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 ‘The Brood’

The Brood is a 1979 Canadian horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg. It stars Oliver Reed, Art Hindle, and Samantha Eggar, with Henry Beckman, Nuala Fitzgerald, Susan Hogan, Cindy Hinds, Gary McKeehan, and Nicholas Campbell.

It was a profitable film, grossing over five million dollars. Positively received by critics, The Brood became a cult film in later decades. Academics have shown a scholarly interest in the film for such themes as mental illness and parenthood.

The Chicago Film Critics Association named it the 88th scariest film of all time in 2006.

Here‘s a link to quotes from the film, and here‘s a link to the complete film.

Cronenberg’s inspiration for The Brood was his own acrimonious divorce and bitter child custody battle over his and his ex-wife’s daughter. In fact, Hindle and Eggar were cast as Frank and Nola Carveth because of their physical resemblances to Cronenberg and his ex-wife.

Another inspiration for the film was Kramer vs. Kramer, though The Brood is meant to be a correction of the optimistic ending of a marriage in the American drama that came out the same year. In spite of the science fiction element (“psychoplasmics”) of The Brood, Cronenberg described it as “more realistic” than Kramer vs. Kramer, and he called it “the most classic horror film [he’d] done” in retrospect.

Of course, divorce causes serious emotional trauma in the children caught in the middle of their parents’ fighting, and the link between The Brood‘s themes of mental illness, parenthood, and separation lead to another key theme in the film: child abuse–not just physical, but also emotional. I’m reminded of that poem by Philip Larkin, for in many ways, that’s what The Brood is all about.

Parental abuse, however, isn’t the only kind of abuse to be explored in this film. The ways in which psychotherapy can be abusive, intentionally or not, are also an issue here. And when one considers the ramifications of transference, an abusive psychiatrist, psychologist, or psychoanalyst can be just like an abusive parent, as we see in the film’s opening scene.

Dr. Hal Raglan (Reed), a psychotherapist, is demonstrating to a group of people something he calls “psychoplasmics,” a form of therapy he’s devised to get his patients to release suppressed emotional trauma by making it appear as physiological changes to their bodies. His audience watches him facilitate a father transference in a patient, Mike (McKeehan), who has abandonment issues with his biological father.

Raglan speaks cruelly to him, like an authoritarian father, calling Mike weak and feminine for not looking him in the eyes. His harsh words are meant to bring out Mike’s psychological pain, as part of the therapy, but it just looks as though Raglan is retraumatizing him. Indeed, the last thing that those spots seen all over Mike’s chest and face look like are signs of healing.

Nonetheless, at least one of the members of the audience is amazed at the results of psychoplasmics, and thinks Raglan is a genius. Frank Carveth is less impressed, and he’ll be furious when he sees marks all over the body of his daughter, Candice (Hinds), concluding that Raglan is a fraud and that his ex-wife, Nola, has physically abused their daughter.

That demonstration, with the lights turned down low and Raglan and Mike on a stage embracing at the end, looks more like a theatre performance than real therapy. The doctor switching from abusive words to hugging Mike, in fact, looks like traumatic bonding.

In these contradictions, we see the anti-psychiatric critique in The Brood. Psychotherapy is supposed to help the mentally ill, not make them worse. One could consider this film to be an allegory on religion, too, with Raglan’s therapeutic innovations as the beginnings of a new cult, conning people into following him and paying him for a salvation that is nothing of the sort.

Indeed, Nola has been receiving Raglan’s therapy for her own mental health issues, and she’s getting worse rather than better. Frank wants to stop his ex from seeing their little girl, to protect her from further physical abuse, but Raglan won’t have it, since he feels that Nola’s seeing Candice regularly is crucial to her recovery. Frank threatens to sue Raglan.

Now, what is “psychoplasmics” as a form of therapy, really, in its essence? Symbolically speaking, it’s projection, and projective identification. The patient tries to push his or her pain outward, to get it out of him- or herself, hence the markings on the patient’s body.

The problem is that through projection and projective identification, the pain that is pushed out tends to be put into other people, and this is what is personified by the brood of deformed, killer kids that Nola parthenogenetically produces. “They fill you with the faults they had/And add some extra, just for you,” as Larkin says in his poem.

The thing about projection and projective identification is that, as ego defence mechanisms, they act as a kind of amateurish therapy for the self, a self-soothing. If people have hurt you, by projecting that pain onto others (often not the ones who initially hurt you), you can relieve yourself of it, then carry on your life in a reasonably functional way. You kid yourself into thinking you’ve removed the pain from yourself and passed it on to somebody else (“Man hands on misery to man”), though that pain is still rooted in the unconscious.

This passing on of pain is what Nola is doing by creating the brood and having them kill for her. First, we see Raglan do a therapy session with her, in which he takes on the role of Candice to bring out the source of the abuse the little girl suffered. At first, Nola naturally denies it, even going to the point of claiming that “Mummies don’t hurt their own children.”

This, of course, is utter nonsense coming from Nola’s mouth. The ideal mother would never hurt her own child, certainly not intentionally…”They may not mean to, but they do.” Many mothers and fathers out there at least don’t deliberately hurt their children…but some do. Nola’s certainly aware of the knowingly hurtful ones, for as Raglan carries on with his therapy with her, the repressed pain comes to the surface, and she admits that “bad mummies…fucked-up mummies” sometimes hurt their kids (“But they were fucked up in their turn”).

Raglan gets her to admit that her own mother physically abused her. He now takes on the role of her mother, repeating her denials of mothers ever committing abuse in order to provoke more of a surfacing of Nola’s pain. And just as with Mike, he has her physically manifest her pain…but it doesn’t appear as mere marks on her skin. It comes out as the brood.

The fact is that Nola’s trauma is far more severe than Mike’s ever was. He suffers abandonment issues, which are surely terrible, but she as a child was beaten, scratched, and thrown down the stairs. Her alcoholic mother, Juliana Kelly (Fitzgerald), is as much in denial of what she did to little Nola as Nola is of what she did to Candice…through the brood, mind you, as we will learn.

These parental denials add a new dimension to the abuse, a psychological dimension called gaslighting. The victim’s refusal to acknowledge the pain she’s been through–as we see initially in Nola and in Candice’s quiet non-reactions to any violence–is a coping mechanism: an attempt to remove the pain by pretending it isn’t there.

But Nola, having felt the pain resurface, can find only one way to get rid of it now, and that’s through projecting it into the brood, one of whom goes over to Juliana’s house, where Candice also is. The evil, deformed child attacks and kills Candice’s grandma, and Candice, seeing the bloody corpse in the kitchen, gives no emotional response, but just goes up to her room to sleep, and forgets about the whole thing.

And just as Juliana would deny any knowledge of how little Nola got all those bumps on her body, Candice seems to know nothing of how Juliana got her injuries. The police psychologist, Dr. Birkin (played by Reiner Schwarz), has examined Candice, and he can tell that she has repressed trauma that must be dealt with. Taking Birkin’s advice, Frank tries to get his daughter to talk about what happened, but she stays quiet.

In another therapy session with Raglan, Nola has a father transference with him, complaining of her fears that Frank is taking Candice away from her. Raglan, taking on the father role, defends Frank’s actions as protective of their daughter; he claims that in a similar way, Nola’s father did his best to protect her, which provokes her into denying that protection, which truly never happened. As a codependent, alcoholic ex-husband to Juliana, Barton Kelly (Beckman), sat back and allowed Juliana’s abuse of Nola to happen.

When parents look away and ignore abuse, pretending it never happened, just as the abuser denies it, and even the victim pretends it never happened, all of this denial enables the abuse. When the victim does this, it’s wrongheaded but understandable, as confronting and trying to process the pain feels almost impossible; but when abusers, flying monkeys, and codependent enablers let the abuse slip by without judgement, they are in many ways as guilty as the abuser is.

Interestingly, as Nola is tearfully telling Raglan (as her father transference) that he looked away and never protected her from Juliana, he turns his back on her and looks the other way. At one point in the scene, he, in the role of ‘loving father,’ kisses her on the cheek and calls her ‘sweetheart.’ He, as a psychiatrist, is being as emotionally abusive to her as her father was, in however indirect that way Barton was (and Raglan is). In fact, that kiss also suggests he has a sexual interest in Nola, who is an attractive woman.

Frank takes photos of Candice’s bruised back as evidence to be used in a court case against Raglan and Nola. He also receives a visit from Barton, who’s happy to see his granddaughter, but saddened to know the cycle of intergenerational family abuse has resurfaced.

To get more evidence against Raglan, Frank sees Jan Hartog (played by Robert A. Silverman), who has also received psychoplasmics therapy and has lymphosarcoma on the front of his neck. Hartog knows he can’t prove in court that Raglan’s methods caused his cancerous condition, but he hopes that even a losing court case will hurt Raglan’s business by giving him bad publicity. Frank’s hoping for more convincing evidence for the court case.

Barton drives over to see Raglan about telling Nola of her mother’s murder, but Raglan doesn’t want her father to contact her, claiming that her isolation is key to her therapy. Isolating someone is, of course, a kind of emotional abuse, reminding us that therapists can be as bad as abusers, especially ones with Raglan’s narcissistic tendencies, i.e., his apparent god complex, which is something I’ll elaborate on later.

Barton is infuriated with Raglan’s refusal to let him see Nola, so he gets drunk that night in his old house with Juliana. Meanwhile, Frank is having dinner with Candice’s teacher, Ruth Mayer (Hogan), and there’s a potential romantic interest between the two, since she could be a new mother to the little girl. Nola will find out, though, and her rage against her non-protective father, and her jealousy of Ruth, will get both objects of Nola’s rage killed by the brood.

Now, before Barton is killed by one of the brood, as I said above, he gets drunk and ruminates sadly over his failed family in his old house, the one he lived in with Juliana. He talks on the phone with Frank, and he’s on the verge of tears.

The word brood has two significant meanings as far as this film is concerned. As a noun, brood refers, of course, to the group of deformed killer children that Nola produces out of her rage. As a verb, to brood is to ruminate sulkily about whatever is making you unhappy, as Barton does before he’s killed, and as Nola does in her rages that produce the brood.

While Frank is gone to get Barton before he does something foolish in his drunken depression, leaving his dinner date, Ruth, in his home, Nola phones Frank, with Ruth receiving the call and inflaming Nola’s jealousy…and causing her to brood in her own right. Just before Barton is beaten to death, he looks at his brood-killer and sees Nola’s face on it. Of course he does: the brood are all her projections.

When Frank arrives at Juliana’s house and finds Barton dead, the killer child tries to kill him, too, but it soon ‘runs out of gas,’ so to speak, and dies. The child’s body is examined, and we learn that it is sexless, having no genitals. It also has no navel, and therefore wasn’t born the natural, human way. It’s toothless and colourblind, too.

One should consider the implications, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, of it apparently seeing only in black and white. Since these brood children are fueled by a murderous rage, and are projections of Nola’s mental instability, we can understand their black-and-white vision as representative of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting.

The brood’s murderous rage comes from seeing the world as either all white (i.e., all good, as in Nola and Candice) or as all black (as all bad, or those to be killed). There is no grey in-between for them. Such is the mental state of what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (PS): paranoid, because of the paranoid fear that comes from contemplating a retaliation from the hated object; schizoid, because of the splitting of objects into absolute good and bad ones. All babies experience PS at first, but soon enough will acknowledge people as a grey mixture of good and bad, resulting in the mental state called the depressive position (D). The brood can never integrate the black with the white, so instead of experiencing D, they’re always in PS.

In this permanently split state, the brood can never be fully human, hence their lack of teeth, genitals, and retinas in their eyes; their physical deformity (including cleft lips) is symbolic of this human incompleteness. Furthermore, their tongues are too thick and inflexible for proper speech; all they can do to communicate is to grunt and scream without any articulation.

This inability to form words means that the brood cannot participate in society and culture–they have no sense of what Lacan called the Symbolic. Their violent world is that of the Real, an undifferentiated, traumatic, inexpressible world.

Nola’s mental instability is at such a severe state that she splits off and projects her hostility in personified forms that are symbolically comparable to what Bion called bizarre objects, projections that take on a life of their own.

When Raglan learns of the killing of Barton, and that the killer was obviously one of the brood, he realizes that, through psychoplasmics, he’s created a monster…or many monsters. In spite of his narcissistic tendencies, he isn’t all bad, for he’s feeling a pang of conscience.

That pang, nonetheless, isn’t inspiring him to make the best of moral choices, for he tells Chris (Campbell) to have all of his patients, save Nola, removed from his institute. This will feel like he’s abandoning these patients, especially Mike, as Chris tells Raglan. And while it’s true that Nola’s care needs special focus, Raglan’s form of therapy is the last thing she needs; the fact is, he still wants her for himself, so his narcissism wins out.

Frank learns through Hartog about Mike being sent out of Raglan’s institute, and that Nola, “the queen bee,” is the only one Raglan is interested in. She doesn’t even have to pay for the therapy, because Raglan can use her to prove how ‘effective’ psychoplasmics is at projecting pain outward. He, of course, isn’t really going to cure her: the creation of the brood is feeding his god complex.

Mike is now desperate for a father substitute, having been abandoned by his real father and now by Raglan. Mike wants Frank to be his new ‘daddy,’ and he’ll do anything for Frank in exchange for that. Mike will spy on and try to find out what Raglan’s doing with Nola.

To get an idea of how ‘effective’ the projections are in removing pain from oneself, we see after the killing of Ruth how at peace Nola is from waking from a restful sleep. The removing of that pain, however, is only temporary, for she’ll continue to be raging, jealous, and possessive of Candice, who’s been taken, by the pair of brood-children who killed Ruth, back to her.

Frank learns from Mike that Raglan has the brood under Nola’s care in a work shed at the institute, and he surmises that Candice, who’s been missing since the killing of Ruth, must be with Nola. So he rushes over in his car to the institute. He confronts Raglan in front of the work shed, the latter having a gun, and he learns that she is the brood’s mother, and that it was the brood that beat Candice at the beginning of the movie.

And here is where Raglan’s god complex comes in. Even though he can be implicated in the killings of Juliana, Barton, and Ruth, since it’s his psychoplasmics that created the brood in the first place, he won’t use his gun to shoot the killer kids, except in self-defence, as he does to some of them at the film’s climax. Deep down, he loves the brood, because he’s their father, if indirectly. He’s proud of his creations.

Raglan, in this sense, is like God the Father, though he’s more like the inferior Demiurge, creator of what’s physical (i.e., the skin markings, the brood). He’s an evil god, or at least an inferior one, and Nola is an evil Mary, giving virgin births to evil Jesuses, as it were, who kill rather than give life, then die themselves soon afterwards.

So in this sense, The Brood is not just a statement against failed parenting and bad psychiatry; it’s also symbolically a critique of religion’s failed attempts at healing and guiding people. “They fuck you up, your mum and dad”: this includes therapists as parental transferences, priests (the Fathers in church), the Mother of God, and God the Father…whether they mean to, or not.

Interestingly, the first verse of Larkin’s poem was recited by a judge during an acrimonious divorce/child custody case in 2009, reminding us of that of Cronenberg and his ex-wife, which in turn inspired this film. The misery man hands down to man, incidentally, reminds me of Exodus 20:5, in its relation to a wrathful, jealous father-God.

Raglan, in an attempt at redeeming himself somewhat, offers to fetch Candice from the room where she is to sleep with the brood, as long as Frank can go in the work shed and speak to Nola in a conciliatory way, to keep her calm so the brood won’t be enraged and attack Raglan and Candice. The plan works at first, until Nola reveals her external womb, created through psychoplasmics, which produces brood-babies. Frank cannot hide his shock and disgust at her ripping open the womb, taking a bloody baby out of it, and licking the blood off of it.

Offended at Frank’s disgust, Nola is enraged, and the brood attacks Raglan, who uses his gun to shoot a few of them before the rest kill him. In her jealous possessiveness of their daughter, Nola tells Frank she’ll kill Candice before letting him take her from Nola. This forces Frank to choke Nola to death, since he knows otherwise that the brood will kill Candice through Nola’s rage; but with her death, the brood dies, too.

In Frank’s killing of Nola, since the two characters represent, and the actors even resembled, Cronenberg and his ex-wife, we can see just how much bitterness the writer/director must have felt toward her, enough to include a scene that is, in effect, a wish-fulfillment. I’m reminded of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight,” a song about the drummer/singer’s own bitter divorce–these lines in particular: “if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand.”

Frank fetches Candice, takes her to his car, and drives away. The movie ends with a shot of her arm, which has two of the kind of lesions Nola had as a child, which her mom noticed on her. Now, whether Juliana was telling the truth about Nola’s lesions as being there irrespective of the mother’s abuse of her daughter, or if she was lying and in denial about having caused the lesions, they are certainly at least symbolic of the passing on of intergenerational abuse.

The sins of Juliana’s and Barton’s generation are being punished in not only Nola’s but also Candice’s generation. “Man hands on misery to man.” Even outside the realm of family abuse, the sins of the baby boomers and those before them are being punished in generations X, Y, and Z. The brood, in their deformities, incompleteness, and violence, are surely personifications of this problem.

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

Child’s Play is a 1988 horror film directed by Tom Holland, written by him, Don Mancini (whose story the film is based on), and John Lafia. It stars Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, and Brad Dourif, with Alex Vincent, Dinah Manoff, and Jack Colvin.

Child’s Play gained a cult following, and its commercial success spawned a media franchise including seven sequels (with a TV series), comic books, and a 2019 reboot. It won a Saturn Award for Best Actress (Hicks), and was nominated for three–Best Horror Film, Best Performance by a Younger Actor (Vincent), and Best Writing (Holland, Lafia, and Mancini).

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

There is a subtle critique of capitalism in Child’s Play. We see a stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots, that is, people like Karen Barclay (Hicks) and her son, six-year-old Andy (Vincent), on the one hand, living in their nice apartment, and the homeless, one of whom (played by Juan Ramirez) has sold her a Good Guy doll.

The doll itself is a commodity sold to “bring…a lot of joy” to the child who plays with it. The Good Guy doll, especially when the soul of Charles Lee Ray, or “Chucky” (Dourif), is in the doll, is a literally fetishized commodity. One buys the commodity as a complete, finished product, without any sense of the workers who made it, just as one might worship an idol, believing in the god inhabiting the carved wood or sculpted statue, without any thought as to who made the idol. Chucky is thus like a pagan idol, with a spirit animating it, adored by Andy the idolater, because the lonely, alienated boy has no real, living friend to play with. In commodity fetishism, there’s a preoccupation between things (money and merchandise), not between people, hence its relationship with alienation.

As far as the opposition of those with shelter and the homeless is concerned, that opposition is in potential danger of being erased, in Karen’s case, as a consequence of her walking out on the job during her shift to buy the doll from the homeless peddler. Her manager, Walter Criswell (played by Alan Wilder), pesters her about walking off on the job, and implies a threat of firing her if she won’t agree to covering a sick worker’s shift…on Andy’s birthday. In this conflict, we see an example of worker alienation, which is adding to the Barclay family’s alienation as already discussed in lonely little Andy (whose father died).

Another thing should be mentioned about the homeless, as seen in the peddler in particular: they aren’t portrayed sympathetically. The peddler tries to suck as much money as he can out of Karen (but isn’t that what capitalists do?), on two occasions: his selling her the doll, and his exploiting her need to get information about where he found the doll, even to the point of wanting a sexual favour from the pretty woman in exchange for that information.

This associating of the homeless with criminals can be interpreted in two ways: either it’s a 1980s Reaganite lack of sympathy for the poor, or it links the peddler’s desperation with that of Charles Lee Ray. The frustrations of being poor often have a way of making people mean; they either try to get as much money out of better-off people, like Karen, as they can, or sexual frustration can make them act like creeps, as the peddler does to her; or the detrimental effect of capitalism on one’s mental health can drive one to commit violent crimes, as it drives Charles Lee Ray to become a sociopathic serial killer.

His passing of his soul into a doll represents a classic case of projective identification, a Kleinian concept that goes beyond the ordinary projection of imagining one’s own traits in others, but instead one succeeds in putting those traits into someone else (or in the case of the doll, something else). What’s more, the bad guy puts himself into a Good Guy, in the form of a voodoo incantation.

There is a lot of duality in this film. In particular, there are many pairings: Charles Lee Ray and Chucky, Andy and Chucky, Karen and her friend, Maggie Peterson (Manoff), Charles Lee Ray and his double-crossing partner-in-crime, Eddie Caputo (played by Neil Giuntoli), Detective Mick Norris (Sarandon) and his partner, Detective Jack Santos (played by Tommy Swerdlow), and Chucky with the voodoo doll of John “Dr. Death” Bishop (played by Raymond Oliver).

These pairings are generally parallels and/or opposites of each other, in some way: a bad guy in a Good Guy doll, a sweet little boy who physically resembles (sometimes even dresses like) his doll with the killer’s soul in it, his nice mother and his cranky baby-sitting substitute mom, two criminals, two cops, and a victimizer doll vs a victim’s doll. These parallels/opposites remind us of dialectical realities.

Because Karen has to cover the sick worker’s shift on her son’s birthday, her friend Maggie will babysit the boy that night. She’s rather cranky about Andy getting to bed without letting Chucky watch the news to know the latest about the police’s manhunt for Eddie Caputo, the partner of the presumed-dead Charles Lee Ray, and someone he wants to kill for having driven away and abandoned him when Norris was chasing them at the beginning of the film.

Maggie’s perceived crankiness as Karen’s substitute puts her in the role of what Melanie Klein called the bad mother, as opposed to Karen as the good mother. Maggie not letting the ‘boys’ stay up is frustrating to them, whereas Karen going all out to buy the doll for Andy makes her the good mother, who strives never to fail in pleasing her son. These women are thus like the “bad breast” that won’t give the baby milk, versus the “good breast” that will feed the baby.

This splitting of the women into two moms is a defence mechanism that Andy also does, in a symbolic way, on himself, with his understanding that Chucky is alive. Just as there is a good mom and a bad one, so is there a good boy and a bad ‘boy.’ Splitting as a defence mechanism is thus aided by another defence mechanism, projection. Andy is projecting his bad, hateful side into Chucky (in a symbolic sense), just as Charles Lee Ray has literally done.

It’s interesting that much of the doll’s violence and terrorizing happen in the apartment, with Maggie or Karen as the victims. We’re reminded of the last, and best, episode of Trilogy of Terror, “Amelia,” in which the Zuni doll terrorizes Amelia (played by Karen Black) in her apartment. In my analysis of Trilogy of Terror, I explored the projection and splitting-away of the bad character traits of the characters Black plays in all three episodes, leaving the remaining ‘good’ characters as timid and sexually repressed. Andy’s sweetness, as opposed to Chucky’s viciousness, can also be seen in this light. Maggie‘s falling out of the window and crashing through a car roof, incidentally, reminds me of the fate of Katherine Thorn (played by Lee Remick) in The Omen, another film about an evil boy.

When the police investigate Maggie’s death, Norris notices that the soles of Andy’s Good Guy shoes match the footprints leading up to the attack on her, so he deems Andy to be a suspect. Of course, Karen is too upset even to consider such suspicions.

Later that night, she’s talking to her son, who says that Chucky told him that he was sent to Andy by his dead father in heaven. I’m curious to know how Chucky learned of Andy’s father’s death in so short a time to be able to make up such a story. One wonders how much of the boy’s conversation with Chucky is real, and how much of it is just the boy’s imagination.

Andy also tells his mother that “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch and got what she deserved.” He insists that Chucky is the one who said it, which is of course perfectly plausible, given the killer’s personality…but technically, we never hear those words come out of the doll’s mouth. For all we know, Andy said and thought it himself, however unlikely that may be, given the context.

Even if all of this did come out of Chucky’s mouth, though, which is of course more than probably true, it’s true only on the literal level. On a symbolic level, we can still see the living doll as a case of projection and splitting-away of Andy’s bad side onto the doll.

His father’s death would have caused emotional trauma for the boy, who would have imagined the death as a kind of abandonment of him, thus making Andy’s father the bad father, in the Kleinian sense. The good father in heaven may have given him the doll as a gift; but the bad father gave Andy a Bad Guy in a Good Guy doll.

The police see Andy as a suspect, even though it’s hardly much more plausible that a little six-year-old boy could have had the strength to make a woman fly out of a window than a ‘living doll’ could have. Andy’s insistence that the doll is alive sounds like a manifestation of mental illness in him, even though Chucky really has the killer’s soul animating it, so it’s not surprising that he’s taken to a psychiatric hospital to be treated by Dr. Ardmore (Colvin).

As I said above, on both literal and symbolic levels, little Andy really does have issues. His father died, the death of Maggie is a shock to him even if he isn’t the perpetrator of the killing, and he’s so lonely, he needs a talking doll for a friend. His physical similarity to the doll, including their clothes, sometimes suggests a potential merging of identities, in spite of the splitting and projection.

Andy’s experience of what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position–a schizoid splitting of his mom into absolute good (Karen) and bad (Maggie, the mom substitute), as well as a paranoid fear that the bad projection will come back to get him (i.e., Chucky coming to the mental hospital to get him–actually, not to kill him, but to put the killer’s soul into the boy’s body…still, Andy doesn’t know that)–is a projection of the splitting of the good and bad sides of Andy himself. His splitting of his dead father into good and bad versions is also such a projection, as is his projection of his bad side into Chucky.

This splitting of people into good and bad, as well as the projection of this splitting onto people in the outside world, is symptomatic of the alienation we all feel in a society ruled by the profit motive, which splits people into rich and poor, then idolizes the rich while looking down on the poor. The capitalist class exploits this splitting and projection by selling us the commodities representing idealized people (Good Guy dolls, films and TV shows glorifying our objects of hero worship), and the war on the poor that results from chasing profits in turn results in desperate people we denigrate, the lumpenproletariat (criminals and the homeless).

Note how the story takes place in winter, with the homeless huddling together around outdoor fires to keep warm. One homeless man, the peddler of the doll, turns nasty and tries to get as much out of Karen as he can, even her body, in exchange for information about where he got the doll (never mind all the greedy capitalists who try to squeeze out as much profit as they can through the extraction of surplus value, some of whom exploit the bodies of females far younger than Karen!); but when Norris rescues her from the peddler and his meat-hook hands, he also points his gun at all the other homeless in the area, as if they were just as bad as the peddler, making them run away from their one source of heat, their outdoor fire, on that cold, bitter night.

Norris may be a good guy in his helping of Karen, but as a cop pointing his gun at freezing cold homeless people who never laid a hand on her, he is working to protect the class interests of the wealthy. By speaking of an area where the homeless hang out as a rough part of town that she shouldn’t be in alone at night, Norris is lumping the homeless together with criminals. This lack of sympathy for the poor and desperate makes Chucky’s revenge attack on him in his car not exactly surprising.

Now, Chucky learns from John “Dr. Death” Bishop, his former voodoo instructor, that in order for his soul to escape the doll (which is becoming increasingly human), he must put it in Andy’s body (he being the first person to know that Chucky’s alive). This putting of Charles Lee Ray’s soul into the boy’s body, a merging of bad Chucky with good Andy, should be understood, symbolically speaking, in terms of the paranoid-schizoid position, which is a splitting into absolute good vs bad, and the depressive position, an integrating of the split-off good and bad.

Though a child perceives the split-off good vs bad as being in his good vs bad parents, we must remember that the splitting is happening in the child’s mind, and it is thus a projection of a splitting that isn’t really in his parents, but rather in himself. Chucky, back in Karen’s apartment with Andy and having knocked the boy out, begins the incantation to put his soul in Andy’s body, a merging that represents the integration of the good and bad sides. He doesn’t complete the ritual, though, because Karen and Norris arrive just in time to stop him.

Just as the merging of Andy and Chucky isn’t complete, so is the integration of the good and bad mother, or the good and bad father, a child’s reparation with them, never complete. Throughout one’s life, one tends to shift back and forth between the paranoid-schizoid position (PS) and the depressive position (D), an oscillation Wilfred Bion expressed in this shorthand form: PS <-> D (e.g., in Bion, page 67).

Accordingly, Chucky as the bad Andy fights with Karen and Norris (who could be seen as a substitute father). When Karen, having put Chucky in the fireplace, screams to Andy to get the matches so she can burn the doll, the boy sits in hesitation at first–partly out of fear, no doubt, but also partly out of an unconscious wish to remove Karen the bad mother by letting Chucky kill her. Nonetheless, the good Andy wins out in his conflict, and gets the matches.

Chucky attacking Karen with, for example, him stabbing the knife through the door with her holding it closed on the other side, can be seen to symbolize how Andy, in unconscious phantasy, is attacking his mother through a projection of his bad self. He unconsciously wants to attack her because he feels she’s frustrated him in certain ways (not buying the doll at the beginning of the movie, not being with him at night for his birthday, but having cranky “Aunt Maggie,” Karen’s substitute and therefore split-off bad mother, instead to babysit him, etc.).

Later, when he sees Karen and Norris trying to protect him from Chucky, he can see the good mother in her, and he can understand that both the good and the bad mother are the same person. Now, instead of wanting to attack her in unconscious phantasy, Andy wants to keep her. In fact, even Chucky, wanting to merge with Andy, says he’ll let Karen live if she gives him the boy (a pretty weak promise coming from a serial killer, but still symbolic of an unconscious train of thought). So the bad side in Andy, Chucky, is still vicious, but thanks to his help in getting the matches, as well as his recognition that his bad side is really bad (“This is the end, friend.”), Andy can weaken his bad side and integrate it with his good side, a switch from PS to D.

With the final destruction of Chucky, through not only gunshots breaking off his limbs and head, but also that bullet in his now fully-formed heart, Andy no longer needs to project his bad side. He can now switch from paranoid anxiety to depressive anxiety, from the fear of being persecuted by the projected bad mother to the urge to hang on to his mom with all of her faults, her mixture of good and bad.

The film ends with a frozen shot of Andy leaving the room and looking at burned, mutilated, and dead Chucky. The boy’s frown isn’t only from his trauma: it’s also from his enduring sense of connection to his other, bad, projected self. The movement between splitting and integration doesn’t end in infancy or childhood: PS <-> D is a lifelong oscillation.

Analysis of ‘Un Homme Qui Dort’

Un homme qui dort (“The Man Who Sleeps,” or “A Man Asleep”) is a 1974 French film directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, based on Perec’s story of the same name. It stars Jacques Spiesser.

The film’s script is taken completely from the text of Perec’s prose, though in a condensed form. The text is in the second person singular, as though the narrator (recited by Ludmila Mikaël in the original French, and by Shelley Duvall in English translation) were speaking to Spiesser’s character.

The black-and-white film was almost lost, but it was restored on DVD in 2007. It received some critical acclaim, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, here is a link to an English translation of Perec’s story (or is it the script for the film?), and here is a link to the film with English subtitles. Here is a link to the English language version.

A twenty-five-year-old Parisian university student (Spiesser), whose name is not given (thus making him a kind of everyman), lives in a one-room chambre de bonne. His feelings of alienation have risen to such a pitch that he no longer wishes to participate in social life. “…you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that you don’t know how to live and that you never will know.”

The notion that he is “a man asleep” is metaphorical. Actually, he wanders the streets of Paris instead of going to school and hanging out with friends. He’s living the life of an automaton, devoid of human interaction; it’s an attempt at indifference as a way of alleviating suffering. Self-isolation, he hopes, is a way to nirvana.

He’s as passive as can practically be achieved: “…it’s not action at all, but an absence of action…”

He imagines that someone else, his twin, his double, will get out of bed, wash, shave, dress, go out, and attend school for him. This idea of a double is significant, for it is expressed in other forms: the narrator, addressing him as “you,” is the rambling of his own thoughts in a kind of unwritten diary; also, there’s his cracked, Lacanian mirror, the specular image of which he is alienated from, too.

Finally, there’s the reproduction of René Magritte‘s 1937 surrealist painting, La reproduction interdite, showing a man standing in front of a mirror, his back to us and facing it; but instead of seeing the man’s face reflected back to us, we see the back of his head just as we do of the actual man in front of the mirror. About fifteen minutes into the film, when the student has gone into a theatre to see a movie, we see a surreal variation of this picture, but it’s the student, and the images show him repeatedly facing away from his ‘reflection.’ More self-alienation.

All of these doublings of himself indicate his having left the social and cultural world of the Symbolic Order in order to regress into the narcissistic, dyadic world of the Imaginary. In time, the horrors of the Real will jolt him out of his isolation, and force him to reintegrate into the Symbolic.

It’s also significant that the movie is in black-and-white, when colour film was easily available, and when, by the early 70s, virtually all movies were in colour. I see the choice of black-and-white to be symbolic of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting, part of the cause of this young man’s psychological problems.

According to Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position causes us to split people into being perceived as all-good or all-bad, the bad ones being projected outward and split off from us. This is what the student is doing, though he seems to feel that virtually all elements of society are bad, so he splits them off, including his internal objects of them, and projects them outward, imagining himself to be safe without them.

But of course, he won’t be safe without them, because the internal objects are a part of himself; hence, towards the end of the film, when the tension is raised and he realizes he can’t just cut himself off from the world, we see the black-and-white film in negative images.

Still, for the time being, anyway, he feels a sense of peace and bliss from no longer engaging with the world. Wouldn’t we all love to break away like this?! To give up on all responsibilities, to let Freud‘s death drive kick in, and be at rest, no longer suffering with the rest of the world.

Pleasure, for Freud, consists in the relaxation of tension, which in the form of death, is the ultimate relaxation of it; hence, the death drive as being merely the other side of the same coin as that of the libido, part of Eros. We sense that the young student is aiming for just such a relaxation of tension, though, like Hamlet, he’s too chicken to go through with suicide.

So life as a passive, indifferent automaton seems a reasonable compromise. Indifference, in this regard, is like that of the Buddhist avoiding gratification of desire, or attachment to the world…but without the Buddhist’s hard discipline, of course. The non-existence of nirvana, no-thing-ness, the escape from existence as pain, dukkha, is the death-paradise the student seeks.

We’re reminded of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“…to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” (III, i)

It is in this sense that we should understand the young student to be “the man who sleeps.”

Recall that the narrator, his anima mirror-double, says, “You have no desire to carry on […] the fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more, to see no more, to remain silent and motionless. Crazy dreams of solitude.”

At one point, in the middle of this solitude, he imagines he has reached this point of nirvana, for the narrator says the following to him:

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything.
You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you.
You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, an almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions.
You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing.
You are invisible, limpid, transparent.
You no longer exist…”

His friends have stopped over to say hello, but he ignores the knocking on his door and the paper messages slipped under it. He wants no contact with others, for he has come to understand that hell is other people; he doesn’t want to bear their judgemental gaze…yet the narrator, his internalized Other, addressing him with a judgemental “you,” ensures that he will never escape the hell of judgemental others. Therefore, there is no exit for him, not even in indifferent solitude.

(We hear, almost an hour into the film, “Il n’y a pas d’issue,” that is, “There is no way out,” or “There is no exit”; now, Sartre‘s play is named Huis clos–“Closed Door”–in the original French, but English translations of the play with titles like No Way Out and No Exit would have been well known by the time Perec began writing his story. Besides, the student, when in his chambre de bonne, typically has his door closed, anyway.)

When we see him wandering the streets of Paris, we usually see few if any other people there. This can be seen in the middle of the day, when the streets presumably would be far busier: could he be dreaming during these moments, experiencing wish-fulfillment?

Alone, in his chambre, he smokes, drinks Nescafé, looks up at the cracks on his ceiling (easily associated with the cracks in his mirror, all symbols of his fragmented self), and plays a game of cards similar to solitaire. This escape from the social world, into one of solitary play and contemplation, is not too far removed from the maladaptive daydreaming of traumatized people, or the self-isolation of sufferers of stress from Adverse Childhood Experiences.

His room–small, hot, claustrophobic, and with those cracks in the ceiling and on the mirror–is nonetheless “the centre of the world” for him. The room thus in many ways represents himself: fragmented, narcissistic, a place to hide himself in sleep, and a place to escape from when he can no longer stand himself. He’s as passive as that dripping tap, or those six socks soaking in the pink plastic bowl–sharks as indolent as he is.

With his loss of interest in social life comes also his loss of interest in time, whose passing he barely notices. Similarly, when during his wandering of the Parisian streets, two twin boys in identical clothes are running past him from behind while rattling a ruler against the palings of a fence he’s walking beside, he isn’t at all irritated by the noise. The boys’ duality parallels his duality as against his alienated self, his image in the mirror, the man twice seen in the Magritte picture with his back to us, his imaginary double replacing him in going about his normal daily routine, and his anima narrator…except that the boys are, in their energetic, enthusiastic participation in life, his dialectical opposite–what he still could be if he weren’t so alienated from everything and everyone.

In the Luxembourg Garden, he watches the pensioners playing cards, comparable to his own playing of his solitaire-esque game in his room. Such a comparison suggests a unity of self and other vis-à-vis him and the pensioners…also a dialectical unity between the elderly and his young self.

In a development of this theme of self and other, young vs. old, we see him watching an old man sitting on a bench staring into space “for hours on end,” as if mummified, “gazing into emptiness.” The young man, admiring the elder, would like to know his secrets, for the latter seems to have attained the ideal of detached indifference for which the former has been striving. (One is reminded of Prince Siddhartha seeing a holy man, and thus being inspired to find enlightenment himself.) He looks at the old man as if staring into a mirror, gazing at his ideal-I…so much better than his reflection in his cracked mirror in his room.

At one point, while reading the business news in Le Monde, he imagines himself to be some important businessman or politician smoking a cigar and getting out of a car. Ending the narcissistic fantasy of him identifying himself with important men, he is seen as his ordinary self, playing pinball.

When playing his solitaire-like card game, he removes the aces, so he has no ‘ace in the hole,’ or ‘ace up his sleeve.’ Accordingly, he rarely succeeds at the game, yet winning doesn’t matter to him, for what would winning mean to him, anyway? The card game, after all, is like life: if he’s indifferent to life, why would he care any more about winning at some card game? He goes through the motions like an automaton, all meaninglessly, just as he does through life.

We’ve noticed, by now, that he’s been biting his nails.

As I mentioned above, he reaches a point when his ‘mastery,’ as it were, of the indifferent life has allowed him to attain a kind of bliss. He seems as indifferent as the dripping tap, as the six socks soaking in the plastic pink bowl, as a fly, as a tree, as a rat.

He speaks no more than is absolutely necessary: in this disengagement with language, and therefore with society, he is leaving the Symbolic. “Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs.” Though he’d seem to be blissfully regressing to the narcissism of the Imaginary, before long, he’ll experience the trauma of the undifferentiated Real.

In this sense of non-differentiation, he finds himself with a series of choices of ‘you do, or you don’t do.’ These include:

You walk or you do not walk.
You sleep or you do not sleep.
You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it.
You eat or you do not eat.

A little later, the narrator says, “You play pinball or you don’t.” All of these ‘do or not do’ expressions remind us of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Just as Hamlet suffered from an inability to act, whether in killing his uncle Claudius or in killing himself, so does the young Parisian student feel incapable of acting, hence his automaton-like passivity and indifference. Still, in the end, like Hamlet, he must act.

Tense music can be heard playing in the background, suggesting that he is reaching the limit of how long he can continue to live the ‘indifferent’ life. Though I mentioned above the black-and-white film as representing his black-and-white psychological splitting, there’s also the preponderance of grey, for he is “a grey man with no connotation of dullness.” Indeed, his life has grown so dull that he’s forgotten what excitement is.

In his narcissism, in his imagined mastery of the indifferent life, he fancies himself “the nameless master of the world.” Buddha-like, he has seen that motionless old man the way Prince Siddhartha saw the impressive holy man (after having seen the old, sick, and dead men, as you’ll recall from his legendary life story), and now he imagines he has attained enlightenment. “All you are is all you know.” Total, narcissistic solipsism…nirvana? I think not.

So in his ‘mastery’ of the indifferent, he’s “inaccessible, like a tree, like a shop window, like a rat.” We again see a shot of him watching the motionless old man, as if he were looking in a mirror at his ideal-I, or like the Buddha seeing the holy man. We see a shot of that indifferent dripping tap, too, as well as shots of a walkway with trees, benches, and fences on either side, yet devoid of any people…the misanthropic young man’s ideal world.

But he soon comes to realize all of the ways that he is not at all like the ‘enlightened’ and ‘indifferent’ rat; for rats don’t have sleepless nights, they don’t bite their fingernails, they don’t wake up bathed in sweat, they don’t dream, against which the young man has no protection.

We come back to Hamlet: “to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Just as Hamlet couldn’t use the “sleep of death” as an escape from his problems, for he’d then have the nightmare of hell to deal with after having committed the sin of suicide, so can’t this young student use the sleep of indifference as an escape from his alienating world, for his nightmares are the return of repressed pain that he’ll never be able to project onto the world and be rid of.

Such an understanding “makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of”.

To get back to the biting of his fingernails, we learn that he bites them so violently that they bleed and are in unbearable pain. This violent biting is an example of his excessive attempts at splitting off and projecting those ‘black’ parts of himself that he doesn’t accept. The biting represents his alienation from himself, his refusal to integrate his Shadow.

Rats don’t play pinball, either, and when he plays, for hours on end, he’s in a rage…hardly indifferent. No, he isn’t much of a Buddha. But like Hamlet, he “can play or not play.” He can’t start up a conversation with the pinball machine, though, and this incidentally would seem to be his reason for preferring pinball to people. At the same time, a pinball machine cannot give him the human response, the love, that he so obviously needs.

It is in this very retreat from human company, replacing it with things that will never satisfy, that we can all relate to the young man; for don’t we all, in our own way, attempt a sleep of indifference to the world?

The narrator says repeatedly that he drifts around the streets, an odd behaviour for someone who has supposedly ‘found the answer’ to his problems. He goes back to his room and tries to go to sleep, but he can’t; instead, he would “calmly measure the sticky extent of [his] unhappiness,” and he goes out again and wanders the streets at night.

It is around this point that we start noticing a switch to negative film, back and forth between this and regular black-and-white film. We also hear the first of a series of references to “monstrous” things, or to “monsters”–in this case, “the monstrous factory gates.” We also hear of “impatient crowds,” which I believe are the “monsters” he’s been trying so hard to rid himself of.

Now, unhappiness hasn’t come to him all of a sudden: it’s gradually appeared to him, as if without his knowing until it was fully formed. Unhappiness has been in the cracks on his ceiling, and on his mirror, in the dripping tap, in those things in which he saw blissful indifference. All of his wandering has been meaningless.

As we see him biting his fingernails again, there’s a rapping, percussive sound in the background, reinforcing the sense of his agitation. He keeps playing his absurd card game, having removed the aces, but it offers no way out of his malaise…the same as with his wandering.

By now, an hour into the film, the narrator is speaking faster, with more urgency in her voice. We see negative film again, with crowds of people on the street. That rapping noise is still being heard. “The monsters have come into your life,” the narrator says, “the rats, your fellow creatures, your brothers. The monsters in their tens, their hundreds, their thousands.” These crowds of people are the ones he’s been trying to get away from…but can’t. This is also one of the first references to “rats” that is negative…interesting that this is happening now.

As we see more of the negative film, we hear the narrator say, “You follow their shadows [i.e., those of the “monsters,” the crowds of people], you are their shadow [i.e., you are the very thing you see in them that you won’t accept].” As the rapping sound continues, we also hear the narrator speaking faster, and we hear a dissonant chord played on a keyboard.

We see more shots of crowds of people walking on the streets, we hear more rapping, and the dissonant keyboard chord. Images of condemned, torn-down buildings, too. More references to “monsters,” all those people he hates. The juxtaposition of all these jarring images, sounds, and words is, of course, deliberate. The narrator’s voice is getting more and more agitated. The film alternates between normal black and white and negative film during this climactic moment.

The narrator mentions “…all the others who are even worse, the smug, the smart-Alecs, the self-satisfied…” These people seem suspiciously like projections of himself as the would-be indifferent Buddha. Again, he’s trying to split off and throw away what it is inside himself that he doesn’t like–the Shadow he needs to integrate.

After more repetitions of “monster,” the wanderer in his ongoing bitter meditation starts tossing around the word “sad” through his narrator mouthpiece: “sad city, sad lights in the sad streets, sad clowns in sad music-halls, sad queues outside the sad cinemas, sad furniture in the sad stores.”

His heavenly bliss of indifference has become the hell of a most non-gay Paris.

He feels like a prisoner in his cell, like a rat trying to escape its maze. Again, how odd it is that only now is a rat being used as a simile for something negative. He’s starting to realize that his retreat from the world has never been anything good.

The narrator has finally calmed down. Among the shots of rubble, we see a surrealist image of a sink standing alone; instead of containing water, though, we see a flame on it. Should we interpret this rubble of torn-down buildings, and his flaming sink, as representative of his chambre de bonne, in turn representative of himself, torn apart, fragmented, burning, in a psychotic break with reality, in the traumatic agony of Lacan’s Real Order?

“You are afraid,” the narrator says as he looks at all of the rubble, the home he meant to return to. We see a shot of his cracked mirror again, in between the shots of him looking at the rubble. He runs away, another attempt to run away from himself and his problems. We see the burning sink collapse.

Next is a shot of him calmly walking down a street between parked cars. He is calm, and it seems that he has come to accept the necessity of returning to a life in the real world. We hear an eerie tune played on an organ: a repetition of D to G on the right hand (and variations thereof), a descent in the bass from G to F, then to E-flat and to D-flat. A female voice accompanies the organ by singing a high G.

The young man is no wiser from his detachment from the world. “Indifference has not made you any different.” The nirvana of indifference has led back to the samsara of involvement with the world. Still, he won’t be judged for his failed experiment, for he has done nothing wrong. “No, [he is] not the nameless master of the world.” He’s no Buddha. He is afraid, waiting for the rain to stop…as we all are.

The film ends with the same shot of the buildings of the city that we saw at the beginning. The film has come full circle; he’s back where he began. He’s woken up from his metaphorical sleep, ready to go back into the world with the rest of us. We must all wake from our sleep of death, of indifference, and be involved in life again.

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.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Fourteen

I see a tiny, glowing white dot in the middle of the endless black all around me. I’m floating toward that dot of light, which is getting bigger.

Now that I’m close enough to it, I can see that the dot of white light is actually an exit from this void of infinite darkness. I’m approaching it, and instead of glowing light, I see those waves of the endless, universal sea.

I’ve re-entered that sea, and I’m swimming in it, breathing the water as if I had gills instead of nostrils. I feel a soothing peace vibrating all around me and in me.

I’m coming to understand the full extent of how all is one. Everything within and outside of me is one. Everywhere is an eternal here. I am connected to all around me.

All of time is one. The past, the present, and the future are merged in endless cycles. Only now is real: the past and future are just human constructs.

Everything that happens is unified. Opposites flow into and out of each other in dialectical waves. All people, and all of their actions, are a yin and yang mixture of good and evil, wisdom and folly, beauty and ugliness. My own nature and behaviour are equally such mixtures.

With this understanding of oneness also comes an understanding of the universal, eternal fluidity of everything within and without. This is why I see the waves of an ocean everywhere, undulating without end.

I can feel the feelings of other people flowing into me, and my feelings are flowing out to all of them, like water, to be felt by all the other people. As we all share each other’s feelings, I sense my alert, conscious awareness of every second, every wave flowing up and down all around me, soothing me, massaging my skin.

The dialectical relationship between all opposites, their essential unity, feels not only like the up-and-down movement of waves, but also like a continuum coiled into a circle, the extreme opposites meeting and flowing into each other.

I see a large serpent in the water; it’s coiled in a circle, biting its tail. Darker and lighter shades of green are moving along the body of the serpent, either darkening its scales or making them sparkle. These tints and shades of green are moving from the bitten tail, along the length of its coiled body, around to its biting head, then through to the bitten tail again. Those moving tints and shades are all the opposites of the world, eternally flowing into each other.

Seeing these flowing movements instills in my mind the truth that all things shift from good to bad, to good and to bad, and back to good again, around and around in cycles, forever and ever. This is why I should be patient when the bad times come, but I should also keep from being too attached to the evanescent good times.

So the world, just like all the people in it, including myself, should be seen in a middling way: neither too exciting, nor too rejecting. We must see everything and everyone as they truly are, not as we conceive of them in our fantasies and nightmares. We must refrain from exaggerating, seeing all as either too good or too bad.

Pain is healed by feeling it, by confronting it, as I did in that black hole. Pain must also be expressed, in the spoken or written word, in order to heal it. Another way to heal pain is to consider it not only through the Unity of Space, which includes the unity of Self and Other, but also through the Unity of Action, which reveals, through the dialectical relationship between opposites that I saw in that serpent biting its tail, how going overboard with extremes of pain, we can go past the extremes and achieve soothing. By contemplating not only our own suffering, but adding to it the suffering of others, others felt as ourselves, we achieve compassion and empathy, growing thus into better people.

In this way, by listening to others instead of just preaching to them, we self-soothe as well as soothe others. We self-soothe by contemplating not only our own ups and downs, but also those of other people; and in seeing the unity between up and down, good and bad, we know that the bad is never permanent.

In contemplating the Unity of Time, knowing that now is the only real time, and that endless cycles bring good and bad back again and again, we focus on the present instead of worrying about the future and ruminating over past failures. The endless cycles of good and bad phasing in and out of each other mean neither is permanent: don’t be attached to the good, and patiently wait for the bad to drift away.

Wait! Am I melting? Yes! My body is being absorbed into the infinite ocean! Atman is fusing with Brahman. My body is becoming one with the waters I’ve been swimming in! Oh, bliss! Oh, sweet nirvana! I have attained enlightenment, and as soon as my watery form concentrates, bringing me back to human form, I’ll be ready to teach the Way to any with ears to hear. Those five followers will come back, for sure!

Of course, this melting feeling of mine could just be part of my ketamine high.

‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novel, Chapter Thirteen

I look up above my head and see the overhanging leaves of a tree. I look down and see I’m sitting on a bench; yes, those five people must have put me in the same place where that meditating man was.

Maybe they left me here, not out of disappointment in my potential, but rather because of that potential. By leaving me in the seat of the meditating wise man, they’re trying to inspire me to emulate him, to search for enlightenment as he had. Yes, that’s it!

I won’t disappoint those five people! I won’t move from here until I’ve attained enlightenment! (Actually, because of my ketamine high, I can’t move at all, but anyway…)

Ooh! Sudden gunfire from further off. A few explosions, flashes of light. That startled me.

Anyway, let’s see: to be a wise leader who will bring liberation, justice, and an end to the war, I must acquire knowledge of the true nature of the world. I must close my eyes, focus, and go beyond the limitations of my ego. I must also transcend feelings of desire and hate…

Beyond all the surface differences, there is oneness, but the differences must also be acknowledged–in the form of wavelike movements from one state to its opposite, and back and forth, and back and forth, over and over again…

I feel myself vibrating all over. My ketamine high has erased my sense of the boundary between me and not-me. Meditation is heightening my sense of unity with my surroundings…

Everything inside and outside feels…oceanic, all waves flowing into me, within me, and flowing out of me. The whole world, the whole universe, feels like an ocean with no boundaries or shores anywhere out there–just water. It’s a peaceful, soothing experience.

I’m making progress.

Along with this unity of all within and without, the unity of crests and troughs flowing into and out of each other, I feel my sense of relationships with others becoming more unified, too. As well as everything becoming more unified, everything feels more real, too.

Up until now, my perception of other people has been, on the one hand, an idealizing of others, a lusting and yearning for perfection in others, imaginary others; on the other hand, though, there’s been a perception of others as lowly and contemptible, a hating and rejecting of others, these also being imaginary people. I’ve felt my perception of others as being split in two, a hallucinatory halving into black and white.

Now, however, everyone seems more realistic, a grey in between the black and white, a sense that all people are a mix of good and bad. I feel I’m understanding humanity as it actually is, not as figments of my imagination.

As I watch the slowly-moving waves of that universal ocean, flowing gently before my mind’s eye, I also see a black hole growing there. First, it appeared as a tiny black dot, then it began growing and growing until now, it’s big enough for me to be sucked into it.

I’m scared.

Still, I know that I must confront this huge void. Its shape has changed from that of a large circle into that of a human silhouette about my size. I should talk to it. Will it answer my questions?

“Hello,” I say out loud.

I feel, instead of hear, its answer. Hello.

“Who are you?” I ask.

I’m every pain you have ever felt, I feel it say.

“What are those pains?”

You know what they are. You just don’t want to face them.

“Very well: how do I face them?”

Come inside me, it says, then it changes back into the giant hole, welcoming me in.

I float forward and enter the hole. Instead of seeing dark oceanic waves, I now see endless black.

“OK, I’m inside,” I say with impatience and fear. “Now what am I supposed to do?”

Talk to me, the voice says in my imagination. Talk.

“Talk about what?”

About any and every pain you’ve ever had in your whole life.

“Very well. I’ll start at the very beginning. Mother?”

Emerging from the centre of the void is an older woman in regal, Oriental clothes. I can’t quite make out her face. She must be my long-lost mother, the queen who died about a week after I was born.

I never knew her, but I saw plenty of pictures of her, so I’ll recognize her face when she comes close enough to me.

“Mother? Is that you? It’s your son, Sidney. Please come here and let me see you. Come and talk to me.”

She is coming closer, but I still can’t see her face clearly.

I grow anxious and impatient as she continues approaching.

Finally, she’s close enough for me to see her face.

“Queen Maya! My mother!” I shout in sobs.

I see her face, but she isn’t smiling, as my mother did in her pictures. This queen is scowling a familiar scowl.

My stepmother?

No, my mother!

There never was a stepmother.

There never was an ideal mother from which my stepmother represented a sad decline.

There never was an ideal world, a garden where she gave birth to me, an Eden from which our present world was a sad decline.

There are no ideal people, contrasted with contemptible people. There are only real people, a grey in between the imagined black and white. My ‘stepmother’ wasn’t all bad; my actual mother was far from all-good.

There is no heaven, no hell. Just life here on Earth, a mix of good and bad.

It hurts to know there’s no paradise to aspire to, yet it’s good to know the truth, not to be deceived by illusions. Knowing the truth is like an abrasion on the skin, but one can rub the hurt surface and soothe oneself.

I hear some more gunfire and explosions from further off, but they aren’t as loud or startling, so I can bear them better.

I’m making progress.

Analysis of ‘Trilogy of Terror’

Trilogy of Terror is a 1975 made-for-TV horror anthology film directed by Dan Curtis. It features three segments based on unrelated short stories by Richard Matheson; the first two segments were adapted by William F. Nolan, while the third–and by far, the best–was adapted by Matheson himself, based on his 1969 short story, “Prey.”

All three segments star Karen Black in the roles of “Julie,” “Millicent and Therese,” and “Amelia,” which are also the names of the segments, since each story, as I’ll argue below, is really about the inner mental life of each character Black plays here. “Julie” costars Robert Burton, Black’s husband at the time. “Millicent and Therese” costars George Gaynes. “Amelia” is essentially a one-woman-play, with only Black and Walker Edmi s ton doing the voice of the Zuni doll.

Here is a link to a few quotes from the film.

The essential reason to watch, or own a DVD of, Trilogy of Terror is to watch “Amelia,” the excellent third segment, as the first two are rather mediocre stories. It’s never properly explained how Julie lures Chad Foster (Burton) into a brief sexual relationship before poisoning him: is she a witch, or some kind of succubus? And how come her sister (played by Kathryn Reynolds) never even suspects Julie of any kind of wrongdoing? That Millicent and Therese are two personalities in one woman’s body is pretty easy to predict–we never see the two together in the same scene.

It is, however, worthwhile to examine all three stories in terms of their common themes and elements, in order to grasp a deeper meaning in the superb and genuinely scary “Amelia.” All three stories are psychological studies of their titular characters, emotionally repressed women who are rigid, prudish, or otherwise neurotic on the outside, but who each have a hidden, inner dark side that is finally revealed at the end of each story.

These dark sides, or what Jung called the Shadow, are kept from the titular characters’ conscious minds (until the end of each story) through the use of a number of ego defence mechanisms: repression, projection (including projective identification), splitting, denial, and reaction formation. A merging with this repressed, projected, or split-off Shadow occurs at the conclusion of each story.

The sexual predator in Julie is projected (through projective identification) onto her young and handsome American literature student, Chad; the stereotypically male sexual predator becomes the victim of the erstwhile stereotypically female victim of sexual predation, thus reversing the stereotypes. He as a predator parallels the aggression of the Zuni fetish doll against Amelia.

Therese’s seduction of her father (or was it his seduction of her, as repressed by prudish Millicent?), of Thomas Anmar (played by John Karlen), and attempted seduction of Dr. Chester Ramsey (Gaynes) are all instances of Therese as a sexual predator. The Zuni fetish doll, with its phallic spear, and later, the phallic little knife, is symbolically predatory in a sexual sense.

Julie splits off her Shadow side onto Chad. Millicent splits off her Shadow side onto her “sister,” Therese. Amelia splits off hers onto the Zuni fetish doll, making it into what Wilfred R. Bion would have called a bizarre object, a hallucinatory projection of Amelia’s unconscious matricidal instincts.

All three stories involve some kind of strained family relations, the all-too-typical causes of mental disturbances. Julie’s sister, perpetually kept in the dark about Julie’s private life, just wants to help her, but doesn’t even know the half of the problem.

Was Therese’s incest with her father an expression of the Electra complex, including her killing of her mother; or was it (as I see as a possibility) that her father raped her, causing her to split into two personalities, and did her mother, knowing of the rape, kill herself in heartbreak?

Amelia’s mother places great restrictions on her social life, driving her to move out for the sake of at least some independence. The man she’s dating is named Arthur, which sounds like a pun on father and thus symbolically suggests, through transference, more of the Electra complex (which is further intensified by her plan to kill her mother at the end of the story), thus thematically linking this story to that of “Millicent and Therese.”

Along with this literal expression of the Electra complex in “Millicent and Therese,” and the metaphorical one (as I see it) in “Amelia,” there’s also–in how possibly forty-something Julie could be old enough to be the mother of her handsome young male students–a possible mother/son transference in her relationship with them, suggesting a Jocasta complex in her. We thus can see a thematic link among all three stories.

Amelia attempts to kill the Shadow in herself by stabbing the Zuni fetish doll; Millicent kills Therese (and herself, of course) by pricking a voodoo doll with a pin. Chad drugs Julie’s drink at the drive-in; Julie later poisons his drink.

Julie, in behaving so frigidly and unsociably, is engaging in reaction formation to hide her predatory interest in her handsome young male students. Millicent’s prudery is a similar reaction formation hiding how she, being in the same body as Therese, has the same sexual desires. In being so intimidated by her domineering, clingy mother, Amelia is using reaction formation to hide her wish to kill her mother and thus free herself from her.

Each of Black’s characters, in a symbolic or literal sense, merges with her Shadow at the end of each segment. Julie, in drugging Chad’s drink as he’d drugged hers, has merged with him (through their sexual relationship), her projected Shadow. Millicent pricks the voodoo doll representing Therese (since it’s she who wants to kill Therese, not vice versa), but has done so in Therese’s blonde wig, makeup, and clothes; in other words, both personalities had to have been present at the time of the killing, both of them sharing consciousness, or both “on the spot,” to borrow an expression from Billy Milligan, a merging of them in suicide. Amelia opens the oven in which the Zuni doll is burning, and its spirit enters her body, the resulting demonic possession being a symbolic merging of her with her Shadow.

Let’s now turn the discussion towards sharp teeth. There are the fangs in the vampire movie that Chad takes Julie to see. After he drugs her drink and she falls asleep in his car, he takes her to a motel, where he checks himself and her in as Mr. and Mrs., get this…Jonathan Harker, an allusion to the character in Bram Stoker‘s Dracula; Harker at one point is terrorized by Dracula’s vampiress brides, suggesting already that Chad is being used by Julie, not vice versa.

Then there are the sharp teeth on Amelia’s Zuni fetish doll, teeth that end up in her mouth at the end of the story. As with the drug or poison put in, respectively, Julie’s and Chad’s drinks, the biting teeth are symbols of projective and introjective identification, understood especially in the context of Bion’s notion of container and contained…that is, not the kind that mothers use to soothe their agitated babies, but rather negative containment, which leads to a nameless dread (see Bion, Chapter 28; for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic concepts, go here).

Bion used masculine and feminine symbols to represent, respectively, the contained and the container, suggesting phallic and yonic symbolism. In turn, the sharp teeth, like the spear and little knife the Zuni doll uses, are phallic (also like the vampire’s fangs), and the bite and stab wounds are yonic. In this negative containment, trauma (as opposed to the processing of pain that a mother does for her baby) is projected from the attacker and introjected into the victim.

The pricking of the pin into the voodoo doll representing Therese, as well as Amelia’s stabbing in the Zuni doll’s face as it tries to get out of the suitcase she’s trapped it in, are also symbolic examples of this projection and introjection.

With all these points of thematic comparison and contrast made, we can now focus on the deeper psychoanalytic meaning of the best segment, “Amelia.” As I said above, it’s fitting that these stories are all named after the women Black plays in each of them, because the real theatre of these stories dramatize what’s going on in the heads of these three mentally ill characters. That “Amelia” is more or less a solo performance emphasizes that we’re dealing with a drama happening entirely inside her mind.

I believe the Zuni fetish doll coming to life and attacking her is a hallucination, a projection of her repressed wish to kill her mother, who oppresses her with guilt trips to keep her from living a free life.

She buys the doll knowing about the warning not to remove the chain from it, that its removal will bring it to life. She doesn’t believe such a thing will really happen, of course, but the idea exists in unconscious phantasy for her. She looks at it, saying it’s so ugly that even its mother wouldn’t love it; saying this is a reflection of how the doll is a projection of her own unconscious matricidal urges–no mother, Amelia imagines, would ever love her daughter for having such feelings.

After arguing with her mother on the phone in the living room over whether they can cancel one night together (a regular Friday night get-together she and her mother always have) so Amelia can spend it with her boyfriend on his birthday, she–oppressed with guilt from her mother’s manipulations–brings up the doll, telling her mom of how it will supposedly come to life with the removal of the chain. Her bringing up of this is a wish-fulfillment and an implied warning to her mother, who, significantly, hangs up at just that moment.

Amelia then holds the doll, and she seems to have touched the chain at least a little. She sets it on the table and walks away. As we know, the chain falls off the doll’s waist. Now, consciously, she shouldn’t be concerned about this, since she doesn’t believe there really is a spirit inside the doll; but unconsciously, she has a wish that this spirit will come out, with the possibility of it one day attacking and killing her controlling mother. Therefore, Amelia’s fondling of the doll, leading to the chain falling off, is a parapraxis indicating her unconscious matricidal urges.

After being in the kitchen to slice up some meat (with that little knife) and put it in the oven, she returns to the living room to find the doll no longer standing on her coffee table. She looks around, including under the sofa (the obscurity below being symbolic of the unconscious), but can find only the Zuni doll’s spear, the tip of which pricks her finger. Her inability, at this point, to find the doll is representative of her repression of “He Who Kills.”

The living room lamp suddenly switching off represents further repression. Right when she goes to turn it back on is when the doll attacks her, at her foot. This attack represents the return of the repressed, in which the forbidden, repressed feelings return to consciousness, but in a totally unrecognizable form. In Amelia’s case, her matricidal desires have returned to consciousness in the form of a hallucination: the doll trying to kill her, rather than kill her mother.

So on the surface, conscious level, Amelia is terrified of the doll killing her, of course; on the unconscious level, though, she is afraid of what the doll represents–her matricidal Shadow merging with her, a merging caused by all those projective/introjective cuts and bites, the container wounds and the stabbing and biting of the contained.

Her real fear is her wish to kill her mother.

This fear/desire is what makes this third segment so scary.

So her attempts to stop the doll–wrapping it in a towel and drowning it in the bath water, stabbing it in the face, smashing it against a lamp, shutting doors to keep it out, locking it up in a suitcase, and burning it in the oven–are really attempts to prevent it from merging with her.

Now, there’s her wish to prevent the merging, but there’s also the wish for the merging to happen, hence, as I said above, her ‘accidental’ causing of the chain to come off, then her slipping and falling when running away from the doll–which allows it to get to her again–and, when she tries calling the cops, she oddly can’t remember the address of her apartment and thus can’t help the cops find her. This ‘forgetting’ is another parapraxis serving her unconscious wish to merge with her murderous Shadow as personified in the Zuni fetish doll.

Its unintelligible babbling, combined with her screams, is an expression of Lacan‘s notion of the Real, a realm of non-differentiation, of unverbalized trauma.The doll’s possibly killing her is far less horrifying that its merging with her to commit matricide, which–as the psychiatrist said at the end of Psycho–is the most unbearable crime of all. Amelia’s conflict is of the classic id vs. superego kind, or of gratification vs. morality.

As the doll is using the little knife to cut a hole in the suitcase she’s trapped it in, she tries to grab it by the blade with her fingers, a foolish, futile move that only gives her a bloody cut. Again, though, this act reflects her conflict between wanting to disarm the doll and stop its attacks on the one hand, and her unconscious wish to merge with it (i.e., the cut on her finger, the container, from the knife blade, the contained, as an act of projective and introjective identification).

Similarly, after she’s thrown the doll in the oven to burn it (as Julie burned down Chad’s apartment and him in it after poisoning him), she has to open the oven door…consciously, because she needs to make sure it’s ‘dead,’ but unconsciously because she wants to be merged with its spirit, which of course she does.

Now, just as I believe the doll’s coming to life is a hallucination that we, the viewers, share with her, so do I believe her merging with the doll’s spirit at the end, including her razor-toothed grin, is a hallucination, a delusion we viewers share with her. Her unconscious desire to kill her mother was there from the beginning; her belief that the demon in the doll has possessed her has given her a convenient excuse to kill her mother with a clear conscience. After all, it isn’t Amelia who wants to slice her mother up with that large knife she’s poking on the floor…it’s the ‘Zuni demon’ who wants to.

Similarly, Julie entertains the illusion in her mind that Chad is the sexual aggressor while she pretends to be innocent and frigid (her ‘witchcraft’ on him being a metaphorical projection onto him), and Millicent imagines Therese is a sister rather than a split-off personality bearing what’s actually Millicent’s middle name, another act of projection.

In therapy, one sometimes speaks of doing Shadow work, a confronting of and merging with one’s Shadow. Such a merging is not what’s happening here, with these three women Black is playing. Julie, Millicent/Therese, and Amelia split off, project, and repress their respective Shadows with such vehemence that the inevitable merging comes with a violent force that has tragic consequences.

One must assimilate the Shadow, but it must be the conscious personality that integrates the Shadow, not vice versa. Jekyll integrates Hyde, not the other way around. Julie projects Chad (remember that what we see on the screen is a dramatization of her inner thought processes; it’s not to be taken as literally happening), Millicent splits Therese off from her, and Amelia hallucinates the living spirit in the doll. These acts of projection result in Hyde taking over Jekyll.

Analysis of ‘Inception’

I: Introduction

Inception is a 2010 science fiction action film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, who also produced it with his wife, Emma Thomas. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, with an ensemble cast including Ken Watanabe, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Marion Cotillard, Elliot Page, Tom Hardy, Cillian Murphy, Dileep Rao, Tom Berenger, and Michael Caine.

Nolan had been working on a story about “dream stealers” for nine to ten years, originally conceiving of it as a horror film before making it a kind of heist film. He was influenced by such movies as The Matrix, Dark City, The Thirteenth Floor, and even his own Memento, to an extent. He postponed making Inception until he’d got enough experience making large-scale films like the first two of his Dark Knight trilogy.

Inception was the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2010; it is considered one of the best films of the 2010s, and it won four Oscars (Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects). It was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Score.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the script.

II: Unconscious vs. Subconscious

What is, for me, especially intriguing about Inception is the intersection of several themes: the unconscious (here infelicitously called the “subconscious“–more on that soon), manipulation, capitalism, trauma, strained family relationships, the blurred distinction between fantasy and reality, and perhaps most importantly, what shared, lucid dreaming can be seen to represent–the viewing of a movie in a theatre with other people.

Let’s now look at each of these themes one by one.

“Subconscious” is a popular term in psychology to refer to what psychoanalysis calls the unconscious. While I’m sure Nolan never intended to adhere to Freudian thinking to any significant extent (beyond, perhaps, the estranged, bitter feelings that Robert Fischer [Murphy] has for his dying father, Maurice [played by Pete Postlethwaite]), a bitterness that could be at least partly Oedipal), I must favor the term unconscious over subconscious, and here’s why.

Subconscious, as Freud explained, is an unclear way of expressing what that part of the mind is, what is ‘outside’ of conscious thinking. Is it topographical, i.e., existing underneath consciousness, as is almost literally indicated in the movie? Is it qualitative, indicating another, subterranean consciousness, again, as Inception seems to imply?

The unconscious, on the other hand, is not concerned with some kind of mental ‘place.’ Rather, it’s properly concerned with what we do not know. Unconscious impulses, for example, don’t ‘hide underneath’: the repressed, on the contrary, returns to consciousness, though in a new, unrecognizable form. It isn’t ‘underground’; it hides in plain sight.

Significantly, Dominick ‘Dom’ Cobb (DiCaprio) and his team of thought-thieves are fully aware of what’s going on in the “subconscious” world of their shared, lucid dreams. There’s something unmistakably topographic and subterranean in these dreams-within-dreams. So however psychoanalysts may cringe at the use of the word “subconscious,” we must go along with Nolan’s word choices and imagery, going down an elevator with Ariadne (Page) to lower and lower levels of this subterranean land to see what this “subconscious” actually symbolizes.

III: Fantasy vs. Reality

Here we come to one of the intersections of theme. The dreams-within-dreams of the “subconscious” represent further and further removes from reality, deeper and deeper forays into fantasy. That the dreams generally look as if they could be events occurring in reality (Ariadne’s alterations of the Parisian cityscape, among other exceptions, notwithstanding) shows how blurred is the distinction between fantasy and reality in the film.

Small wonder the dream-thieves have to carry around totems (e.g., the spinning top, or Arthur’s die) to test if they’re dreaming or in the real world. Small wonder that Mal (Cotillard) kept killing herself to wake up, only to do so again for the last time in the real world, her still being obsessively deluded (thanks to Dom’s planting of an inception in her mind) that she was always in dreams-within-dreams. Incidentally, the inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality is indicative of psychosis, which is what I suspect Inception is really all about.

IV: Capitalism and Manipulation

The implanting of false beliefs into the minds of the marks of the dream-thieves–be this implanting inception (putting the beginning of an idea into one’s mind) or extraction (stealing a company’s secrets as the goal of corporate espionage) through conning the mark into trusting the dream-thieves into opening up completely and thus making oneself vulnerable to them–is manipulation in the service of one set of capitalists trying to defeat their competition. As Marx once said, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929) Here we see the intersection of the themes of manipulation and capitalism, in the realm of the unconscious, in deeper and deeper layers of fantasy that get confused with reality.

Indeed, the company that Dom Cobb works for, Cobol Engineering (not only on which his surname is a pun [i.e., Cobb is a microcosm of the company], but also on which cobalt–extracted from the earth, like company secrets, by poor Congolese children for use in our cellphones–seems a pun), is a kind of mafia organization in the field of corporate espionage, in which failure can endanger an employee’s life. As I’ve argued many times in other blog posts, the mafia (criminal businesses) is a fitting metaphor for capitalists: note the expensive suits we see on Dom, the dominant, leading member of the dream-thieves.

Those of us on the political left are acutely aware of how capitalism results in alienation, which in turn leads to such problems as strained family relationships (i.e., Fischer and his dying father, as well as Cobb’s inability to return to the US and be with his kids) and emotional trauma (the hurt Fischer feels from the contempt Maurice has always had for him; Cobb’s guilt over how his inception for Mal drove her to suicide).

V: Dream Theatre?

A number of commentators on Inception have interpreted its use of shared, lucid dreaming as symbolic of people in a darkened movie theatre watching a film together. Getting caught up in the movie’s story is hypnotic, dreamlike. We can see more thematic intersection here in how not only the marketing of movies is a part of capitalism, but also how films are used to manipulate their viewers emotionally. The CIA is often consulted by moviemakers, who are required to portray the organization–known for ruthlessly helping in the overthrow of many governments opposed to US imperialist interests–as benign. Accordingly, films like Top Gun: Maverick and the Marvel superhero movies are blatant American military propaganda.

Now, this notion of shared, lucid dreaming as symbolic of people watching a movie together can be extended, I believe, to the idea of people watching TV together–TV shows and commercials–listening to the radio, being hooked on the internet, etc. In other words, the fantasy world of dreams can be a metaphor for the hypnotizing effect of the media.

Note the dream-like quality of many of our recent TV commercials. Instead of focusing on the products, as the commercials of the past did, these ads focus on images of a happy, carefree life. The commercials are fantasies, removals from reality, just like the shared dreams in Inception. An escape from the world…all in the service of capitalism, while pretending that the profit motive of capitalism isn’t at all present. The urge to buy what’s being sold sneaks into the unconscious by association with the fantasy presented, the inception of the desire for the product, our imaginary appetites…all while extracting our cash.

We might want to remember how Edward Bernays–whose double uncle was Freud, incidentally–used psychoanalytic concepts to help advertisers and political power structures to colonize the unconscious and manipulate people into buying this or that product, and to manufacture consent. (Bernays, by the way, was involved in the 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état for the sake of the United Fruit Company.)

VI: Putting All the Themes Together

So these are all the ways that the unconscious, manipulation, capitalism, trauma, strained family relationships, the hazy line between fantasy and reality, and dreams as a metaphor for film (and the media in general) intersect in Inception. Though inception means beginning, or the establishment of an institution or activity, I see in the word a pun on deception, or the planting of a deceptive idea into someone’s unconscious.

So the film can be seen to be about how the capitalist/imperialist-run media manipulates the mind, and how our attempts to escape the horrors of the capitalist world, in order to enter a haven of fantasy, can backfire and lead to psychosis.

VII: Inception of Inception

The film begins with Cobb washed up on a shore, then taken by Japanese guards to see an extremely aged Mr. Saito (Watanabe), the businessman who wants Cobb’s team of dream-thieves to plant the inception of an idea into young Fischer’s head, to break up his dying father’s corporation so that of Saito–Fischer’s competition–can reign supreme. We eventually learn that this washing-up on the Japanese shore isn’t the beginning, but the near-end, of the story.

After this, we go back to the beginning of the story, when Cobb’s team is attempting an extraction of company secrets from the unconscious of dreaming, younger Saito while on a train going in the direction of Kyoto. We see the same big house as in the previous, deep-fantasy scene of aged Saito.

We soon learn, after the dangerous meddling of Mal (actually, Cobb’s projection of her, or as I see her, his internal object of her), that this scene in Saito’s house is really a dream within a dream, this ‘outer’ dream, as it were, being that of Nash (played by Lukas Haas), Cobb’s dream architect before the team employs Ariadne.

A couple of interesting points should be made about Nash and his dream, which make me question his motives. His dream includes a huge mob of insurrectionary rioters out in the streets, all about to force their way into the building where Cobb, Saito, and Arthur (Gordon-Levitt) are having the dream within the dream, in Saito’s house. Note that, according to Freud, a dream is the fulfillment of a wish. Later, Nash betrays the rest of Cobb’s team. Is Nash a man with unconscious leftist sympathies (i.e., with revolutionaries in his wish-fulfillment-dream) making a failed attempt at undermining capitalist Cobol, and is his botching of the carpet a Freudian slip, reflecting his conflicted commitment to the team?

VIII: What Cobb Will Do to Get Back Home

Cobb wants so badly to be reunited with his son and daughter back in the US that he’s willing to take Saito’s offer to clear his name there of Mal’s death, in exchange for planting an inception in Robert Fischer’s mind, an undertaking Cobb knows is extremely dangerous and difficult to do. After all, he did it to Mal, and what happened? Still, he can’t bear to be separated from his kids.

To assemble his new team, he first goes to Paris, where his father-in-law, Professor Stephen Miles (Caine), who taught him about navigating the unconscious mind, recommends he hire Ariadne. Her name, an obvious reference to the woman in Greek myth who helped Theseus navigate the Labyrinth so he could get out after killing the Minotaur, is fitting. She proves her skills as a potential dream-architect by quickly improvising mazes complex enough to convince Cobb she’s up for the job. Just as the mythical Ariadne helped Theseus get out of the infernal Labyrinth, so does Inception‘s Ariadne help Cobb find the strength to confront his trauma over Mal’s suicide, to let go of his attachment to his internal object of her, and thus to be able to navigate his way back up to the top, to escape the hell of endless dreams-within-dreams.

Next, Cobb has to go to Mombassa, Kenya–a city crawling with Cobol agents looking to catch and kill him for his failed mission in Japan–to find Eames (Hardy), a forger able to impersonate people in dreams. The agents chasing Cobb through the streets of Mombassa is the one instance of an ‘action movie’ scene in Inception that happens in the real, non-dreaming world…or is this the real, non-dreaming world? (More on that later.)

Eames recommends Yusuf (Rao), a chemist who will provide a sedative to keep the team under as they navigate the different layers of the “subconscious,” dream-with-dream worlds, while also allowing the team to hear a recording of Edith Piaf singing “Non, je ne regrette rien” (“I regret nothing”), their synchronized cue, or “kick,” to wake them at the right time.

IX: Drugs

Though we’re not meant to think of Yusuf as some kind of drug dealer, that scene of him with all those people taking his sedative in the dark basement of his place of work…it sure makes one think of, say, an opium den. These users of the sedative dream for four hours each day because, as one of them tells Cobb, “The dream has become their reality.”

Even if Yusuf is not to be understood to be an actual drug dealer, what he’s doing in this basement is surely symbolic of what a drug dealer would do, at the very least. Such an understanding is crucial when we consider the theme of the unsure distinction between fantasy and reality as presented in Inception. After all, as I noted above, psychosis is characterized by an inability to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and drugs (with their hallucinogenic effects) can induce psychosis, including sedatives.

Furthermore, in the alienating, cutthroat world of capitalism, emotional trauma often leads to substance abuse as an attempt to escape that pain. An escape into fantasy relieves, however temporarily, one of the pain of facing reality, and drugs obviously help with that feeling of escape. Drugs can cause mental illness, just as the stress of living under capitalism has been observed to cause mental illness. In these connections, it’s easy to see why Dom and Mal went so deep into the dream world, into so many layers under layers of dreams-within-dreams; in searching for the Garden of Eden, they ended up in the ninth circle of Hell.

X: Splitting

Mal’s suicide, as I’ve said, is a pain that Dom finds unbearable, especially since his planting of the inception in her mind–that her world was unreal–means he’s guilty of causing her death. He cannot let her go, so he keeps her internal object as a kind of ghost haunting his mind. She’s there, but the trauma of her suicide is also there; so he tries to protect himself from that pain, however unsuccessfully, through the defence mechanisms of projection and splitting.

Dom thus experiences what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position—paranoid because of the persecutory anxiety he feels whenever her projection interferes, often violently, with his team’s attempts at extraction; and schizoid because of the splitting of Mal into absolute good and bad versions of herself.

Dom, in his unconscious attempts to preserve the good Mal, can’t help but be forced to confront the bad Mal–hence her apt name as a pun on the French word for bad. Only when he goes the farthest down all the layers of his “subconscious,” down all those dreams-within-dreams, to return to the paradise/hell that he constructed with her, back before she died, only then do we see the good Mal, when he tells her he has to let her go.

His trauma is one example of how capitalist alienation harms relationships, including family ones. Another example is that of Robert and Maurice Fischer. The dying father, founder and owner of a great, powerful corporation, is annoyed that he has to pass on the control of the family business to a son he regards as inadequate for such a great responsibility. Some of this father/son hostility could be Oedipal, as I mentioned above; on the father’s end, it could be a Laius complex, or a fear of the son supplanting the father.

XI: Sympathy for the Dominant

One thing that is, or at least should be, striking about this story is how we, the audience, are all lulled into sympathizing with these characters. We’re dealing here with dishonest, lying, manipulating, gaslighting people who are all out for themselves, all working within a capitalist context. Manipulating young Fischer into ending his father’s business is meant to allow their competition, Saito’s company, to thrive. It is the insidious nature of neoliberal capitalist ideology–“there is no alternative“–that tricks the audience into sympathizing with a bunch of con men.

Dom is seen on several occasions, just after waking up, to be spinning a top to make sure he isn’t still dreaming. As we understand, if it stops spinning, he’s relieved to know he’s in the real world…or is he? One’s totem–like Arthur’s die–is supposed to be known only by its owner: its look, feel, weight, etc. Dom, however, has come into the habit of using a top originally owned by Mal. So even if it stops spinning, is his reassurance of no longer dreaming valid?

XII: In Dreamland

Back to the story. The team is assembled and ready. On a flight to the US, Fischer is put to sleep to share a dream with Dom, Arthur, Eames, Ariadne, Saito, and Yusuf. This first shared dream, Yusuf’s, is set on the streets of a city in teeming rain.

Fischer, trying to take a cab, is kidnapped. Arthur, whose job was to research Fischer thoroughly, has failed to learn that the team’s mark has unconscious security to fight off extractors like them. Dom is furious with Arthur for his oversights.

This unconscious security, in the form of men shooting at Cobb et al and therefore putting them all in danger–if shot and killed in the dream–of being trapped in Limbo (an inescapable labyrinth of the unconscious, like being in a coma) because of Yusuf’s powerful sedative, is a personification of Fischer’s ego defence mechanisms, these ones being unconscious.

As the Ego Psychologists understood unconscious ego defence, here’s an explanation: “the ego also contains complex unconscious defensive arrangements that have evolved to satisfy the demands of neurotic compromise, ways of thinking that keep repressed impulses out of conscious awareness in an ongoing way. Unlike unconscious id impulses that respond with enthusiasm to the prospect of liberation in making their presence felt…, unconscious ego defenses gain nothing from being exposed. Their unobtrusive, seamless presence in the patient’s psychic life is perfectly acceptable (ego syntonic) to the patient; they often function as a central feature of the patient’s larger personality organization…The ego, charged with the daunting task of keeping the peace between warring internal parties and ensuring socially acceptable functioning, works more effectively if it works undercover.” (Mitchell and Black, page 26)

XIII: Wake Up Dead?

One fascinating idea in this film is the paradoxical notion that if you are killed in a dream, you wake up. It’s the reverse of what Hamlet said: “To die, to sleep–/No more” (III, i, 60). Now, with Yusuf’s sedative, dying in the dream makes matters much more complicated: “To die, to sleep;/To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub;/For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,/Must give us pause.” (III, I, 64-68)

Another complicating factor in Fischer’s troubled family life is his “Uncle Peter” Browning (Berenger), his godfather and fellow executive of his father’s company. Browning acts as a kind of surrogate father for Fischer, being there for him in ways that his father never wanted to be. Cobb’s team will manipulate this relationship through Eames’s impersonation of Browning, to introduce the idea of Maurice having an alternate will to dissolve the company.

Inception, as Eames has previously pointed out, is “a very subtle art.” Fischer’s first introduction to the idea of the alternate will is to be a negative one, a plausible further instance of his father’s contempt for him; further down in the dreams, the dissolving of the company is meant to be a positive exhortation of him to do his own thing, giving him a catharsis.

XIV: Dreams-within-dreams

Anyway, everyone on the team except Yusuf–who is driving around on the first dream level, since it’s his dream–is sedated into going down to the second dream level, Arthur’s dream, which is set in a hotel. Here, Dom convinces Robert that his ‘security’ is really working against him, as part of the ruse to go deeper into his “subconscious.” Here we have Dom gaslighting Robert into distrusting his own unconscious ego defence mechanisms.

To get to the layer of Fischer’s “subconscious” where he will receive the inception of the idea to end his father’s business to start something of his own, the team must be sedated further, into a dream set around an alpine fortress. Several problems occur: Mal interferes again and shoots Robert before he can receive the inception; also, Yusuf sets up the Edith Piaf kick too early.

Arthur and Eames therefore must improvise a new set of kicks to be synchronized with them hitting the water in Yusuf’s truck in the first dream, with Arthur rigging a hotel elevator with all the floating dreamers tied up, and with the alpine fortress being set up with explosives. Saito having been shot as well as Robert means both of them are in Limbo, forcing Dom and Ariadne to go further down another level to rescue them…in Dom’s constructed dream-world with Mal.

Here is where Dom must confront his trauma with Mal. He must let go of his attachment to his internal object of the good Mal, and he must do it quickly, for getting Robert and Saito back is of paramount importance. Indeed, Ariadne importunes Dom to hurry…but can one be cured of one’s trauma in such a short time? (Indeed, Ariadne shoots Mal to speed things up.)

It seems that he has managed to do so, for he leaves Mal, and they get Robert and Saito back–the rescue of the latter through, essentially, a repeat of that opening scene with Dom washing ashore on the beach and being taken to Saito’s big house by his Japanese guards. Neither Dom nor Saito wants to die a lonely old man, filled with regret, hence the choice of Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” as the kick to wake everyone up with.

XV: Maladaptive Dreaming

No rationally thinking person wants to waste away in a fantasy world, only years later to snap out of it and be full of regret for such a wasted life. Yet the alienating world of capitalism makes such a retreat into fantasy so tempting. Small wonder so many of us out there escape reality through drugs, online video games, porn, movies, TV, consumerism, internet addiction, etc.

Robert returns to the alpine fortress dream and receives the inception. Everyone, including Dom, manages to get back up using all the synchronized kicks in time. I’d say it’s all a little too good to be true.

Dom wakes up on the airplane with all the others, who smile at him, glad to see him back. Saito makes the necessary phone call to clear Dom of the charge of murdering Mal, so he can go through customs without a hitch. Recall above how I mentioned that, according to Freud, dreams are wish-fulfillments. Dom’s wishes are all being fulfilled, aren’t they?

The action and excitement of the dreams, fighting off Robert’s unconscious security, is an instance of how these shared, lucid dreams parallel the entertainment of watching a movie in a theatre. We’re back in the ‘real world’ now, in the airport; but Dom had an ‘action movie’ moment in Mombassa, too. Has his ‘waking’ world been real, or has it been dream, too?

XVI: Conclusion–Nothing But a Dreamer

Here’s an interesting thought: we’ve been assuming that Mal killed herself, mistakenly thinking she was trying to wake herself from a dream, but…what if she was right? Could Dom have lost count of all the dream layers, thinking his time with her on the building ledges was real, when it was actually another dream? She’d been assessed by three different psychiatrists to be sane, so is he the one with a psychotic inability to distinguish fantasy from reality?

When he claims that she didn’t want to go back to the real world, is he projecting onto her his wish to stay in the world of dreams? Is this what calling Mal his “projection” really means?

At the end, when he spins the top and walks away to see his kids, he doesn’t care if it stops spinning or not. Or maybe he’s afraid to see it keep spinning. In any case, the top was Mal’s totem originally, so if its slight wobble at the very end indicates that it will stop spinning, this hardly assures us that he’s in the real world now.

Some think the real plan, masterminded by Miles (who, recall, recommended Ariadne to be the architect), was to pull Cobb out of the dream world. If so, I don’t think it worked. Cobb prefers fantasy to reality, like so many of us with our drugs, movies, TV, etc. I think Mal is still waiting for him in the waking world; but like those TV commercials that show people enjoying quality time with family, or like all those action movies we enjoy in the theatre, Cobb would rather escape from, than have to continue living in, the stresses of the capitalist world.

His Hell is his Eden…even without Mal.

Analysis of ‘Insomnia’

Insomnia is a 2002 psychological thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan and written by Hillary Seitz, a remake of the 1997 Norwegian film of the same name that was directed by Erik Skjoldbjærg (his film debut) and written by him and Nikolaj Frobenius. The 2002 film stars Al Pacino, Robin Williams, and Hilary Swank, with Maura Tierney, Martin Donovan, Nicky Katt, and Paul Dooley; the Scandinavian equivalent of Pacino’s character, the insomniac, was played by Stellan Skarsgård.

The 2002 film is the only Nolan film that he didn’t write or cowrite; it was also part of his transition from independent filmmaking to studio, mainstream Hollywood movies. It was praised, with a 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 200 reviews; Pacino’s and Williams’s performances were given especial praise, the latter’s being a noted departure, as with his performance in One Hour Photo, from his more usual zany, comic acting, to portraying a dangerously disturbed character.

Here is a link to quotes from the 2002 film, and here is a link to the complete 1997 film…but with French subtitles.

The Norwegian film begins with the murder of a 17-year-old girl, Tanja (played by Maria Mathiesen), during the credits; whereas Nolan’s film shows the murder of its equivalent, 17-year-old Kay Connell (played by Crystal Lowe) in split-second flashbacks. The 1997 film shows a shot of an airplane going over clouds obscuring the sun as it takes police officers Jonas Engström (Skarsgård) and Erik Vik (played by Sverre Anker Ousdal) to a Norwegian town above the Arctic Circle, the land of the midnight sun. This obscuring of light will be a recurring theme, symbolic and literal, in both movies.

In the 2002 film, the American equivalents of Engström and Vik, respectively LA Detectives Will Dormer (Pacino) and Hap Eckhart (Donovan) are in a small plane flying to Nightmute, Alaska to investigate the equivalent crime there.

While the dominant theme of both films is, of course, guilt, another can be seen: the blurred distinction between opposites, as blurred as the vision of each film’s insomniac cop. These unclearly defined opposites include insomnia itself (one is sleepless, but sleepy), day and night (in the Arctic region, the summer sun is shining at night), and right and wrong (our cops catch killers, but the former aren’t exactly innocent themselves: Dormer’s planting of questionable evidence; Engström’s sexual misconduct).

Both Dormer and Engström have reputations as excellent cops; in fact, young local Nightmute Detective Ellie Burr (Swank) admires Dormer for his investigative work. Still, these good reputations of the American and Swedish cops are thin disguises of their not-so-laudable true selves, dark sides that are coming to light just as surely as the midnight sun that keeps poking through the two men’s hotel room windows as they try to sleep.

How are their dark sides coming to light? Dormer has internal affairs wanting to reopen a child rapist/murderer case in which he planted evidence to ensure conviction; Eckhart is going to testify against him, naturally causing resentment in Dormer. Engström eavesdrops on Vik gossiping about an “intimate conversation” between Engström and a female witness from a former case back in Sweden. As we can see, there’s a blurry boundary between good reputations and bad character, too.

One point to be emphasized about the cops’ bad characters being obscured by their good reputations–like those clouds obscuring the sun, or like the cops’ attempts to block out the sunlight coming through their hotel windows–is that these two cops aren’t all that much better than the men they’re trying to charge with murder. As we all should know by now, cops–as protectors of the interests of the bourgeoisie–are often as guilty of crimes (murder, bribery, etc.) as those they arrest, while often getting far better protection from punishment than the criminals can get.

Connected to this protection is the guilt many cops must feel over their own wrongdoings. And how does anyone deal with feelings of guilt or anxiety? Through the use of defence mechanisms, which in the case of Insomnia include denial, rationalization, suppression, splitting, and most importantly of all, projection…including projective identification.

Dormer would naturally deny his deliberate falsifying of evidence to convict the child rapist/murderer, including when he, on the phone to the one in LA who’s in charge of internal affairs, curses him out, acting as if he’s the victim of a kind of witch hunt. Dormer also rationalizes his planting of false evidence and his resistance to the reopening of his cases, speaking not of the stain on his reputation, but rather the danger of letting criminals back out on the street.

He and Engström try to suppress their guilt over…accidentally?…shooting and killing their partners (recall that Walter Finch [Williams] and Jon Holt [played by Bjørn Floberg] also claim that their murders were accidents) by never confessing to them. The cops suppress, but cannot repress, their guilt, hence their sleeplessness.

When Hap confesses to Dormer that he has to cut a deal with internal affairs to stop them from digging up any dirt on him (a rationalization of Hap’s own guilt over betraying his partner), Dormer makes no secret of his anger over this betrayal. He engages in splitting Hap into a ‘bad Hap’ (the betrayer) and a ‘good Hap’ (his still-reliable partner). Dormer’s experience of the paranoid-schizoid position (‘paranoid’ because of his feelings of betrayal, and fear that the ‘bad Hap’ internal object will plague him with guilt after killing Hap; ‘schizoid’ from the splitting of Hap into absolute good and bad versions of him) will turn into the depressive position after he kills Hap and feels guilty about it, his hallucinations of Hap (his ‘ghost,’ as it were) being his projected internal object of Hap.

Similarly, Engström’s resentment after overhearing Vik gossip about the former’s sexual indiscretion with the female witness–which seems intensified by VIk’s recollection of being in their hotel before, having taken a room that a man and woman claimed was theirs rather than Vik’s and his wife’s (and given aging Vik’s failing memory, this incident seems to be a garbled memory of Vik and his fellow cops, “armed to the teeth,” coming to a room and finding Engström with that woman in that “intimate conversation”)–seems to have caused him to split Vik into good and bad Viks. This splitting may have facilitated Engström’s shooting of Vik as a Freudian slip rather than as an innocent mistake, as is the case with Dormer shooting Hap. That obscuring fog was most convenient for our protagonists.

The most important defence mechanism against guilt and anxiety, as far as Insomnia is concerned, is projection, as well as projective identification. In the case of Engström and Holt, the boundary between the two is especially blurred: both are guilty of sexual misconduct (i.e., Holt’s sexual advances on Tanja before killing her, as well as Engström’s on Ane, the girl at the front desk of his hotel [played by Maria Bonnevie], and Engström’s putting his hand up the skirt of Freya [played by Marianne O. Ulrichsen], Tanja’s teen classmate, who’s quickly replaced her for the affections of Eilert [played by Bjørn Moan], her abusive boyfriend) and of an ‘accidental’ killing they wish to conceal. Engström would love to project his guilt onto Holt, but he can’t.

Dormer would love to project his perfidious nature (i.e., his betrayal of justice in his planting of false evidence) onto Hap (for betraying Dormer by cooperating with internal affairs), and onto the people in internal affairs (for, as Dormer sees it, betraying the people by reopening his cases and freeing criminals), but he ultimately can’t project his guilt onto them any more than Engström can.

Dormer projects his own guilt onto the criminals he goes after: in his own words, he says that he “assign[s] guilt” by tampering with evidence to ensure the conviction of criminals whose guilt he is convinced of (if lacking in sufficient proof). The conviction of such criminals, however, is not his job; that’s for the prosecution. He also likes to taunt Finch and Randy Stetz (Kay’s abusive boyfriend, played by Jonathan Jackson) by talking about their brutality to Kay; again, talking about the guilt of others offers temporary relief from Dormer’s own guilt.

Similarly, Engström provokes Eilert by insinuating that the boy’s sexual inadequacies are his motive for having beaten Tanja. Again, a focus on Eilert’s guilt diverts attention from that of Engström.

Now, projective identification takes projection a step further by manipulating the object of one’s projections into manifesting proof of the projected traits. We can see this, in a symbolic sense, in Dormer’s/Engström’s falsifying of evidence, which includes Engström’s planting of Holt’s gun in Eilert’s room so he’ll be charged with murdering Vik and Tanja.

In both films, there are a number of scenes that have…well, hidden ways downward. I’m thinking of, for example, the hidden passageway under the shed that allows Finch/Holt to escape when the cops try to catch him with Kay’s/Tanja’s bag as a lure. Similarly, there’s when Dormer chases Finch over the logs floating on the water, and Dormer slips and falls in, allowing Finch to get away again. And finally, there’s when Holt dies at the pier by falling through rotten floorboards and into the water, hitting his head; and when Fiinch, at his lake house, is shot and falls into the water below.

These ‘hidden ways downward,’ for lack of a better way to describe them, are symbolic of the unconscious mind, that hidden place where unknown ideas are thought, and unknown desires are felt and given expression in unrecognizable ways. After finding and rushing through the passageway under the shed, Dormer/Engström comes out into the fog, also symbolic of the unconscious, and shoots Eckhart/Vik, with that fog hiding the guilty cop’s unconsciously murderous intent behind an ‘accident,’ a kind of Freudian slip.

Before Eckhart dies, he tells Dormer he believes he’s shot him on purpose, to stop him from cooperating with internal affairs. Vik simply ran the wrong way, having gone right instead of left as planned. Neither Dormer nor Engström, however, can assuage their guilt by imagining they have made a mere mistake. Hap’s death is no mishap.

What’s more, chasing and not being able to catch Finch/Holt can be seen to represent how Dormer/Engström can’t bring themselves to assign guilt to a man they know they’re no better than. Dormer shoots Finch, but only after Finch has already shot Dormer, rather like when Hamlet kills Claudius only after he knows he himself is about to die from a poisoned wound. The unconscious has a way of making sure the ‘correct’ mistakes are made.

Now, the light of truth will never stop bothering Dormer/Engström. The insomniac cops want to hide in the darkness of their projections, denials, and rationalizations, but the sunlight keeps poking through their windows, no matter how much they try to block it out.

Wilfred R. Bion had insights on the relationship between projection, sleeplessness, and hallucinations that are useful for understanding the psychological state of Dormer/Engström. The irritating light of the midnight sun that keeps coming through their hotel windows is an example of what Bion called beta elements, unprocessed, raw sensory data that need to be detoxified (through alpha function) to be turned into alpha elements, processed, detoxified, and usable for thoughts and dreams.

If these beta elements are too painful to be processed in one’s mind, one cannot soothe oneself, as is the case with Dormer/Engström. Our sleepless cops keep trying to project the light outward, the light of truth that symbolizes the reality of their sins. The blocking-out of the light thus represents what Bion called a beta screen, which is an accumulation of projected beta elements one hasn’t processed or detoxified.

If one doesn’t detoxify these agitating raw sensory data–which in the case of these films represents the cops’ guilt–one cannot create thoughts for dreams and therefore one cannot sleep (Bion, page 7). If this sleeplessness goes on long enough, one will begin to hallucinate, as Dormer/Engström do. Their hallucinations, visions of Hap/Vik, are projections of the internal objects of their dead partners, split-off, hallucinatory projections that Bion called bizarre objects. (Go here for more on Bion and other psychoanalytic concepts.)

Just as Hap’s name is a pun on how, by sheer hap…or was it sheer hap?…he got shot and killed, so is Will Dormer’s name a pair of puns. With a will, Will finds a way not only to ensure conviction of the child rapist/murderer who otherwise would have been acquitted through a reasonable doubt, he also finds a way to falsify evidence so it seems that Hap was shot with a gun other than Will’s. Ainsi, Dormer ne peut pas dormir.

Our teen killers, Finch/Holt, cannot sleep either, of course, and being doubles of their respective cops, they have their own defence mechanisms for wrestling with their inner demons. They rationalize and minimize their murders, claiming they were accidents, that things simply got out of hand, slipped and snowballed from a few slaps to a beating-to-death of their victims.

Finch speaks of how “scared shitless” he is as he keeps hitting Kay, first to stop her from laughing at him for his sexual advances, then to stop her screaming. The slippery slope of escalation has led to his beating Kay to death; then, his fear suddenly switches to calm, yet another blurry distinction between opposites.

When Finch/Holt cleans the body, washing the hair and clipping the fingernails in order to remove all physical traces linking Kay/Tanja to their killers, this cleaning is a symbolic denial of the men’s guilt.

Confession is good for the soul, so when Finch tells Dormer, over the phone, how he came to kill Kay, how her laughter provoked him, and how his violence escalated, he says he’ll be able to sleep better. Similarly, Dormer must feel at least some relief after telling Rachel (Tierney) at the hotel about his tampering with the evidence that convicted the child rapist/murderer.

An interesting contrast between the Norwegian and American versions of the film is in how their respective villains die. In the former, Holt dies from a mere accidental fall, as ‘accidental’ a death as his murder of Tanja, or Engström’s shooting of Vik (Was Holt’s death a suicidal Freudian slip?). In the 2002 film, we have the typical American climactic fight between the good guy and the bad guy, them both shooting and killing each other. The more artistically-inclined European film is more of a psychological study of guilt than a thriller, more morally ambiguous.

Accordingly, Dormer dies of his gunshot wound having redeemed himself by telling Burr–who’s found out about his falsifying of the cause of Hap’s death–not to throw the incriminating evidence into the lake. When Engström, however, is presented with the incriminating evidence by Burr’s equivalent in the 1997 film, Hilde Hagen (played by Gisken Armand), she just puts it on a table in front of him and leaves him without getting him in trouble.

Engström is thus able to leave town with bodily freedom, but no clear conscience. The police privilege of protection from prosecution won’t protect him from his guilt. While Dormer is finally able “to die, to sleep, no more,” Engström, however bodily safe, will never sleep, for he “does murder sleep,” as the 1997 film’s last shot of his eyes glowing in the dark are eyes that will never close.

	Word Salad – I… on Nakba
	Word Salad – I… on Gaza
	Analysis of ‘K… on Analysis of ‘Rocky…
	Analysis of ‘K… on Analysis of ‘Nineteen Ei…
	Analysis of ‘K… on Analysis of ‘Star W…