden Oldies, were also a cover for something much darker. “They’re not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but […] the ground is spitting them up to the surface. You’re not Rich ‘Records’ Tozier down there; down there you’re just Richie ‘Four-Eyes’ Tozier […] Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. (pages 82-83)

As the memories come back to him, Richie remembers Henry Bowers chasing him, “and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him.” (page 84)

Ben seems to have been doing the opposite of hanging onto his childhood traumas. He lost his weight with proud determination and kept it off, all the way to the mid-1980s, when he’s received his phone call from Mike…and this is why he needs to get drunk at the local bar before going back to Derry.

While Ben is doing heavy drinking instead of overeating as he did as a kid, the association of childhood trauma and ingesting a form of food is still here, for psychological purposes. There’s also a dialectical relationship between his so complete amnesia over his childhood in Derry that he doesn’t even know of the amnesia (page 104), and hanging onto the trauma, as we saw in the marital choices of Eddie and Beverly, or in Bill’s relapsed stammer.

Part II is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986

My Novella, ‘The Targeter,’ Is Now Available on Amazon

My surreal novella, The Targeter, is now published on Amazon. It’s a quick read, only 111 pages, including the ‘about the author’ page. It’s also only US$14.55. Here’s the link to the Amazon page.

The novella is about a despairing 40-year-old English teacher from the West but living as an expat in Taiwan who–due to his apocalyptic, potentially nuclear, WW3 predicament, in which a civil war in China has made his home a warzone–has given up on life. Feeling there’s no way out of his situation (he’s estranged from his Western family), he decides to get drunk on bourbon and stoned on pot, ecstasy, and ketamine. In his stoned stupor, he begins a long reverie of himself as a quasi-Buddha figure (‘the targeter’ is a pun on Tathāgata, and it reflects his wish ‘to hit the target,’ or not sin), a comparison of his own life events with the mythical biography of Siddartha Gautama (he calls himself Sid Arthur Gordimer). As the war draws closer and closer to him, his being under the influence has made him blithely indifferent to the fact that, wandering out in the streets where the gunfire and bombing are going on, he’s walking right into his own death.

I wish again to thank the publishers of Alien Buddha Press for putting my short book in print!

Publication of ‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novella, by Alien Buddha Press, on July 14th

This is my new novella, originally published chapter by chapter here on my blog, but now you can gain access to all the chapters easily without searching my blog’s archives.

It will be released on July 14th on Amazon. It’s a quick read, only 111 pages, including the ‘about the author’ page.

It’s about a despairing 40-year-old English teacher in Taiwan who–due to his apocalyptic, potentially nuclear, WW3 predicament, in which a civil war in China has made his home a warzone–has given up on life. Feeling there’s no way out of his situation, he decides to get drunk on bourbon and stoned on pot, ecstasy, and ketamine. In his stoned stupor, he begins a long reverie of himself as a quasi-Buddha figure (‘the targeter’ is a pun on Tathāgata, and it reflects his wish ‘to hit the target,’ or not sin), a comparison of his own life events with the mythical biography of Siddartha Gautama (he calls himself Sid Arthur Gordimer). As the war draws closer and closer to him, his being under the influence has made him blithely indifferent to the fact that, wandering out in the streets where the gunfire and bombing are going on, he’s walking right into his own death.

I want to thank the publishers of Alien Buddha Press for putting my short book in print!

Analysis of ‘In the Wake of Poseidon’

I: Introduction

In the Wake of Poseidon is King Crimson‘s second studio album, released in 1970. It came into being during a period of great instability in the band, since founding members Ian McDonald (alto sax, flute, clarinet, Mellotron, vibraphone, and backing vocals) and drummer Michael Giles quit after the band’s American tour. To make matters worse, lead singer/bassist Greg Lake would also leave, during the recording sessions of Poseidon, to cofound ELP.

Though the album was well-received by critics upon its release, citing the execution and production quality as better than its predecessor, Poseidon has since been regarded as something of a mere copy of In the Court of the Crimson King. Indeed, apart from “Peace–A Beginning,” all the tracks from Side One of Poseidon are parallels of those on Side One of the first album. Furthermore, on Side Two of Poseidon, towards the end of “The Devil’s Triangle,” there’s a clip from the title track of the previous album, the “Ah…ah, ah-ah, ah, ah-ah” vocals.

Still, in spite of what would seem legitimate criticisms of this reworking of the first album in the way guitarist/leader Robert Fripp would have had it, I’ve always preferred Poseidon to Crimson King: I find this second album to be bolder and more colourful than the first (though I consider the lyrics of the first album to be preferable overall to the obscurantism of those of the second). In an attempt to rationalize this ‘redoing’ of the first album, I’d say that Poseidon can be seen as the ‘epitaph,’ if you will, of Crimson King, a kind of ‘lament’ over the demise of the great original lineup.

Here is a link to all the album’s lyrics, and here is a link to all the tracks from the album, including the shorter single version of “Cat Food,” “Groon” (the B-side of the “Cat Food” single), and Greg Lake’s guide-vocal version of “Cadence and Cascade”.

Apart from the links to the first album that I’ve noted above, the second album has other links to the original lineup. Giles was retained as a ‘guest drummer’ for Poseidon, and two of its tracks are based on music the original band played live: “Pictures of a City” is based on “A Man, a City,” and “The Devil’s Triangle” is based on “Mars,” an instrumental improvisation based in turn on “Mars, the Bringer of War,” from Gustav Holst‘s The Planets.

In fact, as noted above, Lake even recorded a ‘guide vocal’ for “Cadence and Cascade” in an uncharacteristically unexpressive voice; not to bad-mouth replacement singer Gordon Haskell for his excellent performance on the recording used on Poseidon, but if Lake was available to sing the track, why didn’t he do so with his usual expressivity, then Haskell could have debuted on bass and vocals for Lizard?

Many of the themes of the first album are repeated here on the second: the horrors of war, modern alienation, capitalism, political corruption, and fear of the end of the world. The theme of modern alienation is in abundant supply in “Pictures of a City,” this album’s counterpart to “21st Century Schizoid Man.”

But as a sharp contrast to all of this negativity, remaining original members Fripp and lyricist Peter Sinfield gave us a trilogy of tracks on the ideal of peace. Of course, this ideal can never be realized if the issues of the preceding paragraph are not dealt with, but it’s good to be reminded of peace as a goal worth striving for, on three occasions spread out over the course of the album.

II: Peace–A Beginning

“Peace–A Beginning” opens with heavy reverb that will die out slowly over the course of the short track. Lake is singing a cappella in C minor. The four-line verse he sings makes references, however indirectly, to the four elements: air (“the wind”), fire (“lit by the flame”), earth (“the mountain”), and water (“the ocean” and “the river”); these are all identified with a personified peace.

Such basic, fundamental elements point in the direction of unity and permanence, which is fitting, given that peace will “never end.” It’s also fitting that there are two references to water, rather than just one; one of these is the ocean, appropriate for an album called In the Wake of Poseidon, the title track of which will deal more with the four elements.

When Lake sings the last word, we can hear Fripp softly play four notes on his guitar: A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp. Then we go into the next song.

III: Pictures of a City

Since this song is Poseidon‘s equivalent of “21st Century Schizoid Man,” it’s fitting that we hear saxophones in it, played by McDonald’s replacement, saxist/flautist Mel Collins. His jazzy playing of the saxes reinforces the contemporary urban feel of the song. The band is playing in G minor, in a kind of twelve-bar blues before the first verse.

Rather than present any kind of narrative, Sinfield just gives us a series of urban images, true to the title of the song, as well as the sounds of the city, and the feelings that result from such sights and sounds.

“Concrete” gives us a “cold face,” leaving us “stark sharp” and “glass eyed,” lacking expression. Such are the alienating effects of modern urban life: removed from nature, with the city’s polluted air, fire breathing out smoke from cars’ exhaust pipes, earth covered up and suffocated, if you will, under concrete, and water made filthy through sewage, we’re also disconnected from community. The contaminating of the four elements means there can be no peace.

There’s a considerable amount of internal rhyme and assonance in these verses: “face cased,” “stark sharp,” “bright light scream beam,” “neon wheel,” “spice ice dance chance,” “mouth dry tongue tied.”

The third line of the first verse vividly portrays the problems of driving in the big city: road rage, screeching brakes, the honking of horns, and car accidents. Never mind wars between nations–one often finds oneself in a kind of war just by driving in a busy city.

The white of “red white green white” suggests light, like that of the “neon wheel.” Note the red and green of traffic lights, fittingly mentioned right after the “brake and squeal” of impatient drivers. Note also the absence of the yellow traffic light: one hurries up and waits, but never drives slowly.

After the first verse, we return to the jazzy twelve-bar blues riff of the harmonized saxes and guitar. City life sure can give you the blues.

Much of the imagery of the second verse, especially its first line, suggests how urban alienation leads to a desperate attempt to connect with others by looking for love in all the wrong places: “Dream flesh love chase perfumed skin.” There are other “tinseled sin[s]” going on, though. There’s the “greased hand” of political corruption and bribery. One’s teeth one ought to hide so the people we’re cheating don’t know of one’s wicked motives. “Pasteboard time slot sweat and spin” suggests the daily grind of the nine-to-five job, or wage slavery under capitalism.

This verse ends with Fripp playing a chromatic ascension of high notes going up to A-sharp, which leads into “42nd at Treadmills,” the fast middle-section equivalent of “Mirrors,” from “21st Century Schizoid Man.” Since this song is about the immorality of the city, I can interpret “Treadmill” in terms of its old use as a punishment for prisoners in the UK and US of the 19th century, used to exert labour from them, an effective metaphor for wage slavery. “42nd” suggests a doubling of the evil of “21st” from the original song.

Like “Mirrors,” “42nd at Treadmill” is essentially in a 12-bar blues structure (a cycle of four bars of the tonic chord, two of the subdominant chord, two of the tonic again, two of the dominant chord, and two again of the tonic). In fact, much of this section is simply a sped-up version of the 12-bar blues riff heard before each of the first two verses.

After this comes a soft, slow variation on the 12-bar blues structure, suggesting the night time and everyone having gone to sleep…though since this song was initially inspired by New York City, ‘the city that never sleeps,’ during King Crimson’s American tour of late 1969 and early 1970, perhaps we should imagine people tossing and turning in their beds, especially at this section’s dissonant ending, which suggests the morning and therefore the need to wake up and face yet another grueling work day.

With the final verse, instead of getting images of city life, we get what is largely the effect of city life on its residents–the alienation, brokenness, and blindness of those without political or class consciousness. Blinded by drunkenness and aimless partying, these people can’t communicate or see their reality for what it is. They’re doomed in an industrialized, urban hell.

The song ends with that chromatic ascension of high notes on Fripp’s guitar, but this time ending on B and introducing a chaotic, dissonant ending like the one for “21st Century Schizoid Man,” though I find this one to be far darker, and therefore better, than the first one. Also, you can hear in this one Fripp’s signature screaming guitar phrases, in which he quickly strums dissonant, high-pitched chords like the splintery ones you hear on “Sailor’s Tale.”

IV: Cadence and Cascade

This song is Poseidon’s equivalent to “I Talk to the Wind.” It features Fripp’s lyrical acoustic guitar playing, Haskell’s lead vocal as mentioned above, and some lovely flute solos by Collins. The song is in E major, Fripp opening with combinations of single notes, strums, and arpeggios in the tonic chord, an A-major chord, an E-major 7th chord, and A major again.

Haskell’s singing introduces two groupies, Cadence and Cascade, and the man they’re interested in, Jade, who depending on the interpretation of Sinfield’s lyric is variously portrayed as, for example, a singer, or a Silk Road merchant trading goods from the Far East. The names “Cadence and Cascade” suggest the two women’s beauty (more on the meanings of their names later); “Jade” suggests his wealth.

The women worship him for his wealth, power, and fame, but grow disappointed with him as they get to know him better: “As his veil fell aside…They found him just a man.” His phony appeal is comparable to that of a prostitute: “Sad paper courtesan.”

In the world of traditional sex roles, which still largely existed in the West as of 1970, women found their only option for gaining wealth and social status was through a man, so when they met a rich and powerful man, they idealized him…only to find later that he is just as faulty as any other man of modest means. Masculinity is an ideal that is rarely, if ever, even approached, let alone attained.

The bridge opens with Fripp playing one of his “devices,” a celeste, with an ascension of notes: B, C-sharp, E, F-sharp, and G-sharp; this is heard over an A major seventh chord, then with the switch to an A minor seventh chord, we hear celeste notes of G-sharp, A, B, C, and D, E, and F-sharp. We also hear Keith Tippett‘s jazzy piano in the background.

The verse of the bridge has Haskell singing about the lovemaking between the groupies and Jade, their worshipping of his wealth (“sequin,” and “velvet-gloved hand”) and fame (“Cascade kissed his name”). In a larger sense, the groupies’ worship of Jade can represent the idolatry of famous people in general, and the simping for billionaires. This applies to men and women, as worshippers and worshipped.

After the first flute solo, we hear a refrain of the “sad paper courtesan” verse, except that Cadence and Cascade now “knew [Jade] just a man” (my emphasis). The groupies have left him behind in their disappointment in him.

One of the biggest problems in our world is that, because of the worship of fame, wealth, status, and power, people keep aspiring to it, instead of sharing everything so that the basic needs of everyone are met. We aim for these heights, then in disappointment we fall…which leads me to my next point.

Apart from the groupies’ names suggesting their beauty, “Cadence and Cascade”–something Haskell sings several times leading into Collins’s second flute solo–are also words coming from the Latin world cadere, meaning “to fall.” There’s the musical cadence of resolving a harmonic progression back to the tonic, and a cascade is a waterfall (the element of water again, as jade is associated with the element of earth). Both meanings suggest musical or natural beauty, or the beauty of a woman’s cascade of long, wavy hair flowing down to her shoulders. There’s also the fall of the girls’ disappointment on knowing Jade is “just a man.”

V: In the Wake of Poseidon (including “Libra’s Theme”)

This track reworks the first album in two ways: the title, of course, parallels that of the last song on Side Two of the first album; more properly, though, this song is a reworking of “Epitaph,” the last song on Side One of the first album.

Sinfield apparently rewrote the lyric to this song about twenty-five times to make it tie in with the cover art, which therefore should be discussed now. I’ll describe each of the dozen faces not as they appear on the outer album cover–which shows a painting called The 12 Archetypes, or The 12 Faces of Humankind, by Tammo de Jongh–but in order of appearance as Sinfield brings them up in his lyric.

The Observer, a bald old man with spectacles up above his brow and his hand on his chin, looks pensive and scientifically-minded. His elements are Air and Earth. The opening lines, “Plato’s spawn cold ivied eyes/Snare truth in bone and globe,” refer to him. He represents Western science in the service of cold-blooded imperialism, taking over the globe and, exploiting it, reducing all indigenous resistance to skulls and bones.

The Joker, a harlequin painted in reds and yellows and smiling in a triangular hat, is the subject of the next two lines of the first verse. His elements being Fire and Air, he’d “coin pointless games/Sneer jokes in parrot’s robe.” His sardonic humor points out our everyday foibles and political corruption, but it’s “pointless” in how it does nothing to solve our problems.

The Actress is next. She’s Egyptian, with long pearl earrings and necklaces, and with tears running down her cheeks. Her elements are Water and Fire. She is represented in the lines, “Dame Scarlet Queen/Sheds sudden theatre rain.” She weeps for the sins of the world, as does…

…The Enchantress, her long dark hair going across her face. She has Water and Earth as her elements. She “knows every human pain.”

As I said above, the title track is especially concerned with the four elements, two of which are associated with each of the twelve archetypes, as we’ve seen and will continue to see. All four are also heard twice in the next verse, a bridge between the first and third verses, this latter continuing to depict the twelve archetypal faces.

Though the elements are associated with peace, as we saw in “Peace–A Beginning,” the “World [is] on the scales,” with war and destruction on one scale, balanced on the other with peace and its four elements. This “Balance of change” means the world is teetering “on the scales” between peace and war. Which side will win? Which will outweigh the other? Will it be the side that wants peace and justice for everyone, or will it be the side of the imperialistic warmongers, whose recklessness is pushing us all ever closer to nuclear armageddon?

This song, and therefore the entire album, has as much relevance for us today as it did back in 1970, with its Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation between the US/NATO and the USSR. We’re experiencing a new, and utterly needless, new Cold War between the Western, NATO-allied powers on one side, and Russia, China, the DPRK, and Iran on the other. Between the two sides are thousands of nuclear weapons, and no attempt at détente is even being considered.

To return to the archetypes, the next one is The Patriarch, an old philosopher with long white hair and a beard. He’s frowning, with a furrowed brow. Surrounding him are such shapes as flowers and snowflakes. His elements are Air and Water. Referring to him are the lines, “Bishop’s kings spin judgement’s blade/Scratch ‘Faith’ on nameless graves.” The Church controls the heads of state–The Patriarch being one of these stern religious leaders–and it pushes the kings to fight ‘holy’ wars. (One might think of the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of Ely persuading Henry V to invade France.)

The Old Woman would “hoard ash and sand.” She has a wrinkled, sad face, and her hair is wrapped in white. Her elements are Earth and Air. Such women are “Harvest hags,” peasant farmers, whom we associate with the working class, yet these peasants are betraying the fellow proletarians in that they “rack rope and chain for slaves,” the next archetype to be discussed.

The Slave, a black African with earrings and a nose-ring, has Earth and Fire as her elements. The slaves “fear fermented words,” that is, they’re scared of revolution, and like the kulaks who hoarded grain during the famine in the USSR in the early 1930s, they “rear to spoil the feast.” This lack of solidarity among the poor is what allows the rich to stay in power.

The Fool, the laughing man to the centre-left of the front cover of the album, with the pink face, the blond beard, and the flowers in his hair, is “the mad man [who] smiles/To him it matters least.” In his foolish, delusional state, he doesn’t care about the corruption in the world, because like The Slave and the Old Woman, he has no class consciousness. His elements are Fire and Water.

After this verse is an instrumental passage that includes the (Libra’s?) theme (“Air, fire, earth, and water”), only it’s played by Fripp on the Mellotron instead of sung by Lake. I suspect that part of the reason this song is called “In the Wake of Poseidon” is that the god of sea and earthquakes best represents all four elements: the earth and water aspects hardly need to be elaborated on; air can be included in its being blown as wind over the sea, making waves, and Poseidon is known for his fiery temper–consider how he treated Odysseus after he blinded the god’s cyclopean son, Polyphemus. I’m assuming this section is “Libra’s Theme,” given our “world on the scales.”

To go back to the archetypal faces, the next one is The Warrior, wearing a steel helmet and a full black beard, and baring his teeth, ready to fight. His elements are Fire and Earth, and he’s represented in these lines: “Heroes’ hands drain stones for blood/To whet the scaling knife.” The weapons of war wound not only bodies, but the Earth as well.

Next comes The Logician, a wizard with dark hair and a long dark beard. He’s holding a wand in one hand while the other is held up high. There are stars all around him, presumably the magic from one of his spells. He’s represented with the lines, “Magi blind with visions light/Net death in dread of life.” He represents the theologian or philosopher who is ‘blinded by the light’ of his own dogma, preferring death and the peace of a presumed heaven over the pain of living here.

The naïve sheep of these religious shepherds are represented in The Child, a girl with long blonde hair and a face of sweet innocence. The necklace she’s wearing has a white key on it. Her elements are Water and Air, and these lines represent her in the song: “Their children kneel in Jesus’ till/They learn the price of nails.” To enter the Kingdom of Heaven, one must be as a child (Luke 18:17); hence, the key on The Child’s necklace (Matthew 16:19). Still, learning “the price of nails” means learning either to submit to the powers-that-be, whether they’re religious or political, or to suffer as Jesus did for defying them.

And the last archetype is The Mother Earth, or Mother Nature. We see her lying asleep in the grass in left profile, with dark skin and flowers and butterflies all around her. Her elements are Earth and Water, and the last two lines of the song refer to her: “Whilst all around our Mother Earth/Waits balanced on the scales.” Our Earth sits passively as mankind decides the fate of all living creatures who have her as their home: nuclear war, or peace? A healthy planet, or ecocide? Our collective fate is being weighed in the balance, “on the scales,” by psychopathic leaders who care about wealth and maintaining their power, and not about us.

To understand the deeper meaning of archetypes, one must look into analytical psychology, Jung‘s offshoot from Freudian psychoanalysis. Jungian psychology has a grounding in such psychoanalytical concepts as the unconscious and repression, but unlike Freud the atheist, Jung developed an interest in myth, mysticism, and religion far beyond just their psychological symbolism. As a result, he broke with Freud, who would later speak derisively of Jung as one who would “aspire to be a prophet” (Freud, page 280).

The archetypes are characters that reside in the collective unconscious, that aspect of the unconscious we all share and that has been inherited throughout human history. These include the Sage (which can find its equivalent in the song and album cover as The Patriarch), Innocent (The Child), Hero (Warrior), Magician (Logician), Jester (Joker), and Creator or Caregiver (The Mother Earth). The point is that we have all of these characters, hidden deep down in our unconscious; they influence how we think and interact in the world. To this extent, they control us, and therefore control mankind’s collective fate.

In this song, we can see how unhappy these twelve are, or how manipulative (or manipulated) they are. They’re in the depths of the ocean of the collective unconscious, so “the wake of Poseidon” is, literally speaking, the making conscious all of these characters that reside deep within the sea-god’s realm. If we can make their sorrow conscious, we can integrate them, become whole and healthy, then work to save our planet from ecocide and nuclear annihilation. Hence, the deep relevance of this song back in 1970 and, even more, today.

VI: Peace–A Theme

This is a short instrumental for solo acoustic guitar, about a minute long, in A major.

Fripp plays the melody Lake sang a cappella on “Peace–A Beginning,” as well as the bridge melody (“Searching for…, etc.) that we will hear on “Peace–An End.” Fripp opens with a strum of an open A major chord with an added sixth.

From this chord, he embellishes the melody Lake sang before with an appoggiatura: he does a hammer-on and a pull-off as part of the continuing melody with E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, he strums a D-flat minor 7th chord, and single notes D-flat and E, then a hammer-on to F-sharp, and a strum of a D-major 7th chord, the E, D-flat, and an A major chord, with a high note of D-flat.

Next, he strums the D-major 7th chord, and plays the above appoggiatura with the E, F-sharp, E, and D-flat. Then, there’s the strum of the D-flat minor 7th chord again, then a strum of an E dominant 9th chord, then a strum of a D major 6/9 chord, and an ending of the melody that includes another appoggiatura, a hammer-on and pull-off of F-sharp, A, F-sharp, and E, then the D-major 7th chord again.

All of the above is repeated, then we come to the bridge (“Searching for…,” etc., in “Peace–An End”). Fripp strums an A-major chord, then an A chord with a major second instead of a major third, then the A major six chord again. Then he plays arpeggiated chords of D-flat suspension 4th and a D-flat major. Next, a melody of F-sharp, A, B, D-sharp, E, D-sharp, B, G-sharp, and F-sharp is played over chords of D-major 7th, D-flat minor, and D-major 7th again.

After an E suspension 4th chord and an E major chord in the dominant, Fripp repeats the bridge section as described in the previous paragraph, but he ends the piece with a strum of an A 6/9 chord, only without a third, and with the sixth in the bass; then he softly hits an E-flat, a flattened fifth for A major.

VII: Cat Food

This song is another example of King Crimson doing a perverse variation on the 12-bar blues structure, with Tippett mixing in dissonant tone clusters with his more usual jazzy piano playing, and with the usual 4/4 time getting bars of 6/8 thrown in between from time to time. The song is in E minor.

The song is satirizing capitalism and consumerism, and all of the maddening effects these have on people, hence the piano discords. A woman shopping in a supermarket wants to talk to the manager, presumably to make a complaint. “Grooning to the muzak” sounds like an ironic comment on Fripp’s instrumental with drummer Michael Giles and his bassist brother, Peter (who plays all the bass parts on this album instead of Lake), “Groon,” Side B to the “Cat Food” single. Groon is a pun on groan, a complaining sound.

The blatantly atonal “Groon,” truly an acquired taste for most listeners, is a piece of avant-garde jazz that sounds like a Cecil Taylor improvisation, but with Fripp’s guitar replacing Taylor’s piano. The supermarket shopper, however, is annoyed with the muzak, or ‘elevator music,’ which is annoying at the other extreme: it’s music so bland, so ‘nice,’ and so conventional that it desperately needs a little dissonance to make it half-way interesting to listen to. The contrast between “Groon” and muzak is also the contrast between music as experimental art and music as sellable commodity.

She lays out her goods, as if to complain about them to the manager. They’re all “conveniently frozen,” so she can “come back for more” as soon as she’s finished with them. This is convenient for capitalists, who can make more money when she comes back. Ironically, this ‘convenience’ is what she has to complain about.

Next, the woman shopper is cooking at home, whipping up “a chemical brew/Croaking to a neighbour as she polishes a sabre.” The “chemical brew” suggests some kind of processed food from the supermarket, superficially tasty, but ultimately bad for you. Just as she ‘grooned’ to the muzak, now she ‘croaks’ in complaint to a neighbour, suggesting the social alienation that comes from the same source as the fetishized commodities that she’s bought–capitalism. The ‘sabre’ she polishes is presumably her cooking knife, but calling it a sabre evokes the idea that it’s used for killing rather than feeding.

She “knows how to flavour a stew,” but her meal is “poisoned especially for you,” because as I said above, this processed food, in its “tin,” is bad for you. “Hurri Curri” sounds like a brand name of cat food, or its particular flavour. It’s also a pun on hara kari, a form of ritual suicide, given how willingly eating such innutritious, processed food, this ‘hurried curry,’ this instant food, is bad for you.

Because the capitalist system is focused more on profit than on providing a nutritious product, we get the blues from it, hence the song’s 12-bar structure. The alienation from capitalism causes mental health problems, too, hence the piano dissonances, Lake’s mad cackling at the end of this second verse, and “your mother’s quite insane,” in the repeated bridge verse.

“Cat food…again?” sounds like a complaint about eating the same old crap over and over again. Cat food, with its unpleasant smell and even more unpleasant contents, is a metaphor for all the unhealthy junk food we all eat at least once in a while, enriching its producers.

“A fable on the label” of so many of these food products, stuffed in cans, suggests the lie that they’re full of vitamins, minerals, and other nutritious ingredients, when actually the processing and artificial colours, additives, and preservatives ruin the said nutrients, in all likelihood. It’s “drowning in miracle sauce,” meaning that the sauce, however superficially tasty it may be, is killing the nutrients by drowning them. With all of this understanding, the last two lines of the song should be self-explanatory.

The song ends with improvising over the 12-bar blues structure, with its alternating of a few bars of 4/4 with one in 6/8. Michael Giles does a few great drum licks here, as Tippett does with his colourful, jazzy piano.

VIII: The Devil’s Triangle

As I said above, this piece evolved out of “Mars,” the instrumental improvisation that the original King Crimson lineup played in their live shows, based in turn on the first movement of Holst’s The Planets. For this reason, I see the resulting studio version as still thematically linked to the horrors of war, and it’s therefore fitting to have it immediately precede “Peace–An End,” for dialectical purposes as I’ll explain later.

The piece includes three sections, titled “Merday Morn,” “Hand of Sceiron,” and “Garden of Worm.” The first part gives partial writing credit to McDonald, but not the last part, which includes the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King,” which he wrote with Sinfield.

“Merday Morn” opens with a long, slow fade-in: the listener may get impatient waiting to hear any music. It’s as if the music were the sun slowly rising over the watery horizon of the ocean, the beginning of the ‘day of the sea,’ hence the name of this section. We sense that Poseidon is waking up, hence the album’s title, taken literally.

Recall that ‘the Devil’s Triangle’ is another name for the Bermuda Triangle, the legend surrounding the place–the three corners of which are Bermuda, Miami, and Puerto Rico–being that ships and airplanes entering it mysteriously disappear. One senses the fiery wrath of the sea-god here, and why the music is so spooky.

In the entire piece, we have all four elements represented: in “Merday Morn,” the sea obviously represents water, and the rising sun represents fire (as well as Poseidon’s fiery wrath); in “Hand of Sceiron,” air is represented at the end of the section by the sound of strong winds, as if ships are entering a storm; and “Garden of Worm” suggests the element of earth, symbolic of a grave for the dead in sunken ships at the bottom of the ocean, the ground of the seabed.

When we finally start hearing the music, we hear Michael Giles playing a martial beat in 5/4, accompanied by his brother, Peter, on the bass. Fripp is providing melody and harmony on the Mellotron, at first with string section tape, then, when the music starts to get tense, he uses brass section tape. To add to the tension, we’ll hear him play a lot of tritone intervals, which are fitting as the diabolus in musica.

“Hand of Sceiron” begins with a foghorn sound, suggesting that ships are approaching a dangerous area at sea. Along with the tritones heard on the Mellotron, we hear lots more dissonance on, for example, Tippett’s piano. This section ends, as noted above, with those winds. Sceiron refers to violent winds in a myth from an area described in Book IX, Chapter One (section 4) of Strabo‘s Geographica. A ticking metronome sounds like a clock that is ticking towards the end of one’s life.

Of course, the tension is raised to a climax in the “Garden of Worm” section, with its faster tempo and heightened dissonance. Independent layers of sound are put together: the 5/4 martial beat heard on the drums, with the bass in 4/4 playing descending fifths, and dissonance in the Mellotron and piano tone clusters. It all descends into chaos, including, by way of xenochrony, a brief passage for string section, and the clip from “The Court of the Crimson King.” It all ends with flurries of flute notes and a soft, arpeggiated resolution in E major on Fripp’s acoustic guitar.

So, what does all of this music mean? What does a ship entering the Bermuda Triangle and going missing there, all the passengers presumed dead, signify? The piece’s link with “Mars,” with the martial beat (though different from Holst’s original rhythm, because Holst’s estate did not give Fripp permission to use it), suggests the symbolism of war, too. But what do a ship lost in a sea storm, and soldiers killed or missing in action in a war, symbolize in “The Devil’s Triangle,” and In the Wake of Poseidon as a whole?

Recall the archetypes from the title track and the album cover, and how these reside in the collective unconscious. In the wake of Poseidon means ‘as a(n unpleasant) consequence of the sea-god.’ The realm of Poseidon, the ocean, is symbolic of the unconscious, both personal and collective. So as a consequence of confronting Poseidon and his tempestuous ways, we awaken the unconscious and discover those unpleasant parts of ourselves that we want to reject, repress, or project onto other people. To confront them is to confront what Jung called the Shadow. This is a scary, but necessary and enlightening experience.

“The Devil’s Triangle” begins in silence, and with a slow fade-in, because such a beginning represents not only the unawareness of unconscious conflicts, but also the unwillingness to learn of them, the resistance against them. As the music gets more and more dissonant, one is becoming more and more aware of the unpleasant, rejected parts of the Shadow.

The social problems dealt with in the other songs–urban alienation and decadence in “Pictures of a City,” hero-worship of wealth and celebrity in “Cadence and Cascade,” and capitalist consumerism in “Cat Food”–have their psychological roots in these unconscious, repressed conflicts. The way to end the conflicts and attain peace of mind is not to avoid them, by sailing around the Bermuda Triangle of the psyche, but to go through it and risk the dangers therein.

And dangerous it is. Jung warned of these risks when attempting to do what he called individuation through Shadow work, dream interpretation, and Active Imagination. One is advised, when doing this inner work, to have someone monitoring you, ideally a fully-trained therapist specializing in Jungian psychology. Otherwise, one risks navigating the treacherous waters of repressed traumas, leading to psychological fragmentation, a psychotic break with reality (what Lacan called The Real), which is what the “Garden of Worm” section represents.

The significant thing, though, that happens if you can make it through the maelstrom symbolized by the ending of “The Devil’s Triangle” (as Jung apparently did by bravely facing the demons of his own unconscious), and can integrate the darker aspects of your mind with the lighter ones, you can come out the other side and find peace and bliss, as symbolized by the pretty flurry of flute notes and Fripp’s acoustic guitar ending.

(Such psychological integration includes a man confronting his anima, as represented by the six female faces on the album cover and described in the title track, and a woman confronting her animus, the six male archetypes on the cover and in the title track. In this connection, the sea can be masculine, Poseidon, or feminine, Thalassa. La mer est la mère.)

I’ve written many times about my personal interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros, as representing the dialectical relationship between opposites as the meeting ends (the serpent’s head and tail) of a circular continuum (the serpent’s coiled body) including all intermediate points between the extremes. We can hear this oneness in contradiction in “The Devil’s Triangle” in how the music starts in peaceful silence, then the music comes in and gets increasingly dissonant, a move from the serpent’s biting head, down its coiled body towards its bitten tail. At the tail of extreme chaos and pain, we cross over to the head and back to peace and bliss, leading thus to…

IX: Peace–An End

One interesting thing about the “Peace” trilogy is how this last one is musically in ternary form (ABA), while “Peace–A Theme” is in binary form (AABB), and “Peace–A Beginning” is just the A theme heard twice. It’s as though peace begins as just a germinating idea, then it develops, and now it is complete, after having gone through the necessary hell of “The Devil’s Triangle.”

Furthermore, the first part is essentially a cappella, the second just an acoustic guitar solo, and this last part has both Lake and Fripp. It is musically thus the Hegelian dialectic triad of thesis (“Beginning”), negation (“Theme”), and sublation (“End”), this last part not only being complete, but also a resolution of the contradiction of the previous two parts. In fact, the first two parts ended without perfect resolutions: the A, F-sharp, C, and A-sharp on Fripp’s guitar ending “Beginning”; the A 6-9 chord with the sixth in the bass and the E-flat ending “Theme.”

Only now do we have a truly peaceful resolution in E major, with Lake’s last sung note, on “war,” being a D-flat, a major sixth in relation to the tonic, and so it’s reasonably consonant. It suggests, in combination with “war,” a somewhat tenuous peace–since when is perfect peace ever realized, anyway?–but it’s peace all the same, and therefore a fitting end to the album.

Two of the four elements are mentioned in the first line of the first verse–water and air (“sea” and “wind”). Water will again be mentioned in the first line of the last verse, too–“stream.” The reference to “dawn on a day without end” suggests earth and fire, in that we imagine the sun peeking over the horizon, that is, over the land, hills, and mountains in the morning. The fire of the sun will shine on an eternal day, too.

Because the four elements are so fundamentally what make up everything as we imagine it here, they bring us closer to the blissful oneness of Brahman, and therefore to peace, nirvana. Those twelve archetypal faces are each associated with two of the elements; and since attaining psychological peace, as I described it above–with my ouroboros symbolism–involves confronting the twelve archetypes in the Shadow of the ocean of the unconscious, then peace is in this way also associated with the elements.

A bird sings as you smile because it is pleased with your happiness–it is your friend. Peace causes a foe to love you as a friend; we must take those troublesome archetypes of the unconscious and make them our friends–this is how we change war into peace. We bring love to a child, like the sweet, innocent girl on the cover with the white key on her necklace. She has the key to heaven, remember, because one has to be as a child to enter heaven, the realm of peace.

You search for your friends, but can’t find them, because you foolishly don’t realize how close they are to you, like the nirvana and Buddhahood that the lost vagabond son of the parable doesn’t realize he already has, personified by his father. You search for yourself everywhere outside, but you don’t realize that you have to do the inner work, as described in my interpretation of “The Devil’s Triangle,” to find yourself within, in the twelve archetypes, the four elements, and the Atman that is already one with the oceanic feeling of Brahman.

The heart is what empathy flows from, so that’s why peace is a stream from there. Breadth, that is, the width of tolerance and open-mindedness, is the dawn, or beginning, of peace.

The fire of the sun will burn forever for peace, that is, without end; yet peace is also the end, ironically, like death, of the war. The war people would have had in mind back in 1970 was, of course, the Vietnam War, wishing it would end.

There are other wars, though, besides literal ones, that need to end. There’s the emotional war of psychological conflict, as dramatized in “The Devil’s Triangle” and the title track. The Jungian inner work described above to integrate the light and dark parts of the psyche, the conscious and unconscious, to bring about inner peace, can be compared to the Buddhist’s quest for nirvana.

Nirvana literally refers to the blowing out of a flame representing desire, and therefore suffering also. Nirvana is the resulting peace from having extinguished the fire of the delusion of a permanent ego. Yet Sinfield’s lyric, of peace as the dawn of a day without end, implies a permanently burning fire, while peace is also the end…and nirvana is the end of suffering.

How can we reconcile this contradiction, of a permanent fire and its extinguishment as both meaning peace? We can do so as the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism does, by equating nirvana with samsara, the cycle of reincarnation. We did so before with the dialectical interpretation of attaining peace by first going through the Devil’s Triangle, by passing first through hell to get to heaven. Similarly, the bodhisattva first swears off nirvana until he’s helped all living creatures to get there, hence they all travel there on the Great Vehicle, that boat that must weather Poseidon’s storm at sea.

Note how Lake’s singing on “Peace–An End” brings back the reverb at the end, just as “Peace–A Beginning” started with reverb. This beginning and ending reverb thus gives us a sense that the album has come full circle, like the cyclical eternity that the ouroboros originally symbolized. In this sense, we can see how peace never ends, even in a world full of suffering. Nirvana is samsara because we can only have peace and happiness by accepting the inevitability of pain.

X: Conclusion

Based on the interpretation I’ve given above, I must say that In the Wake of Poseidon, though not exactly a masterpiece, deserves better than being dismissed as a mere copy, or sequel, of In the Court of the Crimson King. To be sure, much of the second album does rework the first, but there are other things going on that shouldn’t be ignored.

Side Two of Poseidon is essentially new (the xenochrony notwithstanding). The first album presented the problems of the world; the second album expands on the discussion of those problems, and it also proposes a solution. Most importantly of all, In the Wake of Poseidon presents a kind of Jungian odyssey through hell to get to heaven, giving it a kind of universality of human experience that makes it an album that doesn’t just live in the shadow of its predecessor, but exists in its own right.

Analysis of ‘Chinatown’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Repo Man’

Repo Man is a 1984 film written and directed by Alex Cox, starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, with Tracey Walter, Olivia Brash, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Fox Harris, and Dick Rude. Michael Nesmith of the Monkees was executive producer, and Iggy Pop wrote the Repo Man theme; he also sings the song during the end credits.

A satire on American life under the Reagan administration, on consumerism, and on the Atomic Age, Repo Man had a troubled initial release because Universal Pictures doubted the film’s commercial viability. It nonetheless received widespread acclaim, was considered one of the best films of 1984, and is now a cult film.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the script (including outtakes), and here’s a link to a rather poor quality video of the complete film (i.e., the image being in the bottom-right corner, it’s being sped up, with all the sound in a higher pitch).

After seeing, during the opening credits, a shifting road map of Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and finally to California, we’re in the Mojave Desert, with J. Frank Parnell (Harris) driving a ’64 Chevy Malibu. A cop on a bike pulls him over and wants to know what’s in the trunk of the Malibu. Parnell tries to warn him not to look in there, but the cop insists. He opens the trunk, a bright light shines out of it, and he screams as he’s being disintegrated from the mysterious thing in there, leaving only his flaming boots. Parnell drives away.

Later in the film, we learn from Leila (Barash) that aliens are what is in the trunk; they’re emitting the radiation that killed the cop. A question that should be obvious to ask is this: what business were the contents of the car to the cop? What right had he (I couldn’t care less about his badge) to stick his nose in Parnell’s personal business?

Now, aliens are heavenly beings, if you will. This fact, combined with the sinfulness of LA (where the bulk of Repo Man takes place), as well as the vaporizing of anyone who opens the trunk and exposes the ‘heavenly beings,’ makes me think of the Biblical story of Lot in Sodom. Such an association probably sounds far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, but please hear me out.

To get our bearings, I’ll start by saying that the aliens are like the angels God sent to destroy Sodom, which LA represents here. Granted, the aliens don’t destroy LA in the movie, they just kill a few people nosy enough to look in the trunk; but they do shake things up for a lot of people in and around the city. The radiation emitted by the aliens can be associated with the radiation from nuclear explosions, which can wipe out cities, as happened in Japan. These associations are close enough for me, since as was mentioned above, one of the satirical targets of Repo Man is the Atomic Age.

One of the major sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. The Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house when they knew he was accommodating the visiting angels. The Sodomites demanded he send out the angels so they could “know” them. (Gang rape, regardless of sexual orientation, can only be evil.) Knowing his duty to be hospitable to the angels, Lot couldn’t send them out. When the Sodomites tried to force their way into the house, the angels blinded them, which can be associated with the aliens vaporizing the intruding cop.

My point in bringing up the story of Lot in Sodom is that one of the central themes of Repo Man is impingement, encroachment, or imposing oneself on another’s personal space, just as the men of Sodom tried to impinge on Lot’s home and the guests to whom he was giving hospitality. If you impinge on others, they’ll impinge back on you, as the angels did when the Sodomites tried to break into Lot’s house and rape the visiting men.

The scene in the supermarket–where Otto (Estevez) and Kevin (played by Zander Schloss, bassist for the Circle Jerks, who appear later in the film as a nightclub band) are working as stock clerks facing cans–is full of impingement. Kevin, a geek who is annoyingly sycophantic to the whole capitalist system, is singing, of all things, a 7-Up jingle right next to Otto, irritating him. The last thing punk rocker Otto needs to hear is an advertisement for a soft drink while he’s doing monotonous wage slave work.

Otto impinges back on Kevin by sticking a price tag on his glasses. Then, to annoy Otto further, his boss, Mr. Humphries (played by Charles Hopkins), comes over to nag him about not only being habitually late for work, but also for not spacing the cans properly. He gives Otto an implicit warning of getting fired by mentioning how, in the bad economy of the time, one must be careful about the quality of one’s work. Luis, an armed security guard, gets in Otto’s face for not listening to his boss, then Otto curses at him, shoves chuckling Kevin into the pile of cans they’ve been facing, flips off Humphries and Luis, and walks out.

Incidentally, all the cans, cereal boxes, and other things sold in the supermarket are generically labelled and designed, as if either made by one company with no regard for visual style, or to indicate that it doesn’t matter who the makers of the commodities are. The satirical point being made here is about consumerism as an escape from eroding democratic freedoms in the Reagan era, which inaugurated the “free market” policies that have resulted in the neoliberalism that plagues us all today.

I’m reminded of what George Carlin would, in later decades, complain about: the illusory freedom of choice (i.e., lots of different brands and flavours to choose from) for consumers instead of meaningful, democratic freedom of political choice (viable political parties other than the GOP and DNC, ones that offer a genuine left-wing alternative). Seeing generic, no-name brands in the supermarket exposes the lie of consumerism as ‘freedom of choice.’

Kevin’s gloating over Otto losing his job, as well as his sucking-up to his boss, does him no good, because Humphries in his rage fires the “worm” too. Kissing the asses of capitalists is no guarantee of advancement.

More impinging is going on in the next scene, though it’s consensual–slamdancing to punk rock–at a party that night in the back of a warehouse. There, Otto meets Duke (Rude), a fellow punk who just got out of jail. The Circle Jerks song “Coup D’état” is heard. There’s a suggestion in this atmosphere of an anarchist wish for violent revolution, though it’s only a fantasy.

In the next scene, Otto is in bed with Debbi (played by Jennifer Balgobin) in Kevin’s house, where the party has moved. She asks him to go get her a beer from the kitchen, an interesting reversal of sex roles, especially seen in light of how she’s about the cheat on him with Archie (played by Miguel Sandoval) and Duke.

The partiers are living in a freely anarchist manner, while nothing is being done about the capitalist-based problems of the outside world, in the rest of LA and in the world in general. We don’t solve our problems by escaping the world and getting wasted, but far too many of us do this anyway. “Institutionalized,” a song by Suicidal Tendencies about teenage disaffection and alienation (a fitting subject for these punks), is heard from downstairs.

Speaking of disaffection and alienation, Otto is next seen alone outside in the early morning, in a vacant lot drinking a beer. He recites some of the lyrics from “TV Party,” by Black Flag. They’re lyrics about not wanting to think about anything important, about only wanting to watch the idiot box and drinking beer. Otto vaguely senses the futility of mindlessly partying instead of, say, organizing and advocating for social change.

Later, when it’s light out, Otto is still walking around outside, now in some neighbourhood. Bud (Stanton) is driving by in his car and offers Otto ten bucks, which sounds to Otto like he’s soliciting for gay sex, which of course would be more impingement. (Note how Otto’s homophobic response could be linked to the homophobic tone in the Bible story.) Bud actually wants Otto to help him repossess a car in the neighbourhood.

Repossessing someone’s car has to be one of the extreme forms of impingement, as well as the opposite of hospitality, which involves giving, not taking. Sticking one’s nose into someone else’s business, going into his or her personal space, and taking a vital personal possession of his or hers are among the worst forms of impingement.

Repossession of cars also makes for a vividly illustrative metaphor for the Reagan revolution, which was, in effect, a repossessing of so many of the working-class gains of the postwar period up to the 1970s. The Reagan years saw dramatic cuts in domestic spending, a steep increase in the number of homeless people, union-busting, and a number of other policies that resulted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor, policies continued and exacerbated by all succeeding US presidents.

Otto repos the car for Bud as requested, unaware that what he’s doing is a repo, and he takes it to the “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation,” a misnomer for a repo organization so ridiculously bizarre as to be outright Orwellian doublethink. Indeed, proponents of the Reagan agenda similarly regard its rolling back of government benefits for the poor as a ‘liberating’ of the people from the ‘shackles’ of ‘big government,’ all while jacking up military spending to the point of leaving the American government with a deficit.

When Otto realizes the people in this business are repo men, a truly despicable, thankless job, he expresses his contempt for them by taking the can of beer they’ve given him and spilling it all over the floor–impingement on their property. Instead of being mad at him, Bud and Oly (played by Tom Finnegan) say he’s “all right,” meaning Otto has the kind of confrontational, impinging personality that makes for an ideal repo man. Still, he doesn’t want to do the job.

A government agent named Rogersz (played by Susan Barnes)–she has a metal hand–is leading a group of people who are investigating how the cop got killed in the desert. They will now try to find the Malibu, which is to become the MacGuffin of Repo Man, the car that will be the ultimate repossession.

Otto and Kevin are going through a newspaper, job-hunting and sitting by an unemployment office. Still deluding himself that if he works hard and plays the capitalist game, Kevin can become “manager in two years, King! God!” after dedicating himself as a fry cook. Otto isn’t so optimistic, though. He’s had a dream in which he and Kevin were 65-year-old bellhops in a “sleazy shithole motel” in Miami. It looked painfully real to Otto.

Since job prospects don’t look too good for him, Otto goes home (he lives in the garage, incidentally: see the outtakes [link above] at about 9:00) and asks his parents for a thousand dollars promised to him if he finishes school, so he can go to Europe. His mom and dad are stoners sitting on the couch sharing a joint and watching TV. The show they’re watching is of a televangelist, Reverend Larry, to whom they’ve given the thousand dollars to sell Bibles to El Salvador.

To make money, Otto will have to become a repo man. You’ve gotta love the “free market.”

The televangelist, of course, is a real character in himself, and a reflection of the Reagan years in many ways. Apart from the fact that Reagan himself was a conservative Christian, his preaching of ‘small government’ was a ploy to lower spending on the poor in order to increase spending to further the interests of the rich (e.g., increasing military spending for the sake of US imperialism), that is, big capitalist government! Similarly, the reverend tells his viewers, largely lower to middle-class people in need of ‘spiritual answers,’ to give him their money.

Also like Reagan, the reverend wants us all to “destroy the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism at home.” Note how the religious right, calling these ideologies “twin evils,” is either too ignorant or outright lying when they don’t see the huge difference between communism and liberalism.

It’s safe to assume that Otto’s stoner parents used to be hippies back when he was a baby. Hippies are liberals, by the way, not communists. A common complaint we on the left have is when liberals backslide toward the right, as Otto’s parents have done by going beyond smoking marijuana to enjoying the opium of the people, a subject I explored in my analysis of Drugstore Cowboy.

Note how Otto’s parents aid US imperialism by selling Bibles to El Salvador instead of helping the country be free of the American empire. Religion is a drug used to help people forget their oppression. TV, of course, can also be a drug in itself, a kind of distraction from one’s everyday troubles, just as the partying punks did as observed above. In the outtakes (link above, at about 12:34), we can see cobwebs enveloping Otto’s mom and dad as they’re on the couch watching the idiot box, just as Black Flag sing about in their song.

In his having no choice but to do a despicable job in order to make the money he needs, Otto demonstrates the lack of meaningful freedom in a capitalist society. And just as the punks have their beer and partying, and Otto’s parents have their marijuana and religion as manic defences against the misery of the world, repo men have speed and booze for the same kind of escape.

This escape will be necessary for Otto, since as part of his selling of his soul to do this new job, he’ll take Bud’s advice and “dress like a detective…dress kind of square,” so people will think Otto is a cop. So much for being a punk rocker. Since one imagines punk rockers have at least anarchist tendencies, we can see how this tendency can backslide into liberalism, then to even more reactionary thinking, as Otto’s choice to become a repo man can be seen to symbolize.

As he and Otto are snorting amphetamine in a car in an alley, Bud sees some people outside and tells Otto he hates “ordinary fucking people.” This is because ordinary people always try to avoid tense situations, whereas repo men are always “getting into tense situations.” Such an attitude, glorifying an aggravating of alienation, sounds suspiciously to me like neoliberalism romanticizing confrontation for the sake of furthering capitalist interests; it’s somehow ‘cool,’ ‘rebellious,’ and ‘edgy’ to be a repo man, rather it simply being an asshole.

Bud and Otto go into a store to buy six packs of beer (generically labelled “drink”) while Bud is still talking about “tense situations” with people with knives or guns. They leave the store, and speaking of tense situations involving guns, we learn that Duke, Archie, and Debbi have been hiding behind the counter, where Bud bought the beer, the whole time. The three punks are holding guns on the cashier, about to rifle the cash register.

We’ll notice as we go through the rest of the film that whenever we see Otto and Bud in a store buying drinks, the three punk rock thieves will also be there. Repo men and thieves are thus being associated with each other. This juxtaposition sends the message to us that repossession, properly understood, is stealing. Bud himself admits this earlier when he’s explaining to Otto how much money you can make when you “rip [off]” a car. Making money by stealing: this is also known as capitalism.

In an outtake (link above, at about 6:42), we see Bud trying to repo a car from a man named Arthur Pakman. Bud gives him his name card, which curiously has the name “I.G. Farben” on it. This is the name of a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that became a donor and major contractor to the Nazi government, relying on slave labour from the concentration camps; one of its subsidiaries supplied Zyklon B. That a repo man would have such a name on his name card is an obvious satirical comment on the corrupt Sodom and Gomorrah that is capitalist society, the fascism that hides behind its ‘freedom.’

More impingement occurs when Bud and Otto are driving around a concrete riverbed, and they encounter the Rodriguez brothers (played by Del Zamora and Eddie Velez) in their car, one of them flipping Bud off. They get into a car chase for a while, and Bud and Otto end up stuck in a puddle. Annoyed, Bud says he and Otto ought to go off and get drinks. Otto is amused at how “intense” the car chase was; Bud says that a repo man’s life is always intense.

Duke, Archie (with a paper bag on his head), and Debbi have just finished robbing the store that Otto and Bud are about to enter; the thieves have impinged on the store. They run out, and Archie knocks into a waist-high pole by the door, hurting himself in the balls…more impingement.

Next, Otto and Lite (Richardson) are driving up to Miss Magruder’s car, stopped at a traffic light, and get ready to repo it. Lite gives him a bag with a dead rat in it to throw into her car to upset and distract her, then Otto can get the car. He throws the rat on the seat just beside her; she sprays mace in his face and drives off when the light turns green. He who lives by impingement shall die by impingement, or get blinded by it, as the men of Sodom were.

After that, Otto and Bud drive over to repo a Cadillac owned by a millionaire named Peason, who is in a laundromat talking to two kids about the laundry, and how he wants it arranged. He has an unsurprisingly condescending attitude toward the kids. When Otto rips off the car, Peason runs out of the laundromat, and the kids toss his clothes outside while laughing at him. It’s hard to sympathize with a rich guy who can’t be bothered to make the payments on his Cadillac.

As he’s driving around in the Cadillac, Otto sees Leila running on the sidewalk. She’s attractive, so naturally he slows down to talk to her. He wants to offer her a ride, but she’s distracted him from his driving, so he drives his car into a pile of garbage on the side of the road (impingement), angering an old lady who nags him to clean it up; he ignores her, of course, Leila gets in the car, and he drives off.

It’s here where we learn that Parnell has been driving around with aliens in his trunk. She shows Otto a photo “of four dead aliens.” He laughs in disbelief at her story. Since she’s being chased by government men associated with Rogersz in their own car, Leila has ducked down and hidden herself from them; she’s afraid they’ll kill her over the aliens. She explains to Otto that Parnell has smuggled the aliens from an air force base in his Malibu. She needs to find him before Rogersz et al do.

In this sense, Leila and Parnell are like Lot and his family, and the government people are like the men of Sodom, so to speak. Otto drops Leila off at her place of work, “The United Fruitcake Outlet,” which sounds like a flippant pun on the United Fruit Company. Apart from the aliens being associated with the angels in the Lot in Sodom story, their deadly radiation implies an association with Soviet nuclear weapons, a capability that the American government would like to be about to take from them, as would any capitalists, such as the United Fruit Company, who spearheaded a coup against the leftist Guatemalan government in 1954 (remember the selling of Bibles to El Salvador in this connection).

It’s easy to see Rogersz’s government agents as the bad guys here, but one shouldn’t assume that Leila’s ‘fruitcake’ group of people are any more sympathetic just because she becomes Otto’s girlfriend…or something (Leila and Parnell aren’t the good guys, just as Lot’s family aren’t all that good, either, as we learn in Genesis 19–Lot offering his daughters for the sexual sport of the Sodomites, his daughters getting him drunk and committing incest with him, etc.). Recall how later Leila helps Agent Rogersz torture him by electric shock to get information as to where the Malibu is. At the end of the film, he leaves Leila to go in the car with Miller (Walter); she asks Otto about her “relationship” with him, and when he blows her off, she angrily says she’s glad she helped Rogersz torture him.

There isn’t really anyone in Repo Man who can be called a ‘good guy’ in a more or less pure sense. As I said, the LA of this film is a modern-day Sodom, a corrupt, impinging, inhospitable place. Even the aliens in the Malibu’s trunk, whom I’ve associated with the Biblical angels on the one hand, and with the USSR on the other (radiation>>Atomic Age>>Soviet nuclear weapons), aren’t to be considered the ‘good guys,’ given that this film is a product of Hollywood liberalism, which has no more sympathy for leftist anti-capitalism than conservatives do.

Accordingly, everyone in the film, those from the far-right to the left-of-centre of the political spectrum, wants to get his hands on the Malibu. Thus Agent Rogersz and Leila wanting to find it is simply symbolic of competing capitalists/imperialists wanting to thwart the Soviet accumulation of nuclear power, as represented by the radiation in the trunk of the Malibu. To repo the Malibu, one will get the unusually high reward of $20,000.

After repossessing a red car, Lite and Otto are driving around in it, and at one point, Lite mentions a book he once found when he swiped a Maserati in Beverly Hills. The book is called Dioretix: the Science of Matter over Mind. “That book will change your life,” Lite tells Otto. It is obviously a parody of L. Ron Hubbard‘s 1950 book, Dianetcs, and therefore a satirical stab at self-help books and pseudoscience in general. (Matter over mind? Not vice versa?)

In the next scene, we see Otto with Miller in a vacant lot. Otto is holding his copy of Dioretix and is about to toss it into a burning garbage can. Miller goes into a big spiel about how many things that seem to be coincidences are really interconnected in some secret, profound, mystical way; it sounds like Jung‘s notion of synchronicity, but Miller’s use of a plate of shrimp as an example of how it works sounds idiotic.

It seems as though Miller has been reading Dioretix, too. His absurd attempts at philosophical profundity give Otto the impression that he must have done way too much LSD over the years. Still, Miller seems like more of a Dostoyevskyan idiot, for though Miller expresses his opinions with ludicrous examples, he seems to have his instincts in the right places, for at the end of the movie, he gets into the Malibu, his gut correctly telling him that it’s an alien vehicle, a spaceship that goes up into the night sky, then into space, and…who knows?…may well even travel time, as he imagines flying saucers and time machines to be one and the same thing. He is a working-class man with a spark of intelligence never properly developed because of a lack of money for higher education.

When it’s learned from the repo men that the reward for finding the Malibu is $20,000 (and it’s speculated that the large amount of money offered for the car is due to it containing drugs, rather than celestial beings, symbolically linking the drug speculation to the “opium of the people”), Otto calls Leila about the car to arouse her interest. He, however, is aroused by her body, and when he arrives at The United Fruitcake Outlet, he tries to get sex from her…or at least a blowjob. Angered by his impinging on her at work, she slaps him…twice. He who leers with impingement shall get slapped with impingement.

But now that so many people are licking their lips over that $20,000, Bud is imagining a life of financial security without needing to work anymore. He insists to Lite that he can achieve this security with $20,000 because he has good credit.

In the next scene, he’s driving with Otto and telling him about how important credit is: it’s “a sacred trust,” what the American “free society is founded on.” (That’s funny: I thought American ‘freedom’ was founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, but I digress…) This “sacred trust,” combined with getting the coveted money, is what Bud imagines is the capitalist ‘liberation’ he has within his reach.

He compares this dutiful payment of bills and debts favourably to how the Soviets don’t “give a damn about their bills.” When Otto implies that not needing to pay bills in the USSR is a better deal, Bud (recall his IG Farben name card from the outtake) takes umbrage at such an implication and wonders if Otto is a “commie.” So many Americans are brainwashed about what ‘freedom’ is under capitalism to such an extent that it’s inconceivable to them how not needing to pay bills is one of the most liberating things possible.

Now, Bud doesn’t want to sound too right-wing, so while he won’t tolerate any “commies” in his car, he doesn’t want any Christians in it, either. Such an odd appendage to his hatred of the left can only be explained, in my opinion, as an ego defence anticipating an accusation of far-right thinking, or an attempt to seem centrist and liberal. One ought, however, to take into account the “fish hook theory,” which illustrates how liberalism and centrism are actually closer to fascism (remember again Bud’s IG Farben name card) than communism ever was, in spite of what that nonsensical horseshoe theory says.

Parnell drives over to a gas station, where Kevin has a new job. The nerdy boy still kisses capitalist ass, doing the phony friendly-to costumers attitude and hoping it will lead to advancement. He approaches Parnell and offers a vacuum of the Malibu, but the sweaty old man wants to find junk food from vending machines, imagining such food to be healthy. Kevin offers to check Parnell’s trunk, and luckily for him, he ends up not doing so.

He does the same ass-kissing routine for the Rodriguez brothers, who recognize the nearby Malibu and swipe it while Parnell is gone and Kevin is looking for a non-existent box of matches for the brothers in the gas station office.

In someone’s home, Otto tries, instead of outright repossessing the car of a sweet middle-aged black lady named Mrs. Parks (interesting choice for a name on Cox’s part!), to get her to pay the rest of what she owes for it. Her musician son and his bandmates, all huge guys, come home and, learning Otto is a repo man, beat him up outside. Oh, the karma of impingement…

Otto returns to the lot at Helping Hand, and Miller bandages up his wounds. Plettschner, a cop played by Richard Foronjy, interestingly has the same first name as Otto but is practically the opposite in personality or likability. He gets in Otto’s face by saying he isn’t cut out to be a repo man, getting a “fuck you” reply, which just gets the already obnoxious cop angry, so he brags about all of his ‘achievements’ as a veteran and as a prison guard, whereas Otto is just a “punk” and a “little scumbag.” ACAB.

The Rodriguez brothers carelessly lose the Malibu, which is literally and figuratively hot (from the radiation), to Duke, Archie, and Debbi, who see their chance and steal it while it’s unattended. Otto and Lite try to repo a car, but the owner shoots at them. Lite takes out a pistol of blanks and shoots back, telling terrified Otto to get in the car and repo it. As we can see, this juxtaposition of swiping cars shows how repo men are hardly any different from any ordinary car thief. Otto is increasingly realizing that repo men, with their guns and intense lives, are crazy.

Leila is talking to Parnell on public phones, but a car with Rogersz’s agents smashes into her phone booth just after she’s gotten out; they chase and catch her, put her in their car, and take her away. Rogersz is in a van, looking at Leila on a monitor and questioning her about the Malibu. When Leila mentions the aliens in the trunk, Rogersz asks her if she’s ever thought of working for the CIA, Leila having already said she is in no way averse to torturing people. As we can see, the sides these two women work for aren’t all that opposed to each other.

Next, there’s a party in the Helping Hand yard. The staff ask Otto who beat him up, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Marlene (McGee) asks Plettschner why he won’t go after Otto’s attackers, but the cop says he’s on his coffee break. ACAB. Bud says that repo men should get their revenge on Otto’s attackers without the need of cops. “Just like John Wayne,” Marlene says, sneering at the men, who insist that the Duke is the greatest of American men.

Miller rains on the parade of the repo men’s worshipping of this epitome of American machismo by calling John Wayne “a fag” who wears dresses. (One might recall, in this connection, the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo [Dustin Hoffman] tells Joe Buck [Jon Voight] that dressing like a cowboy in New York makes him look like a gay prostitute; Buck, shocked, says, “John Wayne? You wanna tell me he’s a fag?”)

The importance of this scene isn’t about the homophobia (though homophobia links this scene with the homophobia in the Lot in Sodom story, as discussed above). It’s a satiric jab at conventional masculine roles, something further developed when Oly says lots of straight men like to watch their friends fuck, as do Oly and tough-guy Plettschner…apparently.

The repo men insist that Otto tell them who beat him up, and he lies and says that it was his old boss, Humphries, who gets beaten up that night at his home. It’s hard to sympathize with a petit bourgeois capitalist, all the same.

Leila has Otto meet up with Rogersz in a bar to discuss the Malibu and the aliens in the trunk. The two women stress the urgency of finding the car. Recall how the aliens, via the radiation, represent the Soviet power that the women, in turn representing capitalist and state interests, want to get their hands on.

While this is all going on, significantly, the Circle Jerks are performing in the pub as a nightclub band. They’re playing a lame and square acoustic version (this must be deliberate) of their punk song, “When the Shit Hits the Fan.” It’s easy to see why Otto would say, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.” Recall that the bassist of the Circle Jerks is playing Kevin the nerd.

The song, as you can glean from the lyric, is about economic hard times that hit the poor the hardest. It is an ironic take on the Reaganite way of seeing the problem: “blame the government for hard times”; “let’s leech off the state/gee, the money’s really great,” thanks to “welfare checks,” and “free loaves of bread.” However, thanks to Reagan, “social security has run out on you and me,” meaning that it’s the capitalist government, not a ‘socialist’ one (something the US has never had, by the way), that we should blame.

So when we see the Circle Jerks having changed from a punk band into a lame night club one, the transformation parallels what’s happened to Otto (from punk rocker to repo man), to his parents (from hippies to supporters of a televangelist), and to Leila (from avoiding the government to working for them). All of these transformations allegorize the Reaganite metamorphosis of a welfare capitalist society, one where there’s at least the hope of evolving into a more left-leaning one, into a nakedly neoliberal capitalist society, the worst of which we have now in the 2020s.

Small wonder when Duke, Archie, and Debbi enter the bar and see Otto, they speak derisively to the repo man, annoyed that he’s too busy with work to hang out with his punk friends. Though Otto’s choice of work is a bad one, no other money-making opportunities have been opened to him. As the Circle Jerks sing, “We just get by however we can/We all gotta duck when the shit hits the fan.”

Of course, the trio of punk thieves aren’t all that much better. Committing petty crimes hardly improves society. Debbi thinks Agent Rogerzs’s metal arm is fascinating: it merely symbolizes how the system has dehumanized her and made her part of ‘the machine,’ as it were. The three punks, in their own way, have degenerated from their would-be revolutionary ideals, as have Otto, his parents, Leila, and this fictionalized version of the Circle Jerks.

The three thieves leave the bar and find Parnell trying to retrieve his Malibu. They feel he’s impinging on him, not realizing he was originally impinged on, first by the thieving Rodriguez brothers, and then by these three. Their sticking their noses into his business is no different, in principle, to the cop’s having done so at the beginning of the film, so fittingly, Archie suffers the same fate as the cop. Duke and Debbi run off in terror, and Parnell gets his car back.

The Rodriguez brothers are driving along and see Parnell in the Malibu. They claim to be “special deputies” and tell him to pull over. This pretence of authority to justify taking away a man’s car is how we can see no substantive difference between cops, repo men, and car thieves. Might makes right in the end.

This mutual identity is especially apparent when the repo men, in Bud’s car, find the Rodriguez brothers and Parnell in the Malibu, then start vying over who will get the coveted car, which soon drives off. Bud et al get into a violent altercation with the Rodriguez brothers. Swinging a baseball bat at the two, Bud would like to repo their car, but they insist they’ve paid it off.

Because Bud hit one of the brothers with the bat, they’re suing Helping Hand “for malicious damages,” and Bud has lost his job in a nasty falling-out with Oly. He is next seen in a car with Otto. They’re driving in a neighbourhood with a bunch of homeless people. Bud has just lost his job, but he still has no sympathy for them; he’s internalized the Reaganite attitude that the destitute have somehow ‘chosen’ their lot, and they’re leeching off the welfare system. Bud doesn’t understand that, as an unemployed man, he’s closer to being one of the homeless than he is to being the ‘made man’ he thinks the repoing of the Malibu will make him.

Otto is so disgusted with Bud’s attitude that he gets out of the car and walks down the neighbourhood with the homeless, people who truly deserve our sympathy. People in radiation suits carry off a dead body and put it in a car trunk…rather like those melting aliens.

Otto then sees the Malibu. His sympathy for the poor dissolves, he has dollar signs in his eyes, and he runs after the car. Parnell lets Otto in the car, and they drive together. Parnell is actually dying right there as he’s driving, from his exposure to the radiation in the trunk with the aliens. His ability even to focus and follow a conversation is clearly impaired when, during his conversation with Otto, he mishears the boy saying he represents the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, hearing instead radiation, something impinging on Parnell’s brain.

Parnell claims, in his obvious, growing mental instability, that any talk of radiation being bad for you is “pernicious nonsense.” Then he speaks glowingly of lobotomies, a friend of his and he himself each having apparently had one. Soon, he slumps over the steering wheel and dies. Otto gets him out of the Malibu and drives it to the Helping Hand repo yard.

It seems that Otto’s going to get the $20,000 for the Malibu, so at a party at Miller’s that night, the wives of several repo men, including Oly’s, are all over Otto…”like flies on shit.” Someone, however, has broken into the yard and taken the Malibu. Otto goes walking outside; Bud drives by, and Otto gets in the car. They’ll go to that liquor store to get some drinks again.

Duke and Debbi are in a car just outside the store. He’s talking, in all absurdity, about how they ought to settle down, get a house, and have a baby, since “everybody does it,” and it “seems like the thing to do.” Here we see yet another example of initially rebellious attitudes degenerating into mere social conformity–from rebel to liberal. She can hear how ridiculous he sounds, and so they just go into the store to rob it.

Otto and Bud are in the store, and a gunfight ensues. Debbi shoots, and her bullet grazes the side of Bud’s head. Duke is mortally wounded. As he’s dying, he does a melodramatic speech about how ‘tragic’ his demise is, and that it’s society’s fault that he became a criminal, but he’s a white suburban (implying at least middle class) punk. He who lives by impingement, dies by it.

Since the Malibu is missing, the agents are trying to find it. Marlene and Otto want to stop the agents from getting it, but Plettschner, dick that he is, tries to stop her and Otto from stopping the agents. Otto throws scalding hot coffee on the cop’s face (serves him right–ACAB), and Otto and Marlene run out the door; but he’s caught by the agents.

Leila and Rogersz torture Otto to get information about the Malibu. Leila is still a little conflicted about hurting her apparent boyfriend, but Rogersz rationalizes torturing him with a typical psychopathic projection: “no one is innocent,” apparently. Marlene and the Rodriguez brothers break into the room where Otto’s being held and get him out of there. Rogersz is fine with this, since it will lead her to wherever the Malibu is.

The search for the car continues, and even the reverend is interested in it, which shouldn’t be at all surprising. Considering what the Malibu, which is glowing now, represents as I’ve described above, it’s easy to see how commie-hating religion fits in with the capitalist state as personified by Leila and Rogersz, respectively.

Eventually, the car is found in the Helping Hand lot, angelically glowing with Bud at the wheel. It’s raining ice cubes, a kind of dialectical opposite of raining fire and brimstone over Sodom. This is fitting, if we equate the Malibu with Lot’s house, and equate everyone gathering to get at the car with the men of Sodom surrounding Lot’s house.

Otto goes up to Bud and tries to make a deal over what percentage of the reward money each of them will get for the car. Someone from a helicopter above warns Bud to get out of the Malibu. He gets out, but he’s brandishing a pistol. He’s shot from someone in the helicopter, but before he dies, Bud quotes Emiliano Zapata, in all irony, given Bud’s established opposition to revolutionary ideas: “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

The agents get close to the car, but sense “a strange, eerie kind of force field” surrounding it. Another agent approaching the Malibu catches fire. The reverend comes near the car holding a large Bible; he’s flanked by others in religious garb, as he himself is dressed, and Rogersz is with him, even calling him “your holiness,” implying a link between the state and religion that the ruling class would keep intact. A bolt of lightning from the car zaps the Bible in his hands, causing him to expose the phoniness of his “holiness” by saying “holy sheep-shit!” The Church is every bit as corrupt and sinful as everyone else in LA, the modern Sodom.

The force-field, the fire, and the bolt of lightning coming from the car thus all parallel the angels (i.e., the aliens in the trunk) striking the men of Sodom intruding into Lot’s house (i.e., the Malibu) with blindness.

So who is worthy of getting into the Malibu and driving it (even though he can’t drive)? Miller is, and he waves at Otto to join him inside for a ride. Miller, recall, is the Dostoyevskyan idiot whose innocence and lack of interest in the $20,000 makes him worthy. Now, Otto, spurning Leila and her association with capitalism (the United Fruitcake Outlet) and the state (Rogersz and the agents), as well as his tiring of the repo man job, is now also worthy of being in the car and enjoying its true benefits.

The aliens take the car up into the sky. Just as Lot and his daughters escaped the sin of Sodom, Otto and Miller fly up in the car into space and freedom from the sin of LA and the rest of the world.

Flood

We
are all
being killed
as punishment
for the sins of greedy and powerful people.

The
world
burning
is not a problem for those with underground bunkers.

An
ocean
drowning everyone won’t soak the rich’s modern arks.

No
Ararat peaks need keep their heads above the rising water.

It’s Noah and his kin who are the wicked ones this time.

Analysis of ‘Foxtrot’

I: Introduction/Album Cover

Foxtrot is the fourth album by Genesis, having come out in 1972. It is the second of their albums with drummer/singer Phil Collins and lead guitarist Steve Hackett; it’s also their last album to have the cover artwork of Paul Whitehead (who also did the cover for Van der Graaf Generator‘s album, Pawn Hearts), as the band didn’t like the cover.

The most striking image we see on the surreal cover is that of a woman in a red dress with a fox’s head, or a “foxy lady,” hence the title of the album–also Whitehead’s idea. Singer Peter Gabriel, being the oh, so theatrical frontman that he was for Genesis as a progressive rock band at the time, dressed up in a red dress and fox’s head for the album’s tour. The rest of the band at first were uncomfortable with Gabriel’s ‘crossdressing,’ but when his showmanship gave the band lots of press attention, they were more accepting of it.

The ‘foxy lady’ is standing on a piece of ice floating on the water near a shore. If we look at the back cover, we’ll see four fox hunters on horses looking at her. Whitehead meant them to represent the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, since the end of the world is a major theme of the album–not just the “Apocalypse in 9/8” at the climax of the side-long epic “Supper’s Ready,” but also the aftermath of that as the subject of “Watcher of the Skies” opening Side One. One of the riders has an alien’s head, suggesting the alien watcher of the skies looking down on our world’s demise.

Fox hunters eyeing the foxy lady suggests male lechery. Note again her floating on that plate of ice on the water. She could be seen as personifying our Mother Earth. Let’s juxtapose this interpretation with the four fox hunters of the Apocalypse. The “foxtrot” of these four lustful men, going after the Earth, is destroying her. Global warming, along with rising sea levels, caused by such things as ocean heating and Antarctic ice loss, was a growing concern in the scientific community already by the beginning of the 1970s, around when Foxtrot was conceived.

An allusion to the cover design of the band’s previous album, Nursery Cryme, can be seen in a detail on the back cover of Foxtrot. The macabre croquet game (with decapitated heads instead of balls) depicted on the front cover of Nursery Cryme, reflecting the British upper class and implying their oppression of the working class, is thus linked with how the ruling class today is harming the environment for the sake of profit, which in turn is bringing about the end of the world for all of us. The profit motive, of course, is a major theme of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.”

One of the horsemen, as I mentioned above, is an alien, implying his disconnect from humanity, symbolic of the social estrangement caused by capitalism. Another horseman has a monkey’s head, implying the foolishness of recklessly exploiting and raping the Earth out of a desire to maximize profit. Another horseman has a handkerchief to his face: he’s weeping, implying remorse over the wrongs done to the Earth. The last horseman has an unusually long nose, implying that he’s a lying Pinocchio, disingenuously claiming he’s doing no harm to the Earth, like the climate change deniers. His mendacity can be linked to that of the “Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” (GESM).

Here‘s a link to the album’s lyrics, here‘s a link to a large image of the whole cover, and here‘s a link to all the music on the album.

II:Watcher of the Skies

“Watcher of the Skies” opens with a dark passage that keyboardist Tony Banks plays on a Mellotron he’d just bought from King Crimson, whose leader, Robert Fripp, would have wanted to get rid of on account of its tuning problems. The two opening major chords we hear in the song, a B-major seventh/F-sharp and a C-sharp/F-sharp, sounded especially good to Banks on this Mellotron, though, in spite of its faults; in fact, those chords sounded better on this instrument than on later Mellotrons Banks used. These two chords will be heard during the bridges between verses in the song, too.

Soon after these two opening chords, we hear Banks play cadences including Neapolitan chords: a first-inversion C-sharp major chord going into a cadence with G major and C major, this latter chord being the Neapolitan chord leading to an F-sharp major and a B minor added sixth. Soon after that, he does an ascension of minor chords in G-sharp, A-sharp, and C, then to G-sharp minor again, going down to chords in F-sharp major, E major, up to A major, and back down to G-sharp minor, then down to an F-diminished chord. This more-or-less descending progression will be heard again towards the end of the song.

The opening two chords return, and the rest of the band comes in, with Collins doing a kind of “Morse code” rhythm on the drums, a rhythm also played in a one-note staccato motif in F-sharp by Hackett and bassist Mike Rutherford. This main riff is said to be played in 6/4 time, though I’d notate it as an alternating 4/4 and 2/4, since 6/4 is a compound duple subdivided three plus three.

The progression resolves to F-sharp major, and Gabriel begins singing, with Banks accompanying him on organ, and that staccato motif is heard not as one note, but as C-sharp, F-sharp (9x), then octaves of F-sharp. The line “watcher of the skies” comes from John Keats‘s 1817 poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Now, the new world that Keats, as a watcher of the skies, has seen upon reading George Chapman‘s brilliant translation of Homer‘s poetry (the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Batrachomyomachia) is an exciting discovery, a happy one. In contrast, the alien watcher of the skies that Gabriel sings of sees the remains of a most unfortunate world, a world we have destroyed. We have brought about our own apocalypse, a theme to be explored later.

“Now [our] reign has come to end/Has life again destroyed life?” Our foolishness in doing so is described as if it’s a form of childishness, for perhaps we “play elsewhere” now. Could we be capable of more than our mere “childhood games?” In the lizard’s shedding of its tail, the end of this civilization could bring the birth of a new one.

After this bridge, we have a verse in F-sharp major again, but with Gabriel stomping on the pedal of a bass drum to double that of Collins’s drum kit. Gabriel is also shaking a tambourine as he sings of how one shouldn’t judge a humanity already dead. After all, they’re unable to defend themselves against the reproaches they’re sure to get.

After this verse, we hear Rutherford play a bass riff, to the tight accompaniment of Collins’s drums, in one bar of 4/4 time, then Hackett does a lead in a bar of 7/16, then one in 4/4 with triplets; then we’re back to the alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Banks playing those two opening chords again on the organ.

With this next bridge, Gabriel seems to be singing his “parting counsel” to us at the present moment, warning us that our journey isn’t done. Our ship may be sturdy, that is, the Western empire and the liberal order of the 1970s may feel as though it’s safe and secure, but the sea has “no mercy” (at the time, there were fears of nuclear war and the USSR), and would we “survive on the ocean of being”?

As of now, that old Cold War is no longer a problem, but that doesn’t matter, since there’s a new Cold War happening right now, giving this old song new relevance fifty years later. Our “thoughts turn to the stars,” sadly: “this is [our] fate alone.” Towards the end of the song, that “Morse Code” rhythm in alternating 4/4 and 2/4 gets expanded to two bars of 4/4; then the song ends with that descending keyboard progression I discussed that occurred during the Mellotron opening.

III: Time Table

“Time Table” is solely Banks’s song, musically and lyrically, and it’s centred around piano progressions. It opens with him playing two melodic lines in largely parallel motion on the piano.

Gabriel sings of the medieval world in a manner similar to how that world is portrayed in Rush‘s song, “A Farewell to Kings.” It’s depicted as a noble era from which we in the modern world have sadly declined. As with the Rush album, whose themes also include an idealizing of the past, though, we have to wonder if Banks is in earnest, or if he’s being ironic.

I’m betting on the latter. His references to “legends born” strongly implies that he’s perfectly aware that the ‘nobility’ of medieval times was a fiction. The key to seeing the irony is in these lines: “It seems because through time and space/Though names may change each face retains the mask it wore,” followed by a cloyingly mawkish melody in E major on what sounds like one of those old 18th century fortepianos. We hear a train of tinklingly high Bs before going down a fifth to E, then F-sharp, G-sharp, and a B an octave lower. The melody then modulates to F-sharp major before going to the next verse. The mawkishness of this tune, sounding as it does, as if it’s being played on such an old piano, reinforces the theme of a foolishly idealized past.

The point of the song is that, though this “carved oak table” from the past–where kings and queens once sat–is now dusty and of “musty smells” where “only the rats hold sway,” those times of the past had their faults, too. Times may change, but the masks people wear remain the same.

So many idealize the past as some ‘Golden Age’ from which we today have fallen. Surely the feudal era, with its impoverished vast majority, its religious superstition, and royal authoritarianism, is no improvement on our capitalist modern world, as bad as it admittedly is.

IV: Get ‘Em Out by Friday

…and speaking of capitalism, we now come to the next song, “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” In the first song, we encountered the end of the world from an alien’s perspective. Each of the following songs in its own way seems to explain one of many factors leading to humanity’s demise.

A traditionalist, ultraconservative demonizing of progress through praising an idealized past (“Time Table”) at the expense of the present, instead of looking ahead to the future in an attempt to improve the quality of our lives, is one of those destructive factors. Capitalism was an improvement on feudalism; it was even revolutionary several centuries ago. It isn’t revolutionary now, though, and that’s where the problems dealt with in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” come in…as a matter of landlords.

The song begins with a spirited passage in 6/8 and in the key of A major. Banks does a quick, ascending organ run of sixteenth notes from G-sharp to C-sharp. Then the progression goes down to E major, then up to the relative minor in F-sharp, and we hear that ascending organ run of sixteenth notes again.

Then it goes to the mediant in C-sharp minor, then to the subdominant in D major, with Hackett playing an ascension, in thirds, of alternating quarter and eighth notes starting on F-sharp and A, and ending with tied and dotted half notes in E and G-natural, then a parallel ascension from B and D to whole notes in A and C-sharp, with a change to 4/4 time. Variations of these two ascensions will be heard later in the song, one example being in a theme in Mrs. Barrow‘s verse with these lines: “I don’t know why, it seemed so funny/Seeing as how they’d take more money.”

Now the key is A-natural minor, and we hear Banks playing eighth-note triads on the organ; first, a bar in 7/4, then back to 4/4. The rhythm is in triplets.

Gabriel begins singing in the harsh voice of ruthless businessman John Pebble, of Styx Enterprises. He orders Mark Hall, “The Winkler,” to evict all the tenants in properties in Harlow that Styx has recently bought. In the Cockney accent of The Winkler, Gabriel sings to Mrs. Barrow, a tenant, that she must move out.

In The Winkler, we see an example of a crucial element not only in capitalism, but in all systems of power: the servile obedience of underlings to their masters’ laws and edicts. The systems of oppression that we all suffer under wouldn’t exist if the common people, like The Winkler, would simply refuse to do their bosses’ bidding. We’ll come back to this servility in my discussion of the next song, “Can-Utility and the Coastliners.”

Gabriel sings in Mrs. Barrow’s voice of her shock and dismay at the greed of her evictors, while plaintive music is played on 12-string guitar and Mellotron (flute tape). She’s willing to “pay double the rent,” but this isn’t enough for the new owners of the property, who know it’s “good money gone if [they] let them stay.” Under capitalism, it isn’t enough to make money–profits have to be maximized.

To her even greater shock, Mrs. Barrow learns, upon moving to “Harlow New Town,” the new area where Pebble et al want her and the other evictees to live, that they want to raise the rent. This, surely, will allow Styx to get back the four hundred pounds they gave the evictees to goad them into moving, plus get a lot more money, over time.

After a brief solo by Hackett of sobbing guitar leads over Banks’s organ triads, we come to an instrumental interlude meant to represent the passage of time over about forty years. The main motif of this passage is five notes played on the bass and organ: E D E D F-sharp. Soon after, we hear E D E D F-natural. This motive is harmonized on the Mellotron (flute tape again) and Gabriel’s flute.

When Gabriel’s singing returns, we’ve gone from 1972 to 2012, which I find most interesting from our point of view living now. The social commentary and prophetic nature of Gabriel’s lyric (inspired by his own landlord troubles of the time) are even more prescient, in a metaphorical sense as I’ll explain below, than he must have imagined.

One should bear in mind just how much the world has actually changed since the writing of this lyric, just before the 1973-1975 recession marking the end of Keynesian state intervention in failing economies and of the beginning of the end of welfare capitalism, and the dawn of neoliberalism and the “free market,” which in turn has metastasized into the horror it became by the 2010s.

Note how “Genetic Control” announces that there will be a restriction on tenants’ height to four feet. The directors of Genetic Control have been buying up all the properties recently sold, and with shorter tenants, “they can fit twice as many in the same building site,” thus doubling the money made in Pebble’s company, no longer Styx Enterprises, but now “United Blacksprings International” (sounds like BlackRock to me). Under capitalism, successful businesses grow into giant, multinational corporations.

We’ve all been made “shorter in height,” thanks to the depredations of contemporary neoliberalism. Capitalism makes the 99% small so the 1% can tower over us all. The cramming in of “twice as many in the same building site” reminds me of the terrible living conditions of the working class in 19th century England and elsewhere. See also Marx, pages 816-818.

Incidentally, Pebble has been knighted. When a rich, exploitative capitalist becomes Sir John De Pebble, we can see how foolish it is to idealize the era of kings, queens, and knights (à la “Time Table”).

“Satin Peter of Rock Development Ltd.”, an obvious pun on the saint, announces the coming of a capitalist heaven on Earth “with land in your hand.” Remember this religious imagery when we come to “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man” in “Supper’s Ready.”

V: Can-Utility and the Coastliners

“Can-Utility and the Coastliners” opens with 12-string acoustic guitars–as integral a part of the early Genesis sound as the Mellotron was of the early King Crimson sound–and Collins hitting a triangle. “Can-Utility” is a pun on Canute, an old king of England, Denmark, and Norway back in the 11th century. Surrounded by flatterers, the king showed them he had no extraordinary powers by sitting on his throne at the shore and commanding the tide to stop coming in, which of course it didn’t.

The song is mostly Hackett’s, with some musical contributions from Banks and Rutherford. Hackett’s lyric demonstrates how foolish blind deference and obsequiousness to authority is. As I said of The Winkler, this thoughtless obeying of orders is what gives evil leaders their power. Luckily for Canute’s flatterers, he was not that kind of king; he just wanted his flatterers to realize how foolish their ass-kissing was.

The song begins, as I said above, with 12-string acoustic guitars, playing arpeggios of B major, C-sharp minor seventh, and F-sharp seventh added flat ninth chords, and a strummed B major chord. Then the song goes to D major, and Gabriel begins singing.

He sings of a history book telling Canute’s story. The book is by the sea, just as Canute was, and its pages get “washed by the waves,” just as the king was. We hear a chord progression of D major, A major, G major, and A major as Gabriel sings of the shadow of a cloud looking down on those pages “as eyes of the past.” Just as a king should not be deified, or made into a cult of personality, neither should history or tradition be so revered uncritically.

We hear those major chords in D, A, G, A again when the king commands the waves to “halt at [his] feet.” With the same music, the king makes the same judgement about the foolishness of obsequiousness as those “eyes of the past” that looked down on the pages that praised a king’s modesty…or was it a false modesty? After all, some have claimed that the king vainly commanded those waves to stop because he really did think he could stop them. Either way, the point is made clear about excessive praise of power and authority.

Rutherford hits a low D on his bass pedal synthesizer and Collins comes in on the drums as Gabriel begins to sing of a coming storm near the king’s throne on the shoreline. We hear those D, A, G, A major chords again with words of flattery to the king. Hackett plays a lead of nine notes through a volume pedal as a segue to 12-string acoustic guitar playing in D minor.

Collins bangs in with the drums again during this instrumental passage, with vigorous 12-string acoustic guitar strumming, Rutherford pounding his foot on that D on the bass pedals, and Banks playing a dark theme on the Mellotron. The music seems to be depicting the waves splashing against Canute’s feet and his throne, humbling him and his flatterers.

One senses that maybe the king, deep down, was hoping the waves would obey him when Gabriel sings “he forced a smile even though his hopes lay dashed where offerings fell.” This leads to another instrumental passage, beginning with a chord progression of D minor, G major, C major, and A major. Gabriel plays an oboe melody over this progression.

While we hear the oboe, Rutherford puts his 12-string acoustic guitar aside, and no longer needing the bass pedals, picks up his bass guitar. The key changes to F-sharp major, and he’s playing fast notes in E and going from there to hammer-ons in F-sharp. Banks is playing arpeggios on the organ, first in one bar of 5/4, then back to 4/4, where the time stays largely the same, except for the occasional time change to a bar in 5/4 again, then to a bar of 3/4. During this time, Hackett does a solo, the first few notes using the volume pedal again.

The key switches to C major, and Gabriel resumes singing over alternating C and F major chords. The king’s modesty sure seems to be false (as far as Hackett’s lyric is concerned, at least), for he hopes that–as the tide soaks him–at least his former flatterers won’t laugh at him.

Well, they do eventually laugh, his face turns red with humiliation, and he dies. Sic semper tyrannus?

The song ends with some tricky riffs, perhaps musically suggestive of the awkwardness of the king’s situation. The 4/4 switches to a bar of 6/4 with an ascension of C-D-E-G-C-D-E, then down an octave to an eighth note in E before going back to a bar of 4/4, and a G in a tied whole note. Then a bar of 5/4 with the G from the previous bar as the first of six eighth notes, the others being a G an octave higher, then E, F, E, and C, and ending with a C an octave lower after a quarter and an eighth rest. Then alternating 6/4 and 4/4, and Gabriel singing about the king’s red face and his death. That’s the end of Side One.

VI: Horizons and Supper’s Ready

Side Two begins with another Hackett composition, a short solo for six-stringed acoustic guitar called “Horizons.” It’s a beautiful piece in G major, featuring a clever use of bell-like harmonics.

After that, we come to the great Genesis epic, “Supper’s Ready.” It’s 23 minutes long, and divided into seven parts, the first of which is called “Lover’s Leap,” based on an experience late at night that Gabriel had with his wife, Jill, in their London flat. Hackett claimed that there was some drug use, and that Jill began speaking in a completely different voice at one point, something reflected in Gabriel’s lyric, “I swear I saw your face change; it didn’t seem quite right.” He made a makeshift cross from household items, and she reacted violently. Obviously, it was a bad trip.

A later incident that inspired some of this part’s lyric was when Gabriel looked out the window and saw seven shrouded men walking across the lawn to his parents’ house. These disturbing experiences would evolve into an epic story about good vs evil, including a journey through various scenes from the Book of Revelation, whose apocalypse ties in thematically with the end-of-the-world scenario of “Watcher of the Skies.” We’ve already dealt with such forms of evil as greed in “Get ‘Em Out by Friday.” (1 Timothy 6:10)

The song begins on an A minor chord with an added 6th, with Gabriel and Collins coming in immediately, singing an octave apart from each other, while Hackett, Rutherford, and Banks are all playing arpeggiated chords on 12-string acoustic guitars. As I said above, this dulcet, harpsichord-like sound of three acoustic guitars together was a staple of the early Genesis sound, something they’d already established on such songs as “Stagnation” from Trespass and “The Musical Box” on Nursery Cryme.

As the band was developing the first part of “Supper’s Ready,” though, they didn’t want to repeat themselves too much, so they made sure to have their epic go in different musical directions, as we’ll hear later in a piano arrangement by Gabriel that would become “Willow Farm,” as well as an instrumental passage by Banks, Rutherford, and Collins that would become “Apocalypse in 9/8.”

Behind the vocals and acoustic guitars, we hear Collins strike a triangle again, and–on the studio version–Rutherford playing a cello. The importance of “Lover’s Leap,” from a lyrical and thematic standpoint, is how the love of the husband and wife at the beginning of the epic establishes the good against which the evil will be later contrasted.

Now, I understand–from the programme notes Gabriel wrote for concertgoers to give further explanation of what’s going on in the story–that the two lovers are supposed to be experiencing all the events of the plot together. Still, I feel that there’s a huge contradiction between the notes and when Gabriel sings, twice, “I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm [loving] arms. It’s good to feel you again”/[alternatively] “Now I’m back again.” These lines are heard toward the end of “Lover’s Leap,” and again at the beginning of “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with the variations as given above.

Why would the husband sing this if he’s been with his “babe” the whole time? I tend to think of Gabriel’s lyrics as more canonical and authoritative than his programme notes, which he could have written while stoned, for all we know. Note also the line “A distance falls around our bodies.” He summed up the story as “a personal journey,” suggesting that we’re meant to think of him “walking through scenes from Revelation in the Bible” alone, not with Jill.

Then again, maybe Jill is with him throughout the song, but only in a metaphorical sense. That is, he misses her, and she misses him, so they imagine themselves together as a kind of dream-like wish-fulfillment. Perhaps this is what’s being implied in the programme notes when they say that in the “Lover’s Leap” section, that they are “transformed in the bodies of another male and female.” Perhaps this, indeed, is what is meant by lover’s leap: it’s a leap of faith that, one day after the apocalypse, they’ll be together again. So they dream, perhaps in a drug-induced stupor, that they’ve been together the whole time, but seeing each other in the bodies of a different man and woman.

If my interpretation–that the lovers are apart from the end of “Lover’s Leap” to “As Sure As Eggs is Eggs”–is true, then I can see “Supper’s Ready” as allusive not only to the Bible, but also, in a subtle sense, to scenes from Odysseus‘ leaving of Ithaca to fight the Trojan War, to his odyssey to get back home–he and his wife, Penelope, missing each other’s touch for twenty years. I’m thinking in particular of the way the story is related in the 1997 TV miniseries starring Armand Assante (Odysseus) and Greta Scacchi (Penelope). In this sense, Gabriel’s watcher of the skies really is reading Chapman’s Homer.

The lovers’ bodies transformed into those of a different male and female, and yet together as such throughout the middle of “Supper’s Ready,” can thus be paralleled in The Odyssey to how, on the one hand, Odysseus sleeps with Circe and Calypso, and Penelope is troubled by a horde of obnoxious suitors on the other.

The seven shrouded men moving across the lawn could be paralleled with Menelaus, Agamemnon et al calling Odysseus to join them in retrieving Helen of Troy. It’s interesting how the seventh shrouded man in the front has “a cross held high in hand,” which seems like a projection of the makeshift cross Gabriel had, the one that upset Jill so much. I’m sure Penelope was deeply upset about her husband being taken from her by the suitors of Helen to go to war for so many years.

After all the verses of “Lover’s Leap” have been sung, we hear Banks play a solo on the Hohner Pianet while the 12-string acoustic guitars are playing in D minor. A harmonized tune is played by Hackett on his electric guitar using the volume pedal and Rutherford on the cello. After that, Gabriel comes in with a brief flute melody.

The song soon segues into “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” and we’re back in A minor, which in turn will soon become A major. A humble farmer simply looking after his farm is contrasted with a religious fraud, “who looks after the fire.” The farmer reminds me of Candide, who must cultivate his garden and not be distracted with philosophical and theological nonsense, while the “fireman” reminds me not only of how Pangloss has the opposite philosophical and theological attitude, but also of what a religious hypocrite Tartuffe is.

Religious frauds like the GESM are, of course, part of the evil of the world, promising heaven with their cure-all opium of the people, yet pulling us all into holy (and far-from-holy) wars, just as the GESM will do with his followers, who will do battle against “all those without an up-to-date ‘Eternal Life Licence‘,” as the programme notes tell us. This war, of course, is the subject of the next part, “Ikhnaton and Itsacon and Their Band of Merry Men.” This war also parallels the Trojan War, as I would have it.

“Ikhnaton” is Akhenaten, a pharaoh from 14th century BCE Egypt, not far in time or space from the Trojan War. We all know what the promise of heaven from the GESM is: it’s a con. The “band of merry men” sound like those of Robin Hood; yet the name must be ironic, for while those of Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor, those of the GESM steal to enrich himself.

This section is in D major, with Banks playing arpeggios on the organ, Rutherford quickly strumming a 12-string acoustic guitar, and Hackett tapping arpeggios in harmony with some more played by Banks on the organ. Just as Odysseus and the Greeks win the Trojan War, so does the GESM’s and the husband’s side win in our story. Thus ends this section, and we come to part IV, “How Dare I Be So Beautiful?”

It’s a soft passage in which Gabriel sings about the aftermath of the war and climbing up a pile of corpses. At the top, though, they (the survivors of the battle, or him and his wife, however you wish to interpret “we”) find “a plateau of green grass and green trees full of life.” It’s so surreal that they would find life up at the top of a mountain of death. Is this the GESM’s definition of heaven, after what he’d imagine to be a ‘life and death’ struggle with evil?

The husband’s journey through good vs evil and the apocalypse was also influenced by The Pilgrim’s Progress, which is also about a man, Christian, traveling from his hometown, the “City of Destruction,” or this world, to the “Celestial City,” or heaven, atop Mount Zion.

The husband sees “a young figure…by a pool.” Having “been stamped ‘Human Bacon’ by some butchery tool” sounds like his war injuries, or some other kind of wound. Narcissism’s origins are in some injury, or abuse, and we can see he has this kind of problem.

“He is you”…who? The husband’s wife? I suspect it’s the GESM, for he comes off as having narcissistic traits, given how he’s made for himself a cult of personality. “Babe” seems too sweet to have such vices as these.

The narcissism of powerful leaders is an evil that causes wars like the one just ended. The egotism of “this lad” causes him to turn into a flower, while his servile followers “watch in reverence.” And speaking of flowers, we then come to “Willow Farm.”

A willow, of course, is a tree or shrub–a plant. When willow leaves and bark are used medicinally, one doesn’t generally think about narcotics; when one considers the surreal lyric of “Willow Farm,” though, one may find it easy to think of willow as a kind of euphemism for drugs. So “Willow Farm” could be seen as a code for, say, cannabis farm.

Gabriel’s lyric playfully maximizes rhyme and wordplay, suggesting the imaginative flights of fancy of the stoned. I bring this up because this section of “Supper’s Ready” parallels that of The Odyssey dealing with the lotus eaters. Odysseus and his crew come to an island whose inhabitants eat lotus fruits and flowers, which have a narcotic quality, causing their eaters to sleep in peaceful apathy. This happens to Odysseus’ men, and he has to get them all back on his ship and sail away, for if he doesn’t, they’ll all stay there and never go home.

This lolling about is one of the evils that the husband must struggle against if he is to get back home and be with “Babe” again. So many of us, rather than band together in solidarity and fight the injustices of the world, prefer to sit around and smoke dope, lying about and doing nothing. In terms of the Seven Deadly Sins, this would be sloth.

In the lotus-land of Willow Farm, “everyone’s happy to be here.” If you go there, “open your eyes, it’s full of surprise [drug trip], everyone lies [tells lies, or lies down? I suspect the latter] like the fox on the rocks [inspiring the foxy lady on the cover, though I still insist she’s standing on a flat block of ice] and the musical box [reminding us of the first track on Nursery Cryme].”

Among the examples of surreal imagery in this lyric are “Winston Churchill dressed in drag [since this is not meant to be a reference to transgenderism, I’m delighted to hear that horrible man mocked], he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag.” Many bad things or people used to be good ones, or at least they were once perceived to be good. “The frog was a prince, the price was a brick, the brick was an egg, the egg was a bird.”

Such surreal imagery reinforces the idea that what’s being experienced in Willow Farm is a drug trip, or lotus-eating. Accordingly, the people are “as happy as fish, and gorgeous as geese, and wonderfully clean in the morning.” They’ve “got everything, [they’re] growing everything,” like good dope dealers.

In this stoned state, one never gets anywhere. As in the homunculus argument, one tries to explain a concept in terms of the concept itself, hence “mum to mud to mad to dad,” then “dad to dam to dum to mum.” One comes right back to where one started. Those in Willow Farm are thus like the lotus-eaters, high as kites and going nowhere.

However much the husband may yearn for his wife (“Mama, I want you now!”), just as Odysseus did among the lotus-eaters…or when with Circe or Calypso, for that matter…he’s stuck where he is and can’t get home (“like it or not…you’re under the soil…yes, deep in the soil…”).

Being seeds in the soil means that the husband and his fellow survivors of the war are underground, which can be associated with the Underworld, where Odysseus goes to learn from Tiresias how to sail safely back to Ithaca. “Willow Farm” segues into a soft instrumental passage during which Gabriel plays flute over guitar accompaniment in A minor. At the end of this is a marching snare drum with a trumpet-like restating of the GESM theme (“I know a fireman who looks after the fire.”). The martial nature of this restated theme reinforces the link between religious hypocrisy and war.

And now we come to the climactic “Apocalypse in 9/8 (Co-Starring the Delicious Talents of Gabbie Ratchet)”. Gabbie Ratchet refers to the Hounds of Hell; they’re also known as Gabriel’s Hounds. It’s called 9/8 time, but a compound triple should be subdivided three plus three plus three, not four plus five, as it is here.

The repeated riff, over which Banks improvises an organ solo, is eighth notes of E E F-sharp E B E E E F-sharp, heard on the guitar and bass, and briefly at one point on Gabriel’s flute. It was originally conceived as an organ improvisation with no defined time signature.

The lyrics are full of imagery from the Book of Revelation: “Magog” (20: 7-8, when Satan, released from his prison, assembles the nations of the Earth [including Magog] for battle); “Dragons coming out of the sea” (13:1), bringing “down the fire from the skies” (13:13); “666” (13:18), and “and the seven trumpets blowing” (8:2 and 6).

Now, the Revelation in the New Testament was referring, however poetically and cryptically, to events in the Graeco-Roman world in the latter half of the first century (i.e., Nero was the Antichrist); but Gabriel’s lyrics are bringing these ideas into the modern world, to a time when there were great fears of nuclear war between the US and the USSR. Since we’re in a new Cold War now, with the US/NATO empire on one side and Russia and China on the other, all nuclear-armed, the warnings of “Supper’s Ready” are all the more relevant today.

Indeed, it really does feel as if we’re coming dangerously close to the end of the world, not only because of this new Cold War, which is being expanded, it seems, to include the Middle East as struggles by Yemen to disrupt the Gaza genocide are being frustrated by the American empire (Israeli settler-colonialism in Palestine is a kind of “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” in its own right), but also by global warming (recall the foxy lady on the block of ice of Foxtrot‘s cover).

Those of us who want justice feel caught between Scylla and Charybdis: if we intervene in an attempt to bring about revolution, the fascist police can shoot us down; if we sit back and do nothing like the stoned lotus-eaters, letting the imperialists have their way (their all-too-obedient police and military being the Winklers and Canute-flatterers of our day), we’ll all die. Speaking of Scylla and Charybdis, the apocalypse of “Supper’s Ready” could be compared to the unavoidable danger and death faced by Odysseus and his crew, six of whom die.

Towards the end of “Apocalypse in 9/8,” after Banks’s organ solo and Gabriel’s singing of the second verse, Banks comes in with the Mellotron and plays a descending melodic line of high E, E-flat, D, and C. Then the song segues into the seventh and last part, “Sure As Eggs Is Eggs (Aching Men’s Feet),” with a reprise of the “and it’s ‘Hey babe, with your guardian eyes so blue'” section of “Lover’s Leap.” Just as Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca and into Penelope’s arms, so does the husband finally return (as I insist, in my interpretation of Gabriel’s lyrics, happens) to his wife.

Note how passionately Gabriel sings of how far away, and for so long, he’s been from her “loving arms.” This doesn’t sound like a man whose woman has been with him the whole time, as the programme notes would have us believe. Collins hits some tubular bells for even greater dramatic effect: first, a first-inversion B major triad, then B, B-flat, A-flat, G-flat, E. One might think of church bells, since a happy ending after the apocalypse can only be the attainment of heaven.

Just as the lovers could be likened to Odysseus and Penelope, in the context of all the Biblical imagery in Gabriel’s lyrics, the couple could also be likened to the Christian bride (the Church) and the groom (Christ), as the lovers of the Song of Songs are often allegorized. Recall also the influence of The Pilgrim’s Progress, as I mentioned above.

And with the “angel standing in the sun…crying with a loud voice, ‘This is the supper of the mighty God'” (Revelation 19:17), we come to the inspiration for the title of this side-long epic. (One might also think of Psalm 23:5.)

But what does all of this Christian symbolism mean? Note how the music of this last section is, ironically, the same as that of “The Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man,” but much more passionate, climactic, and sincere. In these two sections of “Supper’s Ready,” we have a contrast between the religious hypocrisy of the GESM and the heartfelt love and genuine spirituality of “As Sure As Eggs Is Eggs.”

There’s a big difference between those capitalists, settler-colonialists, and imperialists who claim to have Christian motives for their evil acts, those who “invest in the church for [their] heaven,” and those whose love is as real as that of the husband and wife of this epic. There’s a big difference between toadying up to authority (people like The Winkler and Canute’s flatterers), and a genuine love of God (“lord of lords, king of kings”).

VII: Conclusion

So, what does the concept of Foxtrot as an album all mean? The destruction of all human life is observed by an alien, and we can see a number of the causes of that destruction. The idealizing of the past, as justifying conservative, reactionary attitudes, which undermine efforts at progressive change; the greedy control of land and wealth, whose ill effects range from landlords evicting tenants to settler-colonialists and imperialists taking land away from the indigenous peoples of the world; servile obsequiousness to authority, to narcissists, and to religious hypocrites, who manipulate us all into supporting wars that ultimately lead to the annihilation of the human race. And instead of doing anything about it, so many of us would rather lie about and smoke dope.

And what would be a cure to these ills? Yet another thing that the lovers of “Supper’s Ready” could represent is our communal relationship with each other. The husband and wife, thus, are the self and other. Their separation, as I interpret it to be during the middle of the story, and expressed as such at both the beginning and the end of the epic story (“I’ve been so far from here, far from your warm/loving arms.”), can represent social alienation in general, another well-known symptom of capitalism, or any form of class conflict.

So the cure of the ills that will destroy our world includes a restoration of that communal love, whose solidarity will end alienation, and with that, end war, greed, servility, slothful intoxication, and the wrong-headed idealization of the past. For it is to the future that we must look to make a better world, “to take [us] to the New Jerusalem.”

Analysis of ‘Barfly’

Barfly is a 1987 film directed by Barbet Schroeder and written by Charles Bukowski, who also does a cameo. It stars Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, with Alice Krige, Frank Stallone, Jack Nance (whom you might remember from Eraserhead), and JC Quinn.

Barfly is a semi-autobiographical film with Henry Chinaski (Rourke) as a fictionalized version of young Bukowski. The film was entered into the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme D’or. Dunaway was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. Barfly was also nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards: Best Actor for Rourke, and Best Cinematography for Robby Müller.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to the whole film.

Destitute LA alcoholic/writer Henry Chinaski exemplifies the Dionysian lifestyle, and it goes way beyond the obvious link with drinking. To understand the extent to which Henry embodies Dionysus, we must understand everything the wine god represents beyond just wine: dancing and pleasure, or partying, and irrationality and chaos, including passion, emotions, and instincts.

More important than even these, though, to consider how Nietzsche discussed Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, the god represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy, and unity, as opposed to the Apollonian principle of individuation. What does wine itself represent, when emptied from the bottle or wine glass and poured into one’s mouth? It represents a dissolution of boundaries (i.e., the bottle or wine glass that gives shape and boundaries to the drink), and in entering the drinker’s body, the wine becomes one with the drinker. The intoxication from the alcoholic drink causes blurred vision and slurred speech–more dissolution of boundaries, more non-differentiation.

Thus, in Henry, we have not only a drunk, but also a law-breaker and a brawler…that is, one who doesn’t respect societal boundaries. His fists cross boundaries to hit the face and body of Eddie (Stallone), the “unoriginal, macho…ladies’ man” bartender he so despises. Henry’s hands cross boundaries to steal a sandwich right out of the hands of a man who’s just paid him to fetch the sandwich, or to break into a neighbour’s apartment to steal his food and wine.

Henry, as a writer, is the Dionysian artist whom Nietzsche saw as having “identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction” (Nietzsche, page 49). In total unity of everything, there is no ego, no self, no individuation, and no boundary between self and other. The contradiction of identifying self with other is painful, because the ego one is attached to is an illusion, whereas the fragmented existence is the only reality, like that of mutilated Zagreus.

Henry is much like Zagreus after that first fight with Eddie in the alley behind the bar. He’s lying all bloody on the ground, practically left for dead. Later, after being hit several times on the head with a purse held by angry Wanda (Dunaway), he looks at his bloody head in the bathroom mirror and recites improvised poetry, which includes the word, “euphoria.” He’s seeing his Lacanian ideal-I in the reflection, seeing his suffering Zagreus-self as a role model to live up to.

Getting drunk is, as we all know, an escape from all the suffering of the world, a manic defence against life’s depressing realities. Bukowski once described drinking as a kind of slow suicide; it’s a pleasure that ends the pain of life by throwing oneself into death, or at least trying to.

Freud wrote of two opposing ways of achieving pleasure, either through Eros, the life instincts that include libido, or through the death drive (called Thanatos by Freud’s followers), since death brings the organism back into a state of total rest, just as the achievement of libidinal pleasure tries to do. “To die, to sleep, no more,” as Hamlet said.

Similarly, just as the Hindus and Buddhists hope to achieve moksha or nirvana through a dissolution of the self (be that in the form of Atman realizing its identity with Brahman, or in the form of realizing, as the Lacanians do, that the ego is an illusion, that there never was a self to begin with–anattā), so do Dionysian types like Bukowski, Henry, and Wanda attempt a kind of ego death, but through drink, and through all things considered sinful or self-destructive.

In other posts, I have written of the ouroboros as symbolizing the dialectical unity of opposites. The serpent’s biting head is one extreme opposite, and the bitten tail is the other; every intermediate point is corresponded on the relevant place on the serpent’s coiled body, which represents a circular continuum. Thus, heaven or nirvana can be seen at the biting head, for example, and hell can be the bitten tail. The normal spiritual quest goes to the head away from the tail, that is, along the length of the coiled body towards the head; the Dionysian, in contrast, gets to the biting head by passing across the bitten tail. People like Henry are trying to get to heaven by passing through hell first, as Christ did.

This perverse pilgrim’s progress of Henry’s explains why he is content to be left beaten to a pulp in an alley at night, helped by no one. It explains how he can look at his bloody head in a mirror and say, “euphoria,” how he can think that people who never go crazy must lead “truly horrible lives,” that “nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace,” and that “endurance is more important that truth.”

Wanda as a drinker is going through the same pilgrim’s progress. After some heavy drinking one night at home, she is lying in bed and imagining she’s dying. She imagines an angel has come to take her away. She’s saying this to Henry as some beautiful Mahler, the andante moderato third movement from the sixth symphony, is playing. Henry is so convinced she’s dying that he calls some paramedics, who correctly conclude that she’s just drunk.

The point is that with each experience of suffering, the Dionysian pushes himself further, into even greater suffering, a move further towards the ouroboros’ bitten tail in the hopes of finally passing it and reaching the head of paradise. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

After being beaten by Eddie several times, Henry keeps coming back for more. He’ll do occasional jobs here and there, since he’s got to have at least a little money to live…and pay for drinks, of course!…but he is loath to get a regular job and join “unoriginal” society. (He’ll only try to get one for Wanda’s sake.) He’s been in jail twelve times, but he keeps breaking laws at every opportunity.

Now, one shouldn’t confuse his coarseness for a lack of culture. He’s a talented writer of poetry and prose, so talented that his writing has touched publisher Tully Sorenson (Krige), whose wealth and intervention in Henry’s life represent where Apollonian order intersects with Dionysian wildness. He listens to classical music, Mahler and Mozart in particular. He hates movies (as did Bukowski, who really needed a financial incentive to write the script for Schroeder’s film!), but he likes Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism, by the way, is a Buddhistic opposition to existence.

His aspiration towards ego death is in such an advanced state that when Tully, on meeting him face-to-face for the first time in his frequented watering hole, asks him who he is–“the eternal question”–and he gives her the eternal answer…he doesn’t know.

Tully’s intervention into his life represents not only the intersection of the Apollonian with the Dionysian: it also represents the intrusion of capitalism into the world of the lumpenproletariat, which Henry so perfectly personifies. She is a wealthy book publisher, wearing fashionable clothes, living in a beautiful, large home, and–let’s face it–hoping to turn a profit off of his talent. Having a basic sense of class consciousness, though, he can’t accept her world, “a cage with golden bars.”

His class consciousness, knowing that “nobody suffers like the poor,” doesn’t mean Henry’s at all motivated to help organize anything like a worker’s revolution. Men like him are why Marx and Engels didn’t see any potential in the lumpenproletariat. Like so many of the poor, Henry feels incapable of pulling himself out of poverty, let alone doing so for the working class in general; hence the wish to escape his misery through drink.

Instead of supporting a vanguard-led revolution, he simply lives as an anarchist would in an otherwise capitalist world. He does what he likes, and has no respect for authority. His stealing of food, as is Wanda’s stealing of corn, is a kind of putting into practice the socialist ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The same can be said of Wanda’s living off of Wilbur’s charity.

Henry’s meeting of Wanda in the bar where we see the Bukowski cameo is serendipitous, for in this meeting we’ll see the beginning of a relationship that will mitigate his misanthropy. His leaving of his dump of an apartment to live in hers, in a way, can also be associated with his Dionysian lifestyle, since as a chthonic god (i.e., of the underworld or of agriculture…recall that corn Wanda wants!), the wine god can also be associated with matrilineal and matrilocal forms of social organization.

Indeed, Henry’s anger at Wanda over her cheating on him isn’t based on some patrilineal notion that he ‘owns’ her: he explicitly acknowledges not owning her. He simply cannot stand that she’s slept with Eddie, of all men!

Henry’s jealousy of her over Eddie, paralleled with her jealousy of him over Tully, has as a coincidence how, when either of them is cheated on, the other has gone off to look for a job. Henry, after coming back to the bar from his job interview, tells Jim (Quinn) that he hates how society tells us we all have to do something, or to be somebody–i.e., to have a job and form one’s identity around it. Similarly, when upon meeting Wanda, Henry asks her what she does, she says, “I drink,” instead of saying a job title. So in betraying themselves to the capitalist system by trying to get jobs, they end up betraying each other sexually.

During Henry’s job interview–with a woman with beautiful, pantyhose-covered legs he ogles and gets a “hard-on” from–he answers “none” to questions about hobbies, religion, education, and even his sex. Once again, he’s demonstrating his Dionysian dissolution of identity…as well as his satyr-like lust.

After Wanda has beaten and bloodied his head with her purse and stormed out of her apartment, he gets back at her by throwing her clothes out the window, once again demonstrating his Dionysian disregard for people’s boundaries.

His Lacanian lack of an ego, combined with his lack of respect for boundaries and his embrace of violence, indicates his experience of the undifferentiated, traumatic, and nonverbal world of the Real. His writing of poetry and prose, however, bring him back to the verbal, social, and cultural world of the Symbolic, as does his making of money from that writing, through Tully’s cashed cheque of $500, which allows him to buy rounds of drinks at the bar to win “all [his] friends,” who will surely give him emotional support for his next fight with Eddie. His moment of “euphoria” in front of Wanda’s bathroom mirror, idealizing himself as an eternal fighter, a Dionysus, is Henry’s experience of the narcissistic Imaginary.

There are other Dionysian personalities in Wanda’s apartment building, mind you, than just her and Henry. Wanda’s next-door neighbours are an old man and woman, the former of whom, it seems, is physically abusing the latter. Henry notes, in near-Buddhistic fashion upon hearing the nastiness next door, that hatred is the only thing that lasts.

Still, even a Dionysian like Henry has a sense of gallantry, and after being fed up with the disturbing fighting he’s been hearing through the wall, decides he wants to help the poor old woman over there, right when he’s finally met and chatted with Tully. He breaks down the neighbours’ door to confront the old man over his vicious treatment of his woman. As it turns out, though, she likes being hurt by her man! It’s a kind of sadomasochistic kink that they’re into, another Dionysian embrace of violence and transgressing of boundaries.

It doesn’t take long for Tully to realize that her Apollonian world is incompatible with Henry’s. Not only can’t she convince him to be “a non-drunk,” and not only can’t she compete as a drinker with him, but she is horrified with his violent nature, gutting the old man with his knife, and driving his car into and pushing the car of two “unoriginal,” publicly kissing lovebirds into an intersection. Henry sees another Eddie in that man, and wants to trespass beyond his boundaries.

It’s an amusing example of projection when rich Tully, annoyed with Henry’s confrontational attitude toward two “romantic” lovebirds in their car, that she calls him “a spoiled asshole” (my emphasis). It’s even more amusing when Henry says that she “hired a dick [Nance] to find an asshole,” my favourite line in the whole film!

One cannot have Dionysus without Maenads, and Henry has one in Wanda. Her jealous fury over Tully having slept with him causes her to have violent designs on the rich, wealthy publisher.

Indeed, Tully’s disapproval of Henry’s wild dipsomania, and her wish to take him out of that unruly world and into her tame, Apollonian one, makes her into a kind of female Pentheus, the king whose banning of Dionysian worship caused him to be lured into the wine god’s sylvan milieu and torn to pieces by the Maenads, as is presented in Euripides‘ tragedy, The Bacchae.

Similarly, Tully feels pulled into Henry’s world, in spite of her opposition to it, and as soon as Wanda smells the perfumed proof of Tully’s closeness to Henry, the hostilities between the two women begin. This tension is building just as that between Henry and Eddie is being rekindled, the latter being annoyed over the former’s tardiness in paying for all the drinks he’s offering everyone in the bar to buy their friendship and backing in the two men’s upcoming fight.

Wanda grabs Tully by the hair and pulls her, screaming, off her barstool, just like a maniacal Maenad. Tully fights back as best she can, even biting Wanda’s hand; but her bourgeois sense of decorum just can’t let her endure in a fight, so she knows she has no hope of taming Henry. She leaves Dionysus in his world, and she returns to that of Apollo.

Now, this ‘catfight‘ won’t be the only entertainment of the night, since Eddie is hungry for revenge after his humiliating loss the last time. Henry is all too happy to oblige, of course, and the film ends with the eternal recurrence of Dionysian violence with which Barfly began.

After all, hatred’s the only thing that lasts, isn’t it?

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