Trust Is Like the Soul

About a month or so ago, my older sister, J., sent me a direct message on Twitter (stupidly renamed ‘X’ by Elon Musk, proving once again that the wealthiest in the world aren’t necessarily the smartest, just the most exploitative…but I digress). She has apparently read some of my blog posts on my family issues back in Canada. I don’t know which ones she read: there are so many of them that I doubt she had the time, let alone the patience, to get through anywhere even approaching all of them, but she seems to have gotten the basic idea of why I’m so upset with her and our two older brothers, R. and F.

I must say that this reading of hers is perhaps the first time she’s ever meaningfully paid close attention to my side of the story regarding my relationship with the family. Over a period of decades of never taking my point of view about anything seriously, her response to what I wrote is a precedent that I find quite…impressive.

Since she knows she has to choose her words tactfully in an attempt to hoover me back into the family, and my living on the other side of the world means that her choosing her words foolishly will only strengthen my resolve not to end my NO CONTACT status with her and our brothers, she expressed herself with the usual honeyed words. ‘I’ll always be her brother, and she’ll always love me.’ Pleasant words to read, no doubt, and the kind of thing a love-starved man like me needs to hear…but not the kind of thing that will make me easily forget decades of emotional abuse from her, our brothers, our dad, and most of all, our–in all likelihood–malignant narcissist mother.

I’m sure J. sincerely believes she loves me, but there are a number of things that need to be understood about this love to put it in the right context. I’m her younger brother: she has to love me. I’ve discussed in other posts how she, as the golden child of the family, was pressured by our mother to personify an idealized version of Mom: J. had to be the ‘perfect’ daughter, has to be the ‘perfect’ sister to R., F., and me, the ‘perfect’ aunt to our nephew and niece, the ‘perfect’ mother to her two sons–she has to be the ‘perfect’ family woman, all to please our mother and be ‘worthy’ of Mom’s love. Remember that a narcissistic mother makes her sons and daughters compete for her very conditional love, so they aim to please her in every way.

Now, to be fair to J., none of this pressure or her caving in to it was her fault–it was our mother’s. By placing these impossible-to-fulfill standards on J., and by manipulating her into believing she must embody–and has successfully embodied–these lofty ideals, Mom was not doing her job as a mother. In fact, J. should be infuriated with Mom for putting her through all of that. It was never J.’s job to be Mom’s ‘perfect’ daughter: it was J.’s job simply to be herself. But let’s at least be honest about all of this. J. ‘loves’ me because she has to, not because she deep-down wants to.

I, too, was assigned a phony role to play in the narcissistic family: I was the scapegoat, or identified patient. I was manipulated by Mom, through gaslighting, into embodying everything she hated about herself and therefore projected onto me–hence the autism lie, which was a projection of Mom’s narcissism (recall the early definition of autism, which is hardly applicable today). This role that I was forced into playing is why the family ‘loves’ me, but has never really liked me–and that includes J., who always tried to change me into a more ‘acceptable’ person. She thinks this kind of changing people is a form of love (she got this, no doubt, from Mom having done it to her), rather than thinking that accepting a person as he is will do a much better job of making him feel loved, which would in turn inspire him to change himself and rid himself of his dysfunctional habits.

J. is the only family member who makes any attempts at all to contact me, and that has far less to do with any genuine feelings of affection for me, and far more to do with her need to salvage what’s left of the family she’s lost over the years (her husband–for whom I composed this short piece of music–our parents, and me out of estrangement). She wants to keep alive her fairy-tale, romantic notion that we’re all a ‘happy, loving family’: this is all tied in with her being the golden child, as I described above. The point I’m trying to make here is that I exist, to her, only as a family relation–that is my whole value to her. As a unique, individual person, I mean nothing to her. Recall what she said: I’ll always be her brother, and she’ll always love me (my emphasis).

I mean absolutely nothing to R. and F., my two ‘brothers.’ I could rot away in a leper colony, and they wouldn’t care; they’d blame me for getting into the predicament rather than pity me for my misfortune. As I said in my post, False Families, they’d probably be amused at the idea of my home becoming a war zone from the US provoking a war with China over Taiwan, the way the MIC and NATO provoked Russia into a war over Ukraine. There is no affection between R. and F. on their side and me: I feel none for them because, in their constant bullying and belittling of me as a kid, teen, and young adult, they destroyed any foundation for a normal, healthy, brotherly relationship between us. Mom sat back and let it all happen, too, perfectly aware that her flying monkeys were hurting me. Dad didn’t do much to help me, either. R. and F. feel no affection for me because they regard me as a worm: why would I be OK with that?

The childhood trauma I suffered from the family’s abuse resulted in a number of dysfunctional habits of mine at the time, which existed as trauma responses, but which our mendacious, ignorant mother labelled as ‘autism symptoms’: these trauma responses included maladaptive daydreaming and social isolation. If no other people are around, I can feel safe, because my family’s treatment of me as a child taught me that people are mean and hurtful. Bullies at school and in the neighbourhood only made my problem worse, and I got no relief when I got home.

When your family betrays your trust, it’s hard to trust anybody, because as object relations theory teaches us, those primal family relationships you have as a child are like the blueprints for all future relationships you’ll have with anyone else. The bad relationships with family members become bad internal objects that haunt you like demon possession (<<p. 67 here). Alienation thus becomes epidemic: if those early family relationships go sour, you learn to believe all future relationships will go sour, too, because you don’t know any other way to relate to people; even if you try your best to fit in, you’ll unconsciously do something wrong to sabotage the relationship. As an adult, I have C-PTSD because of what happened when I was a kid, and I’ll always feel as though I can’t fit in, however hard I try.

Publilius Syrus once said, “Trust, like the soul, never returns once it is gone.” I first heard that quote in Child’s Play (not the Chucky movie), which I watched with my mother when I was a teen. I can never return to the family that betrayed me with lies, abuse, and gaslighting. I’m trying to heal, currently through the application of Jungian concepts like Shadow work and Active Imagination to get to the darkest recesses of my unconscious to find out what’s making me sabotage my life so much–I can’t heal by being in any way involved with the very people who made me sick in the first place.

If I were to be around R., F., and J. ever again (even if just online), I would be subjected to their little digs at me again. Those little digs may typically be small, by any objective measure, but even the minor ones would trigger in me memories of the nastier moments I endured with them when I was a kid. Also, I have good reason to believe that the three of them, as well as our mom when she was still alive, were doing so many smear campaigns on me–whenever discussions around the dinner table, for example, drifted towards me as a topic–that the younger generations have been taught to have at least slight regard for me, if not outright loathing.

You see, it isn’t so much that they ‘did this’ to me forty years ago, or ‘did that’ to me thirty years ago; it isn’t just the things that they did; it’s more about who they are that made them do these things, because I know that–them being who they are–they are sure to do those kinds of things again. I’m not just wallowing about in my remote past: I’m trying to protect myself from future re-traumatizing.

To regain my trust of R., F., and J. would be a Herculean task for them, especially with the limitations of the internet, and I simply don’t think the three of them regard me as worth the effort (R. and F. wouldn’t regard me as worth even a slight effort). For these reasons, I must maintain NO CONTACT with them, however well-intentioned my sister may seem.

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 ‘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.”

False Families

False families are primarily concerned with their public image, as ‘virtuous,’ ‘upstanding,’ ‘admirable,’ ‘moral,’ and ‘loving.’ Maintaining this image is far more important to them than actually striving to live up to such ideals, since doing the latter is, of course, far more difficult.

One doesn’t just put on an act of virtue and goodness, while secretly knowing that one isn’t the good family member one pretends to be. These people lie to themselves as successfully as they lie to the public. Contemplating the truth is much too intolerable, an unbearable blow to their inflated egos; so they must convince themselves that the theatre of virtue put on is real.

Conflicts and feelings of resentment are inevitable, even in the best of families, but the better ones will at least try to resolve these problems as fairly as they can. Toxic families, on the other hand, will find ways of ‘resolving’ these conflicts so that they can maintain an illusion of blamelessness for most of the family, while projecting the unavoidable blame on one, or a few, scapegoat(s).

A healthy family will, paradoxically, acknowledge fault, blame, and ill emotional health in all the family members who are at fault in the conflict, and they will reserve judgement fairly and in proportion to how much fault each member involved has. A false family, or toxic one, or emotionally abusive one (whichever name you wish to use to describe them), will dump all or most of the blame on the scapegoat(s), while absolving of blame other family members who may bear much, if not most or all, of the blame, thus maintaining the illusion of family health for the majority of the members.

A false family has a black-and-white view of the family members. Generally speaking, and with at least relatively few exceptions, certain members are seen as largely good: the narcissistic parent (the ringleader of the toxic family structure) and his or her golden children, his or her flying monkeys. On the other side are those deemed largely ‘bad’: the codependent parent and the scapegoat(s) or identified patient(s). Any reasonable person would know that everyone is a lighter or darker grey between the good and bad extremes, but the group narcissism of the toxic family will admit to little beyond the black and white.

This is the kind of family that I had to endure growing up with. To be sure, I have plenty of glaring faults, but I hardly deserved to be scapegoated because of them. In fact, a reasonable argument can be made that the exacerbating, if not largely the origin, of most of my faults was because of the emotional abuse that I suffered under my parents’ mismanagement of the family.

I have already described in detail, in the links given above as well as such links as these, the whole story of how I was bullied, belittled, lied to, and subjected to gaslighting by my late parents and older siblings (my brothers, R. and F., and my sister, J.). If you have either already read some or all of those posts, or if you don’t care to do so much reading, Dear Reader, then please just go along with what I’m saying to you now: that my having gone NO CONTACT with the family for the past seven years (as of this post’s publication) has been perfectly justified, for the sake of protecting myself against being subjected to any further emotional abuse in the future, something guaranteed from those three surviving siblings. When trying to heal from C-PTSD, one cannot do so while in contact with any of the abusers.

One of the family’s chief rationalizations for bullying me and treating me with contempt is one of those glaring faults I referred to above: namely, my self-centredness (something supposedly based on ‘my autism,’ or really their distorted, outdated definition of autism, which is a mental condition I learned from psychiatrists that I don’t really have, but was rather one of my late mother’s many fabrications). As far as I’m concerned, only my wife has the right to complain of my selfishness (which was really the result of my alienation from an emotionally neglectful family), for unlike the family, my wife is truly selfless.

As I said above, the selflessness of a false family is just that…false. It is an outward show, meant not only to impress and fool the public, but also for the false family to fool themselves into thinking they’re genuinely good people. One only has to use one’s instincts, though, to realize that there’s nothing good about bullies and narcissists. Accordingly, highly sensitive people like me can see through the family bullshit, and they as a result get scapegoated…to protect the lie.

When my mother was dying of breast cancer, she was nonetheless healthy enough to tell me a slew of lies online (see the links above for details), after I’d already known of other lies of hers (e.g., the autism lie mentioned above). When you know someone has lied to you, you cannot trust the liar ever again–this is ancient wisdom. I, living on the other side of the world and already refusing to communicate with her for fear of more manipulating, had no way of knowing if the messages by phone or email about her dying were real, or just another fabrication to make me feel guilty and manipulate me into making a visit to Canada that I vowed never again to make.

My brother R. wanted me to phone Mom, who was in hospital and on her deathbed, to make regular phone calls and chat with her, something I absolutely didn’t want to do, especially given her ever-impenitent attitude. R. wanted me to put on a show of love, which I refused to do.

He later stumbled upon a YouTube video I’d made about seven years before her death, in which I bitterly recited “This Be the Verse,” by Philip Larkin. The combination of my refusal to call her with my recitation of a poem with a four-letter word made him (freshly grieving over her death) so angry that, instead of letting himself calm down and then later asking me, in the comments section, what Mom had done to make me so mad at her, he made a snarky comment to the effect that I’m apparently mentally “disturbed,” and that I should be ashamed of myself for not loving a mother who, apparently, “loved [me] more than anyone else on the planet.”

No attempt was made at an investigation to find out what happened between Mom and me: there was just an assumption that she was ‘all-good,’ and that I am ‘all-bad.” This is the typical attitude of the false family, which idealizes the narcissistic parent and his or her golden children/flying monkeys, and a further vilifying of the family scapegoat.

The way I acted at her death, combined with my continued enforcement of the NO CONTACT rule, is essentially the family’s motive for never trying to contact me since, save for two or three puny attempts by my sister J.–the number one golden child of the family, who is obligated ‘to love’ her younger brother (for the sake of a show of family virtue, remember)–to contact me by email, Facebook, and Twitter. I never responded to this hoovering, of course.

The thing is, for the great majority of the family, save J. and Mom when she was alive, there was never an interest in contacting me, with ever so few exceptions, for the whole time I’ve lived in Taiwan. R., my other brother F., and all the others have never needed my reaction to Mom’s death as a reason never to contact me.

In our family, the word love is meaningless; the words like and dislike, however, do have meaning. Love for them just means family obligation. While love is supposed to be unconditional (i.e., we can be mad at or resentful of family members because of certain faults of theirs, but we won’t stop loving them for that), this family is selective about whom they care about. R., F., and J., and their spouses and kids (minus any new scapegoats intended to replace me and my cousins) are loved and cared for because they are liked.

As for us scapegoats, though J. pays lip service to caring about me (and is convinced that her fake love is genuine, as was Mom), we could all rot in a leper colony for all R. and F. care. I grudgingly respect my brothers’ attitude to me, since at least there’s a dram of honesty in it.

I’ve known the truth of the above for years, but recently I’ve discovered further proof to consolidate the accuracy of my judgement of them. This new proof lies in their total non-reaction to the growing crisis between China and the US regarding my home here in Taiwan.

It doesn’t matter if the family believes the lies and propaganda being spewed from the mainstream Western media about China wanting ‘to invade’ the ‘nation’ of Taiwan, or if they know the truth that I’ve known, which is that the American government has been trying to provoke China into invading, the way the US and NATO provoked Russia for years into invading Ukraine. My home is in danger of becoming a war zone, in which my wife, her family, and I could suffer and die.

…and my ‘morally superior’ family hasn’t lifted a finger to contact me and offer to get us to safety.

[It is totally unfeasible for me to return to Canada, since apart from my estrangement from the family, my limited skill set–teaching English as a second language–will not find me much of anything in terms of employment there; the vast majority of such jobs, teaching immigrants, are presumably already snatched up. My wife and I moving to Canada would almost guarantee us a future of homelessness. In any case, I have high hopes that the American empire will crumble before it even has a chance of bringing about a war with China.]

Now, a number of objections to what I’ve said need to be addressed and put into proper context. I haven’t exactly made it easy for the family to communicate with me–such is the nature of going NO CONTACT. I blocked them, for example, from sending emails to me; and as I mentioned above, I refused to answer J. in her attempts to contact me through Facebook and Twitter.

That said, though, attempts to contact me are far from impossible. Since they know my internet/pen name, they could contact me here in the comments section. They could contact the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, who in turn could contact me by email or phone. The family could phone me themselves! A simple Google search of Mawr Gorshin could bring up a slew of websites where I can be found, and if I never answer their messages, they can pester me over and over again until I finally relent.

It’s not that they can’t contact me. They just don’t want to.

Please don’t misinterpret my meaning, Dear Reader. I’m not saying that I want them to contact me…No! I’d find such attempts at communicating with me to be nothing less than triggering. But this isn’t about what I want: it’s about what they want.

If my mother were still alive, to her credit, she would have stopped at nothing to break through my defences and get to me. My siblings’ attempts have been less than feeble…and they imagine themselves better than I, a mere scapegoat.

The point I’m trying to make here is that this lack of a response proves that they don’t really love me. There is a continuity between this callous disregard for my safety here in East Asia, and back in the day when I was a kid, when F. used to spit on me and hit me, J. played disgusting games with me when I was about eight or nine, and these two and R. shouting one four-letter word after another at me, usually over minor things I’d done to annoy them.

It simply doesn’t occur to them that I am a human being, with a heart and feelings, who has the same basic rights as everyone else. I’ll bet that R. and F. would smile at the thought of me trapped in a war zone…those two fucking bastards! J. calls them ‘brothers,’ by the way. Anyway, all of this only further justifies my continued estrangement from them.

Another objection to the conclusions I’ve drawn is that the family may mistakenly believe that I’m dead (from Covid, presumably–a virus the vast majority of those having died from being either people in their 70s or 80s, or people who had other health problems, neither of which apply to me). After all, J. sent me her direct Twitter message around that time, and as I said above, I never responded to it.

Aside from the overblown media hysteria around Covid, though, why would my not responding necessarily mean I died? Does J. think someone hacked my Twitter account? All she has to do is follow me there, find my many blog articles posted there, and read some of them to know, by my idiosyncratic writing style (and photo at the top!) that it’s really me. My politics have changed radically since the days when we were still talking to each other, but changing one’s political opinions (in my case, from centre-right to hard-left) is surprising, but far from impossible.

But again, this issue leads back to my argument before: if they really need to know if I’m alive or dead, they can just keep pushing and nagging online until I finally respond, or get the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office to contact me. If I’m dead, have they received proof of it? Did they get a death certificate? Has a corpse been produced?

Merely assuming I’m dead is just an excuse not to try to find out for sure. Again, it’s not that they can’t find out for sure. They just don’t think I’m worth the effort…these people who routinely bullied and belittled me when I was a kid, who deliberately undermined my ability to develop self-confidence, and whom Mom never reprimanded for it.

…and it justifies my estrangement from them all the more.

Their reason for not loving me is not because of my faults: everyone has faults, but some people’s faults are put under a magnifying glass (mine and my cousins), while others’ faults are swept under the rug (R.’s, F.’s, J.’s, and our parents’). It’s a vicious double standard, and it’s proof that my family is a false one.

Now, what I want to say to you, Dear Reader, is that if you find yourself the scapegoat of a false family, know that it’s not your fault that they don’t love you (though they may pretend to); it is their fault. They are supposed to love you, and it is their failure, not yours, that they don’t truly love you.

So give yourself heaps of love, to compensate for what they so cruelly denied you, because you’re worth it.

[Postscript: If by chance any of my elder siblings, or anyone else in the family back in Canada, should contact me here in the comments section, my response would be a quote I heard from my condescending sister decades ago: “You’ve left it a little late, haven’t you?” The US has been banging the war drums against China for years now. It’s been a hot item in the news for at least about a year, since Pelosi’s provocative visit to Taiwan last summer…and only now do they contact me, if they ever plan to?]

Horns

The
loud,
brass bluster of horns that accompanies pomp is foul,
obnoxious noise one should not have to endure in our
world
now.

No
one’s
better than all others, by birth, colour, or sex. Why,
why must we hear fanfares that damage our fragile
ears
so?

To
blow
one’s own horns is a blow to our eardrums, a
rupture, a goring, a piercing of a bull’s horns.
Stop
it!

Analysis of ‘Simon of the Desert’

Simon of the Desert (Simón del desierto) is a 1965 Mexican short surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel, the screenplay cowritten by Julio Alejandro. It stars Claudio Brook and Silvia Pinal, both of whom were also in The Exterminating Angel, and the latter also in Viridiana.

The film is loosely based on the life of Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Syrian saint and ascetic who lived for thirty-nine years on top of a pillar, hence, the stylites who emulated him. My poem, “Towers,” alludes to him.

Two contradictory reasons are given as to why the film is only forty-five minutes. Buñuel said he ran out of money, while Pinal claimed that his was supposed to be one of three stories, all done by different directors. The other directors originally meant to be part of the production backed out later, leaving only Buñuel’s third filmed.

Simon of the Desert was highly acclaimed from its original release. It has a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on reviews from seventeen critics.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to a YouTube video of it, with English subtitles.

The film begins with a crowd of monks and peasants walking in the desert toward the ten-foot-tall pillar on which Simon (Brook) is standing. As they approach him, they’re singing holy music…this will contrast sharply with the ‘music of the Devil’ that we’ll hear at the end of the film.

After standing on top of this pillar for six years, six weeks, and six days (O, portentous number!), Simon is being offered a new, much taller pillar to stand on, a gift from a wealthy man (played by Ángel Merino) for having cured him “of an unspeakable disease.” What an odd gift of thanks! To be set much higher off the ground, tempting greater acrophobia, to practice an even more intense asceticism, rather than giving him comfort!

Such a gift from a wealthy man to a saint represents how the ruling class has always used religion and its grueling disciplines for the sake of social control, ostensibly ‘to edify’ the masses, when the rich could use their wealth to improve the material conditions of the poor instead.

Simon gets down from the first pillar, and as he is led to the new one, peasants are crowding around him, hoping for blessings and miraculous forms of aid from the holy man. One peasant even rips off a small piece of the material from Simon’s filthy old robe, in the superstitious belief that it holds divine properties. Such is the desperation of the poor, who have only the opium of religion to give them comfort.

As they all continue towards the taller pillar, Simon is presented with his aging mother (played by Hortensia Santoveña), who wishes to be with him, by the foot of the pillar, to contemplate him in his asceticism, and to be near him until her death. This devotion is comparable to that of Mary, the mater dolorosa who was at the foot of Christ’s Cross. When Simon meets her there, he calls her “woman,” as Christ called Mary at the Wedding at Cana.

If she can be compared to Mary, then Simon, of course, can be compared to Jesus. Indeed, as Simon is standing on the new pillar, (his “Calvary,” as a priest calls it), his arms are typically stretched out, as in a “Jesus Christ pose.” As a saint, Simon is certainly an imitator of Christ. We wonder, though: is this ascetic acting out of genuine piety, or is he motivated by pride? His eventual succumbing to the temptations of the Devil (Pinal) suggest the latter motivation.

When a priest (the same who refers to Simon’s new pillar as his ‘Calvary,’ played by Antonio Bravo) wishes to bestow holy orders on the ascetic just before his ascent up the ladder to the new pillar, he refuses them, insisting that he, a lowly sinner, is unworthy of them. Buñuel’s atheistic disdain for religion, however, suggests that this show of humility is just that–a show. The only thing worse than immodesty is false modesty

At the top of his new pillar, Simon leads the group in a prayer of Pater Noster, just as Jesus taught his followers (Matthew 6:9). A poor peasant family interrupts the prayer, complaining of the father’s having lost his hands; they were chopped off as punishment for stealing. He insists he is repentant, though, and the family begs Simon to work a miracle and give him back his hands.

Everyone prays in silence for a moment, led by Simon, and the peasant gets his hands back. Instead of thanking Simon or praising God, though, the peasant family leaves immediately, knowing they have urgent work to do at home. When one of the man’s daughters asks if his hands are the same as his old ones, he shoves her and tells her to be quiet. Some repentance! Some newly-found religious piety!

We see in this moment the real motive most people have for religiosity: not a genuine wish to be close to God for its own sake, but as a crutch to be used to improve one’s material conditions whenever the need arises; when the need is no longer there, one’s religiosity quickly becomes scanted.

Of course, it is never even contemplated in the film that cutting off a man’s hands might be too cruel a punishment for theft. Wouldn’t imprisonment for several years suffice? Neither is it considered that a redistribution of wealth, lifting the peasants out of their poverty, just might reduce the need for theft to a small minimum.

Everyone leaves Simon alone, except for his mother and four of the monks, who wish to accompany him in prayer. As they are kneeling in prayer, a beautiful young woman passes them by carrying a jug. (Actually, she’s the Devil.) Testing the monks, Simon asks them who she is, deliberately claiming she has only one eye, when of course she is normal.

When one of the monks corrects Simon about the woman’s eyes, and says he knows because he looked at her face, Simon knows the monk has sinned by allowing himself to be distracted by her, and thus tempted by the Devil when he was supposed to be concentrating on his prayer. Simon admonishes him for his sin, reminding him of the kind of warning Jesus gave his male followers in Matthew 5:28. The monks leave Simon and his mother.

In the next scene, a young, short-haired, and clean-shaven monk named Matias (played by Enrique Álvarez Félix) comes to the desert to give Simon some food; but first he briefly chats with a dwarf goat-herder (played by Jesús Fernández). The dwarf praises the udders of one of his she-goats, in a way that strongly suggests he has lewd feelings for the animal. Matias softly chides him for having such thoughts, then leaves to see Simon.

It’s significant that Matias warns the dwarf of the Devil’s presence in the desert, just after Simon has warned the monk against letting his praying be distracted by a beautiful woman passing by, and when Simon himself is soon to be tempted, not only with thoughts of coming down from his pillar to enjoy closeness to his mother, but also with the Devil in the seductive form of a pretty, yet naughty girl.

Simon’s temptation thus is not only like that of Jesus in the wilderness, but also–since Simon’s pillar can be seen as symbolic of Christ’s Cross–like the Jesus of Nikos Kazantzakis‘ novel. In mid-prayer, Simon finds himself distracted, forgetting the end of the prayer. Without even a beautiful woman at the time to tempt him, he is showing himself clearly to be not much more spiritually elevated than that monk.

After receiving the food and water from Matias, who then skips away like a merry child, Simon bad-mouths him as “an idiot, the conceited ass,” and a “wretch”–an odd attitude for a holy man to have. In his continued fasting, he wants to be worthy of God…yet isn’t the whole point of the Christian faith that one can never be worthy of God by one’s own good works, hence the need for Christ’s crucifixion?

Next comes Simon’s temptation to go down to the ground and be with his mother, a temptation curiously juxtaposed with one of the Devil in the form of a beautiful young girl. Normally, Satan is male. As a surrealist, Buñuel used disturbingly incongruous images to give expression to the urges of the unconscious mind, urges that include–according to psychoanalysis–the Oedipus complex.

Seeing a fantasy of Simon playing on the ground with his mother, as if he were a child, then immediately after that, the female Devil is showing off her legs and breasts, strongly implies a link between both urges, a sexual link. Properly understood, the Oedipus complex is a universal, narcissistic trauma, a wish to hog Mommy all to oneself, to be the sole object of her love, a desire that, of course, can never be fulfilled–hence, the trauma. Such narcissism is also linked, by displacement, to the grandiose wish to be honoured as a great holy man, Simon’s secret motive as he stands up high on that pillar.

Buñuel’s point is that all religious aspiration is ultimately as narcissistic as Oedipal urges. One wants God the Father all to oneself just as one wants Mother all to oneself…and for the same reason.

The Devil appears to him as a girl in modern clothes (a school uniform), anticipating the end of the film, when she has Simon in the modern world, having succumbed to his temptation. Though she has Pinal’s curvaceous, womanly figure, she behaves like a little girl, all sweet and innocent (prior to her exhibitionism, of course).

This juxtaposition of Simon being tempted to “feel Mother Earth under [his] feet,” then to put his head on his mother’s lap (like Hamlet‘s “country matters” with Ophelia), and finally to see the Devil-girl’s garters and breasts (like the mother’s breasts he once sucked on as a baby), all suggests that his pedophile temptation to have the Devil-girl is a reaction formation against his unconscious Oedipal feelings. (I made a similar speculation about Humbert Humbert’s unconscious motives for wanting nymphets in my Lolita analysis, i.e., replacing a son-to-mother desire with a father-to-daughter one). Recall also, in this connection, all that largely unpunished sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

So the Devil, as a female, is the doppelgänger of Simon’s mother. Both are at the foot of his pillar, tempting him with worldly pleasures, though in different ways. These two females are dialectical opposites: different, yet identical. And since Simon, a double of Jesus, has a mother who is a double of Mary, Buñuel here is having another moment of atheistic irreverence in equating Mary with the Devil. Woman as angel and whore are one in his film.

There are other dialectical opposites played around with here. The she-devil would have Simon “cease from [his] folly” in her childlike song, as if giving him edifying spiritual advice; indeed, one must be as a child to enter the Kingdom of God [!]. He would brush his teeth clean “with Syria’s urine,” more paradoxes of filth and cleanliness juxtaposed (also, those ancient Romans who crucified Christ used urine to clean their teeth with).

Simon asks where she’s come from, and where she’s going. Her answers, “over there,” while pointing in opposing directions, suggest Satan’s answer to God in Job 2:2.

He resists all of her sensual temptations, from the showing off of her legs and breasts, and her tongue tickling his beard, even to her pricking him in the back. The Devil leaves angrily, nude, but in an aged, ugly, and almost androgynous form. “Neither is everyone what they seem,” as she has sung while showing off her “innocent” legs and garters. This observation is most true, as we’ll soon see.

Immediately after the Devil leaves, we see Simon’s mother again, reinforcing the dialectical link between the two. What seems saintly can be evil, and vice versa.

In my analysis of The Exterminating Angel (link above), one of the three Buñuel films that Pinal appears in, I compared the morality of her role in that film with her roles in this one and in Viridiana. I described her as good in Viridiana, evil in Simon of the Desert, and a mix of good and evil in The Exterminating Angel. My observation there was essentially true, but I need to qualify it here.

The nun Viridiana is essentially good, but narcissistic in her drive to be as pure as the Virgin Mary (as Simon is narcissistic in his drive to be as pure as Jesus). As I argued in my analysis of the film (link above), her moments of unconsciousness, leaving her vulnerable to being taken advantage of by lustful men, symbolically suggest a repressed, unconscious wish to be sexual. This wish to be sexual is implied even more at the end of the film, when she joins a man and a woman in a card game, implying the beginning of a three-way sexual relationship between them. Thus, these moral imperfections of hers are the black yin dot in her yang.

Similarly, Pinal’s Devil is largely evil in her tempting of Simon away from his asceticism; but this tempting of him is also his potential liberation from a religiosity Buñuel deems useless, and therefore foolish. As she sings to him in that girly voice, “Cease from thy folly.” These words are sound advice, the white yang dot in her yin.

Simon continues his praying and devotion through the night, as observed by his mother (a double of Satan?). We see hm eating some lettuce from the bag of food provided by Matias; we also hear military drumming, as has been heard earlier, suggesting the onward marching of Christian soldiers as they continue fighting against temptation. For him, eating the food and drinking the water, as necessary as they are, are also concessions to the flesh that feel dangerously close to sinning. We see his mother have a drink of water, too. What evil indulgence!

The next day, Simon leads the visiting monks in prayer and a discussion of how properly to practice austerities. He speaks in a manner reminiscent of Christ (Luke 14:26). Brother Trifon (played by Luis Aceves Castañeda), however, accuses Simon of accepting delicious cheese, bread, and wine–foods not to be indulged in by a saint! His mother hands some of the food to a monk.

We learn soon enough, though, that Trifon is the one who put the food in Simon’s bag to slander him, and harm and undermine the faith of his followers. Trifon has done this because, as we find out, he, cursing the hypostatic union, is possessed of the Devil! He will be taken away to be exorcised. In the monk’s act of wickedness, we see Buñuel once again placing piety side by side with impiety, thus blurring the distinction that the Church tries so hard to put between them.

As the monks pray for guidance to determine if Simon is guilty of indulgence in tasty food, or if Trifon is guilty of slandering Simon, we see his mother observing ants crawling in the sand; she brushes her hand over them. One might be reminded of the ants crawling out of the wound of a man’s hand in Un chien andalou. As I observed in my analysis of that film, these ants are symbolic of the death drive, Freud‘s “myrmidons of death” (page 312), like the drive the Devil uses to destroy Trifon’s piety, and later, Simon’s.

Before the monks leave Simon, he tells them that Matias, being clean-shaven, must be kept apart from the other monks until he has grown a beard; only then may he rejoin them, as beardless youths “live near the temptations of the Devil.” One is reminded of how strict Muslim fundamentalists require all men to be bearded. Apparently, clean-shaven youths may remind us of the pretty cheeks of women, and may thus provoke homosexual feelings in other men. [!]

It is the excess of this kind of religious strictness that Buñuel is satirizing in this film. Ascetic self-denial, the refusal of tasty food, chastity and celibacy (even when Paul himself said that one may have a wife if one couldn’t help oneself), refusal of cleanliness in body or clothing, no dancing to rock ‘n’ roll (at the end of the film), and the insistence on bearded monks! These are all such absurdly high standards of moral perfection, so needless and offering so little, if any, good to the world, that they are deserving of critique. If one truly wants to be good, why not just work towards feeding, clothing, and housing the poor? Besides, excesses of repression can lead to an explosion of indulgence one day.

Another day goes by, and we hear those marching drums again. Onward, Christian soldiers, it would seem. Simon’s mother walks by with some wood, looking up at him with his arms out in that “Jesus Christ pose.” He is praying, but he acknowledges that his thoughts are straying from Christ. Fittingly, the Devil appears…with a group of lambs.

Recall that Jesus is the Lamb of God. The otherwise feminine Devil also has a beard now, as Simon has required of Matias. This Christ-like appearance of Satan is thus confusing to Simon. Just as a beardless man apparently looks like a woman, and thus there’s the fear of him arousing lust, so is a bearded woman, holding the animal symbolic of Christ, one to be confused with a holy man, and thus there’s the fear of her leading Simon astray with false religiosity.

And so, this bearded Belial tries to tempt Simon to come down from his pillar and enjoy the pleasures of the world. We’re reminded of those who abused Christ on the Cross, who said if He’s the Son of God, He should come down from the Cross (Matthew 27:40). But here, it would seem that God is telling Simon to come down, that his asceticism is excessive and unnecessary. Could it be?

Her dropping and kicking of the lamb she held has made it clear to Simon that her bearded appearance is yet another of Satan’s tricks. In his frowning at the Devil, Simon reminds her of how she was once Lucifer, one of the greatest of all angels. When she asks if, through repentance, she could ever return to her former glory, Simon denies the possibility. (Now, this may be the Devil, but I thought that God’s love and mercy were boundless.)

What’s interesting here is how it was Lucifer’s very pride that brought about his downfall. Simon is showing a similar pride, and he is soon to fall, too.

Still, Simon tries to cloak his pride in a show of humble penitence for having allowed himself to be fooled by a “wolf” in the guise of a “lamb.” So he imagines that even more rigorous austerities, now in the form of standing on one foot (his legs are already covered in scars and scratches), will make him worthy of God. Again, salvations is sought by good works, instead of passive, humble faith; man isn’t supposed to be glorified through his efforts, yet Simon is still using this proud method.

A false show of modesty is still replacing real modesty.

That monk who was distracted from his prayers, by beautiful Satan carrying her jug, has returned to the pillar to talk to Simon, who has been praying for the poor (when the wealthy giving to them would be far more effective).

In his pondering out loud of a wish to give blessings, Simon finds himself not understanding what he’s been saying. Next, the dwarf appears and after Simon has spoken loquaciously about such things as his being sufficiently supplied with food, and that he’s “so withered up,” the dwarf replies that, of all of Simon’s long speech, he’s understood only the last two words.

Indeed, the dwarf imagines that Simon is “not quite right in the head,” a result of “stuffing [him]self with air.” This inability to understand one’s words, from someone so high up in the air, suggests yet another association to be made with Simon’s pillar: the Tower of Babel, whose attempt to reach heaven angered God, prompting Him to confuse the speech of its builders, creating all the languages of the world. Again, Buñuel, through symbol, uses religion to undermine itself.

The monk ascends the ladder to speak with Simon face to face, apologizing for having gazed upon that woman. He also wants to warn Simon about “the hordes of the Antichrist…advancing on Rome.” Man will be in a perpetual state of “fratricidal conflict,” based on a jealous competition over what’s “‘yours’ and ‘mine’.” I am reminded of what I said in my analysis of The Omen: material contradictions of the rich vs. the poor as symbolized in that movie.

Simon, in his abiding self-denial, can’t seem to grasp the idea of selfish hoarding that plagues the world; and as the monk observes, Simon’s penitence and self-denial are “of little use to man.” It is the wealthy who must deny themselves their wealth; the poor aren’t the ones who should be denying themselves anything. What can poor men like Simon give to the poor? On his Tower of Babel, Simon tells the monk that they “speak in different languages.”

He is in a desert, a symbol of want and lack. He stands on a phallic pillar in that desert of want, proudly elevating himself above the earth and engaging in false modesty. I’ve described his unconsciously Oedipal relationship to his mother, a double for the seductive female Satan. The manque à avoir of the desert, and the manque à être of the phallic pillar by which his mother stands, these represent Lacan‘s lack, which give rise to desire, not to spiritual edification. Again, Buñuel turns religion on its head.

The narcissistic trauma of the Oedipus complex is thus transformed into a narcissistic aspiration to piety. The female Devil, for whom he has temptations to lust, is thus a transference of Simon’s feelings for his mother, and she can take advantage of his narcissism, and thus succeed in making him give in to his temptation.

After the monk descends the ladder and leaves, she reappears…in a coffin sliding on the dirt and approaching the pillar. As we recall, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23), so her coming in a coffin is apt. The ants in the sand that his mother caressed, those “myrmidons of death” that are the death drive as well as the “guardians of life” (Freud, p. 312–i.e., the life instinct that includes libido, the sex drive, and therefore desire and sin), these are linked to the Devil in the coffin.

Unlike last time, Simon knows this is Satan, who comes out with frizzled, wavy hair sticking up like hellish flames, and with her right breast exposed, how like a mother’s breast about to be used to feed a baby. He seems to be showing his most determined resistance to her, but it’s just a show. She’ll succeed this time, taking him into the future of that Antichrist the monk spoke of.

We learn that, just as good works (austerities, etc.) won’t save Simon, neither will faith. The Devil, too, believes in the one living God: one is reminded here of that passage in the Epistle of James, which says, “Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.” (James 2:19). If Simon and the Devil–of whom Simon himself has said will never return to his/her former angelic glory–are very much alike, then Simon is as doomed as Satan is.

An airplane is seen in the sky, and Simon is taken into the modern world, that of the mid-1960s, in a dance club in the city, where youth are seen dancing to the music of a rock ‘n’ roll band–Satan’s music, as many preachers have called it, right from its beginnings.

The first of the dancers that we see, significantly, is a young man with a beard; so much for bearded saintliness, I suppose. Pinal’s daughter, incidentally, is among all these young dancers. After seeing all of them living it up so wickedly, we see Simon and the Devil at a table, with drinks and cigarettes. He has his hair cut short and his beard trimmed…like Samson, he’s lost his strength in God from a haircut; devilish Delilah, naturally, is loving the music. Recall, in connection with her enjoyment of the music, the end of Viridiana, with the rhythm and blues song heard when Pinal’s character, the nun, gives into temptation and joins the man and woman in the beginning of an implied menage à trois.

The closest Simon can come to a pious resistance to all this sinful fun is to be bored with it. The closest he can come to being interested in it is to ask what the dance is that all the dancers are doing, them shaking so frantically. The Devil calls it “Radioactive Flesh,” and it’s the latest dance…and the last dance, eerily suggesting how close we all have been to a nuclear end of the world, as real a danger of that Cold War as it is in our current one.

Yet so many today, like these kids on the dance floor, would rather party than heed and avert the danger.

A young man asks the Devil to dance, which she accepts. Simon would rather go home, but she tells him he can’t. “Another tenant’s moved in,” she says. It seems that modern-day capitalism’s accumulation of private property has taken away Simon’s real estate, his pillar, and has rented it to a new pretender of piety.

What was given to him by a wealthy man of the ancient world has been taken from him by one of today’s bourgeoisie. The landlord giveth, the landlord taketh away.

Still, Simon shouldn’t complain. The Devil just did him a big favour in liberating him from his pointless austerity and planting him in an infernal party where he must abandon all hope of its ever ending. As I said above, Pinal’s Viridiana isn’t all good, and her Devil isn’t all bad.

Buñuel knew it as well as AC/DC did.

Hell ain’t a bad place to be.

Towers

Some
people
tower
above
others
because
of innate
greatness
and effort.
They have
earned their
godlike glory.

Many
others
lord
them-
selves
above
all of us
because
they are
egotistical
seekers of an
unearned glory.

Their
Babel-
esque
boasts
sound
to us as
if they were
unintelligible
gibberish from
distant, foreign
lands. To listen to
them is to be deaf.

These
Simon
Stylites
would
attain
heaven,
but they’d
best beware
of falling from
so far a height as
to crash on the land,
bore a hole into it, and
end up in the lowest hell.

Analysis of ‘Pin’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pin thus represents that border where life and death meet.

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

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

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

…and here is where Pin comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Highly Sensitive Person

In previous posts, I’ve discussed how I suffered emotional abuse at the hands of a family whose members have had, in varying degrees, narcissistic traits of at least significant, if not pathological, levels. Because of my trauma, I as a child acquired a number of dysfunctional habits, including maladaptive daydreaming.

Instead of feeling empathy for me, and using such empathy to direct and motivate her towards getting to the root cause of my problems, my mother–the head narc of the family–claimed that psychiatrists who’d examined me diagnosed me with autism. Now, she’d described this “autism” in such extreme language that I find totally implausible. She claimed that the psychiatrists who’d examined me as a little kid had said I was, apart from being autistic, mentally retarded and that I should be locked up in an asylum, throwing away the key!…and by a “miracle from God,” I grew out of this extreme mental condition!

Combining the above with observations made by two psychiatrists I saw a few decades later, each of them concluding after examining me over a period of months that there were no signs of autism in me, and with far-too-low scores I got on the “Autism Quotient” test, I can say that my mother’s version of events were, to say the least, totally unreliable. To say the most, she was outright lying to me.

That she was lying to me I find to be the only logical explanation for her claims; the purpose of the lies was, as I see it, not only to project her own narcissism onto me (she tended to go by an old definition of autism as meaning ‘excessively self-absorbed,’ like narcissism), but also to avoid taking responsibility for the effects of the childhood bullying I’d suffered, at its core, from my elder siblings, against whom I, as a little boy, was helpless in a power imbalance.

In other words, the autism label was meant to indicate that I was ‘born that way,’ rather than correctly describing my maladaptive childhood habits (self-isolation, talking to myself, etc.) as trauma responses, as attempts to self-soothe and ease my anxieties. In point of fact, my real mental condition is C-PTSD, brought on by all that emotional abuse, bullying, belittling, and gaslighting.

Now, as true and valid as all of the above is, it doesn’t mean that I can’t locate any source of these dysfunctional behaviours as my having been ‘born that way.’ I’m convinced that there’s a particular, innate psychological condition that I have that’s contributed to these problems of mine in a significant way.

I am a highly-sensitive person (HSP).

I consistently get high scores on HSP tests. HSPs react more intensely to external stimuli, including discomfort and pain, than the average person. We’re also more empathic that most people (though being an empath and an HSP aren’t necessarily the same thing); we tend to internalize what’s around us more, including criticisms. Bullies can smell such traits in HSP children, and they’re quick to take advantage of our disadvantage.

Narcissistic mothers tend to make their sons and daughters play roles: the golden child (my elder sister, J.), the lost child (arguably, my elder brothers, R. and F.), and the scapegoat, or identified patient—me. The narc mom chooses her golden children and other flying monkeys (all three of my sibs) based on how well they’ve learned to please her, or to give her narcissistic supply. She chooses her scapegoat based on how much narcissistic injury and rage the kid(s) cause(s) her.

Very often, that narcissistic injury and rage are caused not so much by how blunt or sassy the child is to her, but rather by that child’s display of qualities the narc mother knows she can only fake: sensitivity, empathy, and a sincere wish to confront and do away with wrongdoing, which includes phony displays of virtue…a narc’s special talent.

You see, the thing about the scapegoat, or identified patient, or black sheep–whatever you want to call the unfavoured family member–is that this person is the one who can see through all the family bullshit. He or she has the sensitivity to be able to tell the difference between real and fake love. For if the charade of love that is performed before our eyes is real, then why do we scapegoats get so short-changed?

It’s not as though we have a monopoly on human fault: the golden and lost children have plenty of faults of their own; but a double standard is clearly at play here–the flying monkeys’ faults are usually swept under the rug, as are the narcissistic parent’s faults, while those of the scapegoat are put under a magnifying glass. Not exactly fair, is it?

I’m not denying that I have faults; I have a whole slew of them (just ask my wife). The problem is that the family treated my faults as if they were the essence of who I am, rather than something that I have, just a few facets of the totality that I am, among other facets raging from neutral to quite good. And when you focus on the negative in somebody, you bring out that negativity all the more.

The scar to the narcissist’s ego, at the sight of the empathy and sensitivity of the target of his or her rage, comes from envy. The narcissist can’t bear to see another with virtues that he or she can only pretend to have, and narcissists are known for envying others, while imagining that others envy them (i.e., this envy is projected onto others). Hence, the narcissist feels a consuming need to destroy those virtues in the target, to create the illusion among everybody that the sensitive person’s empathy doesn’t exist.

Remember that in the narcissist’s world, appearance and reality are confused, swapped, even. So if the narc can make him- or herself look kind, generous, thoughtful, and altruistic to the public, while making the HSP seem self-centered and indifferent to the suffering of others, then he or she has come as close to reality as needed. One of the crucial manipulative tactics that the narc uses is projective identification, which goes beyond usual projection’s mere imagining that one’s own traits are in others, but which manipulates others into manifesting those projected traits, creating the illusion that the others really have those traits while the narc never had them at all.

I believe that my mother, with her flying monkeys’ help, did this kind of projecting onto me…and she did it with remarkable success! Any inclination in me to want to help others, or to connect with others, was crushed in me, suppressed, denied, and discouraged. To allow me to demonstrate such inclinations would make me step out of my assigned role as family scapegoat; I’d no longer seem “autistic,” and Mom couldn’t tolerate that!

When someone believes that he or she has this or that kind of personality, he or she will behave accordingly. To ensure that I behaved in a self-centered or uncaring way, Mom had to drill into my head the belief that I have such vices. So instead of telling me that I needed to change from my selfish ways, she just said that I am selfish…as if the vice were an absolute, unchanging trait in me, never to be corrected.

If I tried to do good, the family would twist things around so it would look as if I meant to do wrong. I’ll give a few examples, stories I’ve discussed before (links above), but I’m repeating them here to illustrate this point.

Over thirty years ago, it was my mother’s birthday, and I was having difficulty finding a suitable gift to buy for her, so I was late with it. My good intentions would have been clear to her and my sister, J. (I’d spoken to them of how I’d searched all over the city, with no luck), but J. decided to act as though I’d made no such efforts. After all, only the physical appearance of a gift matters, not the thought behind it. And besides, J. had to demonstrate as the golden child that, by having given Mom a gift on time, unlike me, the scapegoat, she was a better daughter than I was a son.

I gave Mom a birthday card, which she received warmly. I was anxious to buy her a gift as soon as possible, so as to avoid being late with it (it was her birthday that very day!). J., however, decided to interpret my intentions as me just wanting to get the buying over with, so I could enjoy the rest of Mom’s birthday as a “me-day,” to use J’s words (actually, since J. had already given Mom a gift, she was now free to get together for a dinner date with a woman-friend, to have a “me-day” of her own!).

I went to J. and joked about the card I bought Mom as a kind of “down payment” on her gift, since Mom warmly said she didn’t mind the gift being a little late. But J. got all snooty with me for being late with it, and this provoked me into getting into a fight with her. In response to J.’s ‘Thou shalt not be late for Mom’s birthday’ attitude, I inadvisably said, in all sarcasm, “…and a birthday is this god we have to worship!”

I meant this remark not out of disrespect to Mom, but to point out how needless J.’s insistence on standing on ceremony was. Nonetheless, Mom, overhearing what I’d said, took my words as disrespectful, and she blew up, shouting a barrage of four-letter verbal abuse at me. I immediately realized my verbal faux pas, and fell over myself trying to apologize, saying I never meant to hurt her…to no avail, of course.

Looking back on what happened, I have the creepiest suspicion that both Mom and J. had set me up to be the scapegoat for a forgetting of the birthday that, in fact, Dad and my brother, F., had actually forgotten. You see, J. had known that I was trying to find a suitable gift, since I’d asked her a night or two before Mom’s birthday what I should buy. J. knew I’d never forgotten, but she acted as if she thought I had.

And how could Mom have gone from a whisper to a scream like that, from so warm to so psychotic–so quickly? I suspect that Mom, in a private conversation with J. prior to the incident, lied to her about me ‘forgetting’ along with Dad and F.; and J., like a good flying monkey, just went along with the charade, because Mom wanted her to do so.

Another occasion when my good intentions were twisted into bad ones was when–again, about thirty to thirty-five years ago–all the staff of my parents’ restaurant, Smitty’s Pancake House, closed it up on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon (Mom and Dad were on vacation at the time) because some fumes…or something, I don’t quite remember now…were making the cooks too sick to work. F. came home that day and asked me why Smitty’s was closed. I simply explained what happened, matter-of-factly.

Apparently, I should have answered his question with all manner of histrionics, for F. told me that the way I’d answered his question sounded as if I didn’t care about the sick staff. His claiming that I don’t care about anyone but myself had been his favourite excuse to bully and harangue me at that time (i.e., over those past several years), and the fact that it was much more of an excuse to attack me than a legitimate complaint of my faults was made nakedly clear (not that he’d have ever noticed, let alone admitted to, it) in this choosing to hear my reaction as ‘uncaring,’ as opposed to my simply answering a question.

Since when did my answer even need to be ‘caring,’ anyway? Was my ‘caring’ going to help the staff recover faster, or something? F.’s constant bullying of me when I was a little kid, with virtually never any defence of me from the rest of the family (with only a few ever-so-rare exceptions from my parents), indicates that the family rarely cared about me in any meaningful way beyond the bare minimum (i.e., feeding me, clothing me, giving me shelter). Such a lack of caring is called childhood emotional neglect; this, combined with the emotional abuse I was suffering from all five of them, taught me that the world is an unsafe place, that hell is other people (I’m misusing Sartre‘s dictum on purpose here, though his original meaning applies to my situation, too), and that self-isolation was the only way I could feel safe.

…and if I was uncared for, then the family shouldn’t have been surprised to see me return that uncaring attitude to them.

Even still, I tried at times to be caring to them, even when they’d continued to hurt me. After J. made it clear to me that she didn’t approve of my marrying the truly caring person who is now my wife (indeed, Judy is the best thing that ever happened to me), I’d been loath to forgive J. for not keeping her disapproval to herself. Nonetheless, when I heard that J.’s husband was terminally ill with cancer, I allowed my ability to feel empathy and compassion to overrule my anger.

I offered to make a flight back to southern Ontario (I’ve lived in East Asia since the summer of 1996) to see J. and her husband one last time. Had I done it, paying for the trip would have broken the bank for me, but I was still willing to do it. This was in the mid-2000s.

The family should have been encouraging of me to do this selfless act…if selflessness is really what they wanted of me. Instead, Mom e-mailed me, telling me not to come, out of fear that my “tactless and insensitive” nature would have resulted in me putting my foot in my mouth in front of J.’s then-emotionally-vulnerable husband, agitating him.

I was furious at this rejection; yet, instead of simply admitting that she’d made a bad call, Mom continued to rationalize her arrogant position with the usual references to “my autism” (or Asperger syndrome, as she now liked to call it), all to make me feel further alienated from the family. Note how neither she nor the rest of the family ever considered, let alone took any responsibility for, causing the very alienation that has made me so cold to them ever since.

And since, as I explained above, the autism story had to have been a lie, Mom’s basis for rejecting my attempt to show solidarity with the family was also built on a lie. Another thing we must remember about narcissists and their relationship with the HSP as family scapegoat: since narcs are pathological liars, they will be paranoid of anyone exposing them as such. HSPs abominate liars, so narcs know that, in order to protect themselves, they must do a kind of preemptive discrediting of the HSP.

I’m convinced that my mother did exactly this to me behind my back, and that this discrediting, in the form of smear campaigns, triangulation, and divide and conquer, is the real reason that I, as the family scapegoat, never got along with Mom’s flying monkeys, my three elder siblings.

Her constant bad-mouthing of her youngest nephew, my cousin G., is what makes me believe she did the same to me. One time, during a phone call I had with her about a dozen years ago, when she was giving me a flurry of G-bashing, she raised her voice in an angry crescendo and claimed that G. must have had Asperger syndrome…exactly what she insisted I have. This disorder was meant to explain how G. is so ‘unlikeable’ (he’s a bit awkward, to be sure, but he’s nowhere near as bad as Mom characterized him). It’s not a leap of logic to assume that she was using “my autism” to tell the family that I’m similarly unlikeable.

As her health was deteriorating in the mid-2010s, she pulled more of her malignant, manipulative crap on me, in revenge–it’s safe to assume–on me for not ever wanting to communicate with her during the first half of that decade. (The above links give the full story, if you’re interested, Dear Reader.) I’ll try to make this brief.

In a series of emails and one phone call, Mom made a number of assertions that ranged from “Why should I believe a word of this?” to “That is most unlikely,” to “That couldn’t possibly have happened,” making all of it dubious in the extreme. And this was after I’d already established an understanding of her as a habitual liar, and not just about the “autism” story.

I told her so, most bluntly in an email explaining why I didn’t want to fly over to Canada to visit her. Predictably, she pretended not to know what I was talking about when I’d accused her of “Lies, lies, and more lies” in my email. Predictably, she made me out to be the villain and herself out to be the innocent victim when discussing my email to the family, who–predictably–believed her every word without question.

Well, of course the family believed her every word without question: they’d been conditioned to for years…decades!…to discredit any observation I made about anything that didn’t jive with their preconceptions about the world. Mom had preemptively discredited me, so my accusation of her lying wouldn’t be given a millisecond of consideration by them. Mom may have been dying, but her reputation was safe.

With her death, in the spring of 2016, the hope of a confession from her similarly died. Her last words to me, spoken on her death bed over the phone to me, were all about how my accusation “hurt” her (translation: caused her narcissistic injury–note how she was permitted to refuse a visit from me, but I wasn’t permitted to refuse visiting her), none about how the truth and validity of what I accused her of had hurt me. She didn’t even try to be fair, and acknowledge that there were many times in my life that she’d hurt me, and that she was sorry for that; instead, I got a pity party about how much of a bad son I was, and to add insult to injury, she congratulated herself on what a ‘good mother’ she’d been, apparently having given me “the most love,” of my siblings and me…during those very years (just before and around my pre-teen years) when she’d contrived the autism lie!

In short, she dumped a huge guilt trip on me while pretending she’d never done me any wrong–classic narcissism. Here’s the thing: if I’m so ‘uncaring’ of other people, why dump all this grief on me? It would make no difference to me–I’d just shrug it off, easily, wouldn’t I? The fact is, the family all know that I internalize all the abuse they ram down my throat–they know I feel the pain. The whole purpose of dumping that guilt on me is to manipulate me into doing what they want me to do, to control me…or at least to try to control me.

I feel so hollow now, so empty, the shell of what I once was, or could have been. Such is what narcissistic abuse does to victims: the vice of narcissism is projected onto the victim, who is fully misunderstood. We are made to live a lie of the narcissist’s making. It’s a terrible feeling, knowing your family doesn’t truly love you, that their ‘love’ was all an act, to make themselves look good publicly, or just family obligation.

Still, I can’t go on just feeling sorry for myself. The damage has been done, but there’s no one out there to do the repairing for me, so I’ll have to do it all myself (I don’t have the money for therapy.). I’ll have to find that sweet, sensitive little boy inside me, buried deep down under all of this pain.

Since I follow the Freudian (actually, post-Freudian) school of psychoanalysis, I don’t usually go in for Jung‘s ideas, but there is one of his that I’ve recently been interested in: his notion of the Shadow. As a result, I’ve been looking into what’s called Shadow work as a form of therapy to confront all this repressed trauma and self-hate, and therefore to heal me.

Since I assume, Dear Reader, that you’re reading this blog post as part of an exploration of the problem of narcissism to heal your own emotional wounds, then I hope that what I have to say here about Shadow work will help you find resources in your own healing journey.

There are so many different ways to describe what Shadow work is, and how to do it, that space doesn’t permit me to go over it all in encyclopedic fashion, but I can give you a basic idea of what it’s about, if you aren’t yet familiar with the concept.

According to Jung, we all have a Shadow aspect to our personalities, a dark, unpleasant side that we try to hide because it includes shameful and traumatic elements. We try to repress it, but we mustn’t; for after all, what is repressed returns to consciousness, though in an unrecognizable form…and this return of the repressed can come in quite nasty, regrettable ways. This repressed, ego-dystonic material must be confronted if we are to heal–Shadow work is this confrontation.

There are many ways to do Shadow work. The most common ways include journalling every day, putting our trauma into words. Other ways can include expressing your pain through art or music. Meditation is also helpful, including EMDR therapy…and there are lots of YouTube videos on these subjects. One of the websites I added a link to above recommend having a ‘dialogue’ with one’s Shadow: asking it questions and listening for answers in a contemplative silence. What’s most important is feeling that pain again (though not overwhelmingly so, of course!), as scary as that sounds, for the only way to heal is to process the trauma properly.

If you don’t feel that pain, you’ll try to repress it or project it, as my family did onto me. I’ve already explained the catastrophic results of that.

Stages

When
kids
make
their
entrances on the world that’s all a stage, they may lose
themselves within the roles they play to please Mom and Dad.

They
strut
and
fret,
but if they protest too much, their drama-critic parents
will pan their poor performances, and they’ll be heard no more.

Yet,
when
they
play
too well, the line between actor and character is unseen,
and they exit the stage at death, never knowing who they are.

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