Analysis of ‘First Blood’

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. It was adapted into a 1982 movie by Ted Kotcheff, the screenplay written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, the last of these three of course starring as Rambo. Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna costarred.

The film went through development hell for ten years because of such difficulties as finding the right director and cast, and getting a suitable screenplay. Morrell had sold the film rights in 1972 to Columbia Pictures; the rights were then sold to Warner Bros., and finally Orion Pictures produced the film. Another reason a film adaptation didn’t appear in the early to mid-1970s was that the Vietnam War was still going on, and film studios were worried about moviegoers’ reactions to such sensitive subject matter as that of a Vietnam vet waging a one-man war against an American town.

A suitable adaptation was finally created, to a large extent from Stallone’s rewrites, when the novel’s violence was toned down, Rambo was made more sympathetic, and he would survive in the end, which–thanks to the box-office success of the film–allowed for sequels to be made.

In fact, Morrell wrote the novelizations for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, having informed readers in the preface to Part II to disregard the death of Rambo in his original novel. Then came two other films, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood; all of the sequels’ screenplays were co-written by Stallone, with Morrell having no involvement in any way with the writing of the last two…though he praised Stallone’s portrayal of Rambo in the fourth film, saying Stallone had returned the character to Morrell’s original intentions as angry, cold, burned out, and filled with self-disgust.

Here is a link to quotes from the first film, and here is a link to an audiobook of the novel.

While the two sequels from the 1980s, as I said above, novelized by Morrell (fittingly, as you’ll see why below), were little more than mindless action movie nonsense, and one can basically say the same about the other two sequels, in a sense it is fitting to see Rambo in actual war situations (in Vietnam in Part II, in Afghanistan in Rambo III, in Burma in Rambo, and in Mexico in Last Blood). I say this because I see the original novel and first movie as telling a story that, while set in an American town, is an allegory of the Vietnam War, with Rambo personifying US imperialism, and the local cops representing the Vietnamese army.

Accordingly and predictably, as far as the sequels are concerned, the Vietnamese and Soviets are portrayed negatively (except for pro-US Vietnamese spy Co Bao (played by Julia Nickson) in Part II, the Soviets are portrayed negatively in Rambo III, the Burmese government is portrayed so negatively (which should not be misconstrued that I’m advocating for the junta) in Rambo as to have had the film banned in the country, and in Last Blood, Mexicans are portrayed so badly that there have been accusations of this last sequel promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes towards the country (in a rather Trump-esque vein). This sort of propagandizing against and vilifying of any country or government going against US interests is typical of imperialism.

As for the first movie, the local police of the town of Hope, Washington (in the novel, the town is Madison, Kentucky) are also portrayed negatively, with sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) being prickly to Rambo right from the start. Deputy Sergeant Arthur “Art” Galt (played by Jack Starrett) is abusive to Rambo to the point of psychopathy; and the other police, when chasing Rambo in the forest and getting wounded by him, cry out to Will for help like children weeping for their daddy.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of Teasle is much more sympathetic and nuanced, with lots of backstory to tell us the kind of world the sheriff is from. His wife has left him, so he has to deal with the pain of that. Also, Teasle is a Korean War veteran, so in that, among other things, he parallels Rambo the Vietnam vet.

Also, in the novel, Teasle doesn’t arrest Rambo (who is called only “Rambo” or “the kid”; the “John” and “James” are inventions of the movies) until after he returns to the town several times. This is opposed to Dennehy’s Teasle, who is abrasive with Rambo just upon first seeing him and not liking how he looks. He arrests him immediately for vagrancy upon Rambo’s just beginning his first return to the town.

It’s important to contrast the tone of the film with that of the novel in light of my allegorizing them as representative of American involvement in Vietnam. The film is, as I’ve said, far more sympathetic to Rambo, and far less sympathetic to the local police and reserve army “weekend warriors,” while in the novel, there’s much more moral ambiguity between the two sides.

In the film, Rambo injures those coming after him, but he never kills them, except for Galt, and even he is killed only accidentally, in self-defence. In the novel, Rambo kills many cops, and most deliberately, including Galt, who isn’t the ACAB pig of the film, but rather a somewhat inept cop who often forgets to lock the door leading upstairs from where they keep the incarcerated downstairs.

This contrast can help us understand the film’s attitude, as opposed to that of the novel, concerning the Vietnam War allegory that I see in both. The film, in having us sympathize with PTSD-stricken Rambo, as against the obnoxious local cops, takes the pro-American attitude towards Vietnam. The novel, with its morally ambiguous attitude towards both sides, allegorically takes into account how wrong it was that the US went into Vietnam and did all the damage it did there.

When we see Teasle telling Rambo, with that American flag on his jacket, to get out of town and stay out, we can see Teasle’s intolerance towards Rambo as representative of the Vietnamese not wanting any more imperialists or colonialists in their country. After all, they had just finished driving out the French colonialists by the mid-1950s, and because of Western Cold War paranoia about the ‘Red menace,’ then, by the 1960s, they had to put up with Uncle Sam moving into their country.

So the cops’ arresting Rambo, then chasing him into the mountainside forest, are allegorical of US troops taken as POWs by the Vietnamese, who then would have chased any escaped POWs in the jungles of Vietnam. Certainly in Rambo’s PTSD-addled mind, his reliving of the trauma he suffered in Nam as he flees to the forest from the cops makes the whole story into the Vietnam War all over again, from his perspective.

Seen in this light, the notion of who really “drew first blood” has a chillingly ironic new meaning.

It’s assumed by most in the West that Vietnam started the war because the “commies” were out to take over the world and ‘enslave’ everybody, so the US had to stop the spread of communism (i.e., the ‘domino theory‘) and intervene. Actually, the US lied, through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify greater involvement in Vietnam. US imperialism and colonialism (i.e., the French) drew first blood, not Vietnam. Allegorically speaking, Rambo’s insistence on coming into town again and again (as in the novel)–defying Teasle’s insistence that he not do so (however more patient he is with Rambo in the novel, even allowing him to have something to eat in a local diner)–is what has metaphorically drawn first blood, too.

In the film, why should Teasle think that Rambo’s entering town with the American flag on his jacket, of all things, to be a sign that he’s looking for trouble? And looking the way he does, in combination with the flag (long hair, sloppy, and smelling bad), is what’s implied, of course, but allegorically speaking, it can represent a white man in Southeast Asia in a green army jacket, with that flag on it, implying a military uniform.

To make Rambo more sympathetic in the film, we see good-looking Stallone with combed hair and no beard or mustache…unlike the far shaggier and scruffier-looking Rambo of the novel. Also in the film, he is further humanized in its opening scene, in which he tries to visit a veteran friend from his team in Nam by going to the vet’s home, only to learn that he died of cancer from Agent Orange. Rambo is lonely, homeless, and suffering from PTSD. The Rambo of the novel has the same problems, but because of his tendency to kill, he’s far less sympathetic.

The issue of veterans’ PTSD, emphasized in the film, is of course a valid one, especially given how shabbily the US government has treated its veterans when they’re no longer of any use to the imperial war machine. Empire doesn’t just harm those outside the imperial core: it hurts those within it, too, and that’s why it’s valid to allegorize a vet’s war in an American town as a war in one of those Third World countries that the empire wants to subjugate and plunder.

These soldiers traumatize others and get traumatized themselves. Rambo’s loneliness represents the alienation and estrangement people feel in society and workers feel doing their work. Accordingly, while Col. Samuel Trautman (Crenna) in the film knows Rambo well (calling him “Johnny”), has personally trained him, and–as the final scene makes clear–is a father figure to him (once again reinforcing our sympathy for the US Army’s point of view), in the novel, Capt. Trautman merely headed the training facility where Rambo learned to be a soldier, he hardly knows Rambo at all, and he’s the one to put a bullet in Rambo’s head at the end of the novel.

My allegorizing of the story as one of Rambo fighting in the Vietnam War, instead of the local American cops, can be seen clearly in the novel, when shortly before Rambo’s breaking out of the police station and racing off to the forest on the mountain, he remembers a time in Nam when labouring as a POW, he gets sick, and he is given a chance to escape when the Vietnamese guards leave him to his own devices. Going through the jungle, he’s given food by local villagers, and he eventually rejoins members of the US Army.

Paralleling this Vietnam memory is Rambo’s escape from the police station, where instead of being sick, his vulnerability is from running outside completely naked (he’s just had a shower to clean away his body odour, and before he even has a chance to get dressed, he’s freaking out from a PTSD trigger from the cops’ attempt to shave his beard and give him a haircut). In the forest on the mountainside, Rambo gets clothes, food, and a rifle from an old man and a boy illegally making moonshine from a still; this help parallels the Vietnamese villagers having fed him.

Rambo is extremely averse to getting a haircut and a shave. In the novel, he’s kept in a cell that gives him claustrophobia. In the film, the sight of the straight razor gives him a PTSD flashback, making him relive the terror of a Vietnamese guard bringing a blade up to his chest and slashing it, triggering Rambo’s fight/flight response. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard, as the cops try to do in the novel, can be compared to the cutting of Samson‘s long hair, thus depriving him of his great strength. In the end, Samson kills all the Philistines, but also himself; in the novel, Rambo kills many of his enemies, and himself gets killed, too.

Having Rambo escape naked reinforces our sense of how tough he is. He can ignore public embarrassment, the discomfort of his unprotected nut-sack slapping against the seat of the motorbike as he races into the wind on it, and the possibility of scraping his skin on the ground if the bike crashes. Him naked among the trees on the mountainside also reinforces our sense of how feral he is.

Another point of contrast between the novel and the film is in who they emphasize as being the main victims of the Vietnam War. In my allegorical interpretation of the novel, Rambo’s shooting and killing of all of Teasle’s cops, as well as that of Orval Kellerman (played by John McLiam in the film) and his dogs, and on top of them, his setting of much of the town on fire suggests the American troops’ shooting and napalming of the Vietnamese and their villages. The film’s emphasis on Rambo’s PTSD, leading to him breaking down and crying at the end, as well as his never deliberately killing anyone, emphasizes how victimized the American vets felt.

Now, Rambo’s rant to Trautman at the end of the film, about how wrongly he and other vets were treated by antiwar protestors, them spitting on him and calling him “‘Baby-killer,’ and all kinds of vile crap,” is valid insofar as some troops really were innocent of such atrocities. Other troops, however, weren’t so innocent, as was the case with the My Lai massacre of 1968.

In any case, the antiwar protestors should have reserved most of their ire for the top military brass and American government. Recall that old antiwar song by Black Sabbath, which condemned the generals and politicians that plotted and started the Vietnam War, then had the poor–young men like Rambo–do all of their dirty work for them…and it was those very same poor who came home–if they weren’t killed–traumatized, unemployed, and often homeless, like Rambo; it wasn’t the generals or politicians who suffered thus.

I mentioned above how there are parallels between Rambo and Teasle in the novel, i.e., they’re both vets. Also, it’s not just Teasle et al hunting Rambo; it’s vice versa, too. Both men sustain nasty injuries in the mountainside woods, and it’s as if there’s a psychic link between the two, because later on in the novel, when Teasle is back in town, he’s had a vision in a dream that Rambo is coming back into Madison.

This time, Rambo’s going back into town to torch it all, linking this return to the other ones at the beginning, which prodded Teasle into arresting him and starting the whole conflict in the first place. This linking of going back into town, in terms of my allegory, shows how Rambo’s arrival has always been an invasion, even if he didn’t kill anybody at first. It’s like the imperialist establishment of South Vietnam (or South Korea, for that matter), a preparation for coming war and prompting the establishment of the Viet Cong.

The whole point in allegorizing the conflict in First Blood, with a US vet fighting a local American town to represent the US army fighting in Nam, is to show how imperialism’s ravaging of other countries eventually turns back on itself, causing the empire to eat itself up and ravage the imperial core. This is what we can see the Trump administration doing as I’ve been writing this post: first, they did the usual–continue to enable the Gaza genocide and Ukrainian war, and threaten Venezuela; now, they’re sending the National Guard into American cities like Washington DC, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles to terrorize American citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re illegal immigrants, in response to an “enemy within.” When we hurt people outside, we hurt people inside (e.g., Vietnam vets’ PTSD), because in the end we’re all one.

Before Rambo goes back into town, though, he still has to hide from those doing the manhunt for him, which by now has included the National Guard and civilians. He goes deep into a mining cave, in which at first he imagines it’s like being in a Catholic Church where he can go to confession; indeed, he contemplates how he wasn’t justified in killing those cops–he could have simply escaped, but he knows that his instinct to keep fighting is powered, at least in part, by his enjoyment of killing. In his bloodlust, we can see how he personifies US imperialism.

Deep in that black pit of a cave–which in the novel, at one point shorty after he’s come back out, is aptly compared to hell–Rambo comes to a filthy chamber with toxic fumes and a floor covered in shit. Bats fly out all over him, biting and scratching him (in the film, it’s rats). He is repelled back, but he soon realizes that it’s only through this awful chamber that he’ll be able to come back out to the surface. Only by going through the darkest hell can one come back out to the light: this heaven/hell dialectic, like any dialectical unity of opposites, is something I’ve discussed in a number of blog posts before.

So in this situation, Rambo is like Jesus harrowing hell before His resurrection…though Rambo’s return to the earth’s surface will make him anything but holy.

Nonetheless, the notion of Rambo emerging from the cave as a kind of resurrected, avenging Christ is apt when we consider, in the context of my allegory, how the missionary spread of Christianity (in places like Africa, for example) has been used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Recall Ann Coulter‘s incendiary words about Muslim-majority countries immediately after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The Western capitalist complaint about “Godless communists” would have also been used as a rationalization for fighting the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

In any case, when Rambo comes out of that cave, he feels “good,” as it says in the novel, being the only apt word to describe how he feels. He’s full of resolve and energy, eager to fight his personal war on the town. This good feeling is comparable to experiencing the transformed, ‘spiritual body‘ of the resurrected Christ, ready to go out and fight as a Christian soldier against the ‘civilian’ pagans, or those whom Rambo fights, those without his military training and discipline.

In the film, he steals a military transport truck carrying an M60 machine gun. In the novel, he steals a police car and some dynamite. With these weapons, he’ll cause a mayhem to the town comparable to the napalm mayhem the US Army caused in Vietnam. He’ll blow up two gas stations, the police headquarters, and much of the town.

But of course, he can fight this personal war only for so long before he’ll be stopped. His inevitable, ultimate defeat is allegorical of the quagmire that the Vietnam War turned into, an unwinnable one that was beginning to be seen as such by the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the year Morrell began writing his novel.

Trautman tries in the film’s and novel’s varying ways to convince Rambo to stop fighting and thus to save his life. Allegorically, this is like the US Army’s big brass realizing that they had to pull out of Vietnam before more of their men needlessly got killed.

In the novel, Teasle and Rambo shoot each other, and Teasle–in that connection I said he has with Rambo–feels a need to be near Rambo when he’s finally killed. The police chief, a former vet, and this Vietnam vet parallel each other in their shared forms of pain (sustained injuries in the mountainside forest, alienation and loneliness [recall Teasle’s wife having left him], etc.).

The ultimate connection, though, between Teasle and Rambo is, in terms of my allegory, a dialectical one, in the sense of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic. One can be recognized as self-conscious only through the other recognizing him as such. Rambo and Teasle react to each other at the beginning of the story. They have a fight to the death; one becomes lord, and the other, bondsman (in my allegory, these would respectively be Rambo-as-US-imperialist and Teasle-as-Vietnamese-resistor). The contradiction between the two is resolved through the efforts of the local police to stop Rambo in the end, making him realize he cannot go any further. This resolution is allegorical of Vietnam fighting so hard for many years until finally liberating themselves from Uncle Sam.

On the surface, it might seem that it’s Teasle who is the lord, and Rambo the bondsman, since it’s through Rambo’s hard fighting that he ends up outdoing the cops for so long, and escaping them; but even if we take this interpretation, it just shows how dialectically interchangeable Rambo and Teasle are, each other’s yin and yang.

Finally, what is ironic about a franchise with a seemingly indestructible tough guy is how, in this first film, the one unequivocally good one, in its climactic and emotional final scene, Rambo cries like a baby, just like Teasle’s wounded cops in the forest. Trautman comforts Rambo like a father figure (as opposed to the novel, in which Orval–the old man with the hunting dogs–is Teasle’s father figure, yet another parallel between Rambo and Teasle). The big action hero is thus a rough, tough cream puff, a Herculean masculine ideal as impossible for men to live up to as is the Marian/Aphrodite ideal for women to attain.

A scene was filmed of Crenna’s Trautman being made by Stallone’s Rambo to shoot and kill him, a forced suicide; for obvious reasons, it was disliked and excluded from the film. As I said above, in the novel, Trautman blows Rambo’s head off; earlier in the novel, wounded Rambo intended to kill himself with some of that dynamite he had.

In any case, Rambo dying at the end may not be pleasing to moviegoers who’ve invested so much time sympathizing with him, but it is the fitting end to the story, because the whole point of First Blood is how Rambo’s projection of who ‘started the fight’ is ironically how he started it (if only allegorically so, according to my interpretation); also, the whole point of the story is how it ends, with Rambo-as-US-imperialism killing many others, then self-destructing.

As of the writing and publishing of this analysis, Americans have been witnessing that self-destruction of empire on their very soil. They ought to reflect on that, and not wish for any sequels to the fighting.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 2

[The following is the twenty-second of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, and here is the twenty-first–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

Once we have listed the sinful uses of magic, as we have just done previously, we can give examples of them, as well as details as to what specifically makes these uses of magic so sinful. We shall start with the first sin on the list.

Magic should never be used in aid of lewdness, the enjoyment of erotic pleasure at others’ expense.

Sex is for procreation and the raising of a family, and is to be enjoyed in those confines. It is not to be enjoyed when corrupting or taking advantage of others, and therefore using magic for such corrupting or exploitive purposes is especially sinful.

Magic must never be used to seduce others to enjoy them when they, if not under the influence of magic, would never consent to it. Such a use is violation, ravishing. The Unity of Action is manifest in this sinful use of magic, since the love of the object of one’s passion quickly turns into hate upon seeing the object not wishing to be used thus. It is written, in “The Migrations,” how a young Luminosian burned in passion for a girl, his neighbour in Zaga, the place we Luminosians shamefully stole from the people who’d lived there before. The boy used magic to have her, and when the magic’s power wore off, she realized what he’d done and screamed. Then his love turned into hate, and he beat her to death.

Magic must never be used to seduce and take to bed any member of one’s family. Again, the Unity of Action turns love into hate here, for the proper love of family, in acting so shamefully, destroys that love and makes parents and children, brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces, and even distant cousins, hate each other.

Magic must never be used in aid of adultery, be it a married woman with another man, or a married man with another woman. Both are equally wrong. These again, through the Unity of Action, which makes all opposing things as one, turn love into hate: hate of the paramour who tempted the lust of the married one, and hatred of the spouse one was disloyal to, as well as the hatred of the betrayed spouse.

Magic must never be used in aid of engaging in lewd, filthy acts with animals. Such behaviour is bestial, disgusting, and perverse. It makes oneself as filthy as the animal one has violated and polluted. Again, love of animals is corrupted into hate of them, and hate of oneself for acting so shamefully.

All of these hateful uses of magic were indulged in by the Luminosians during our time of the theft of Zaga, these sinful uses as well as others far too foul and disgusting to be named. In our captivity by the Zoyans, the innocent have been punished as well as the guilty, for not even one Luminosian has ever been truly innocent. We never punished the guilty, not even the elders who gave such vociferous warning against their sin. Thus, the Echo Effect punished us all–man and child.

For these reasons, we Luminosians now in captivity must be strict in our punishment of any among us guilty of using magic in aid of lewdness and the corrupting or exploiting of objects of base passions. If the lewd one suffers the pain of disease, this will be punishment enough for him: give him no medical treatment. If no disease results, The following will be the punishments.

Adulterers will be divorced and shunned from society. Mild or moderate transgressions will be punished with incarceration for a year. Those who are filthy with animals or family members will have their genitals mutilated or cut off. Rapists will be publicly executed.

It is far better that one offender be punished than the entire community for his sins.

Commentary

Readers must remember that these are ancient texts, from about two millennia ago, and therefore they reflect the common prejudices and preconceptions of the time. Such prejudices include the, however only implied in the text, condemnation of homosexuality: “Sex is for procreation and the raising of a family, and is to be enjoyed in those confines”; also, “…these sinful uses as well as others far too foul and disgusting to be named” (i.e., ‘the love that dare not speak its name’). We scholars are only translating…not condoning…such prejudices.

Similarly, punishments are harsh, justified by a fear of collective punishment as a result of bad karma from The Echo Effect, as was believed to have happened to all of the Luminosians as a result of the occupation of Zaga and their lenience with sex offenders at the time. Again, we translators are only informing the reader of such draconian laws, not defending them.

Analysis of ‘Murder on the Orient Express’

Murder on the Orient Express is a murder mystery novel written by Agatha Christie and published in 1934. The novel’s original American name on publication that year was Murder in the Calais Coach, so as not to confuse it with Graham Greene‘s 1932 novel, Stamboul Train, which in the US was published as Orient Express.

HRF Keating included MOTOE in his list of the “100 Best Crime and Mystery Books.” Mystery Writers of America included the novel in The Top 100 Mystery Novels of All Time list in 1995. MOTOE was included in Entertainment Weekly‘s 2014 list of the Nine Great Christie Novels.

It has been adapted for radio, film, TV, the stage, comics, and video games. As for the two film adaptations, I’ll be focusing on the 1974 one as a comparison to the novel, and not the 2017 version, because first of all, I’ve seen the former version and not the latter, and second, the former is generally considered to be much better than the latter, in spite of the latter’s strong cast and good production values.

The 1974 adaptation’s ensemble cast includes Albert Finney (as Hercule Poirot), Martin Balsam, George Coulouris, Richard Widmark, Sean Connery, Lauren Bacall, Anthony Perkins, John Gielgud, Michael York, Jean-Pierre Cassell, Jacqueline Bisset, Wendy Hiller, Vanessa Redgrave, Rachel Roberts, Colin Blakely, Denis Quilley, and Ingrid Bergman (who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her portrayal of Greta Ohlsson in 1974).

Here is a link to quotes from the 1974 adaptation.

Now, the crucial element of MOTOE, the motive for murder being the case of the kidnapping and killing of the little girl, Daisy Armstrong, was inspired by a real-life kidnapping and murder case, that of the son of Charles Lindbergh, back in 1932. There are a number of other parallels in Christie’s novel with the Lindbergh case, too: the parents were famous, the mother was pregnant, the child, a firstborn, was kidnapped for ransom directly from the crib, and the child was killed even after the ransom had been paid. The Lindbergh maid was suspected of complicity in the crime, and after a harsh police interrogation, she killed herself, just as in the novel.

Linked to the Armstrong case as prompting the murder of the suspect, who though responsible for the crime had escaped justice through corruption and legal technicalities (as well as his leaving the US), is the issue of whether or not vigilante justice is valid. In a world of corrupt courts and governments, where the wealthy can pay their way out of having to face justice for any crimes they commit, that very justice is still needful, and when the crime is so heinous–like the killing of a little girl–that it is unbearable, then even Poirot can see that vigilantism should be winked at.

Now, if you’ve never read the book or seen an adaptation of it, read no further to avoid spoilers. If you know the solution to the murder, though, read on.

The murder victim calls himself Samuel Ratchett, but his real name is Cassetti, and he’s an American gangster responsible for the kidnapping and murder of Daisy Armstrong. As is the case with any murder victim in a detective novel like MOTOE, he has an extremely unlikeable personality, so the reader is left wondering which of the suspects hates him just enough to want to murder him. As far as Poirot is concerned, he comes to dislike Ratchett right upon his first meeting with him, and thus refuses to be employed to protect him (Christie, pages 19-31).

As for the guilty in the average murder mystery, we may assume there to be one, maybe two, killer(s). In the case of MOTOE, though, all of the passengers on the train in the coach which includes the area including and between compartments four and sixteen, starting with that of Pierre Michel (Cassell) and ending with that of Edward Henry Masterman (Beddoes in the film–Gielgud) and Antonio Foscarelli (Quilley), that is, except for the Countess Helena Andrenyi (Bisset, though in the film, we see her and her husband, the Count Rudolph Andrenyi [York], hold the knife and stab together) and, of course, Poirot, are collectively guilty of the murder.

Ratchett is thus stabbed twelve times, with varying degrees of strength or weakness. Each stab is from one of the suspects, so there are twelve of them, making up a kind of vigilante jury…and a “trial by jury is a sound system” (page 134), according to Col. John Arbuthnot (Connery), which is something Poirot emphasizes later as being “composed of twelve people” (page 266).

So, their twelve-man jury is meant to give a kind of juridical legitimacy to their revenge, since the actual law has failed them. They aren’t merely murdering a man–they’re passing a death sentence onto him, as he had onto the sweet little three-year-old girl.

Note also that it isn’t just she who died. Recall the suicide maid accused of complicity in Ratchett’s crime. There are also Daisy’s father and mother: she, Sonia, gave birth prematurely to a still-born child and died herself as a result of the labour; he, Col. Armstrong, shot himself out of grief. So the revenge of the ‘jury’ wasn’t just for the death of the little girl, but for a total of five deaths, all just to sate Cassetti’s greed.

Let us now consider who the ‘jurors’ are, what their relationships are–by blood or not–with Daisy and the other four, and therefore what their exact motives are. Mrs. Caroline Hubbard (Bacall) is revealed to be the American actress Linda Arden, and the maternal grandmother of Daisy, and so also Sonia Armstrong’s mother. Mary Debenham (Redgrave), mistress of Arbuthnot, is an English governess and thus formerly that of Daisy; as for Arbuthnot, Col. Armstrong was his best friend. Princess Natalia Dragomiroff (Hiller) is Sonia Armstrong’s godmother. Hector MacQueen (Perkins) is Ratchett’s secretary and translator, a job he got to get close to Cassetti; MacQueen’s father was the Armstrongs’ lawyer, and MacQueen also had feelings for Sonia. Count Andrenyi takes the place of the Countess in the murder, she being Sonia’s sister. Foscarelli was the Armstrongs’ chauffeur.

There are still a few more. Greta Ohlsson (Bergman) is a Swedish missionary who was Daisy’s nurse. Masterman became Rathett’s valet to get close to him; he was Col. Armstrong’s batman in the war and his valet in New York. Hildegarde Schmidt (Roberts) is Princess Dragomiroff’s German maid; she was formerly the Armstrongs’ cook. Cyrus Hardman (Blakely) is an American former policeman who was in love with the French maid who killed herself after being falsely accused of aiding and abetting Cassetti. Michel is the Orient Express train conductor and father of the suicide maid.

When we see who these characters are, we can then understand that the five deaths are not just a statistic. These people deeply grieved over the losses of those they loved. And when they saw the corrupt court wink at Cassetti for the pain and suffering he caused them, just through his having paid off the authorities, can you even begin to imagine the rage that swelled in the hearts of that dozen or so people? There was no way that they would let Cassetti get away with what he did.

Now, Ohlsson in her religiosity would naturally have found it almost impossible to reconcile her Christian beliefs with her participation in a murder; she surely gave Ratchett one of the weakest of the stabs. In the novel, when reminded by Poirot of the Armstrong case, she gets all emotional, saying that the killing of the little girl “tries one’s faith.” (page 110) The commandment, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ must have been ringing in her ears forever since she gave that stab; indeed, Bergman as Ohlsson quotes the commandment in the 1974 film.

Still, she may find some solace in that very same Bible she surely has with her all the time. She can read Ecclesiastes: “To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose after heaven.” (3:1) Then she can read a little past that: “a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build.” (3:3) Yes, even in the Bible, it says there’s a time to kill.

There are times when the law fails us, when the government and the ruling classes whom these institutions work for (as opposed to working for the common people!) grow so rank in their filth and self-serving that the people must rise up and take the law into their own hands. The killers of Cassetti all come from different countries, classes, and backgrounds, ranging everywhere from a Russian princess to an Italian-American chauffeur/car salesman; such a diversity of walks of life shows the universality of their passion to seek justice through unavoidably violent means.

As Mrs. Hubbard explains towards the end of the novel, “It wasn’t only that he was responsible for my daughter’s death and her child’s, and that of the other child who might have been alive and happy now. It was more than that. There had been other children before Daisy–there might be others in the future. Society has condemned him; we were only carrying out the sentence.” (page 273)

Very often, when an act of vigilante justice is acted out against any of these rich, powerful people, as in the case with Luigi Mangione against the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, there will be those liberals out there who condemn Mangione’s violence, but stay silent over the repeated violence of the denial of health insurance claims, which leads to many deaths or bankruptcies. When confronted with the Gaza genocide, these liberals will pipe in, “But do you condemn Hamas?”

The fact that the twelve killers are of all different social classes, from royalty to the working class, can be see to symbolize people from across the political spectrum: left, centre, and right. Such people in our real world–being enraged at the injustices of the corrupt health insurance industry, government in bed with corporations, and Zionism’s ongoing atrocities against the Palestinians–may have differing diagnoses of these problems, but their anger is the same. The anger and presumed political attitudes of the twelve killers can be considered to be similar.

As for Ratchett/Cassetti, he–as a rich mafia man paying off the courts so he can escape punishment for his crimes–can be seen to personify predatory capitalism, a representation I’ve made in many other blog posts.

Poirot proffers up two possible solutions to this murder case on the train. The first, contrived by the actual killers obviously to shield themselves from suspicion, is that a man boarded the train at Vinkovci, disguised himself as a conductor, and killed Cassetti as part of a mafia feud, then left the train before it went off again and got caught in the snowdrift that has kept the train from moving during this entire investigation.

Evidence of this simple first solution includes the discovery of a conductor’s uniform, with a missing button, in a large suitcase among the belongings of the princess’s lady-in-waiting, Hildegarde Schmidt (page 194). Elsewhere, there has been Mrs. Hubbard’s vociferous complaining of a man being in her compartment around the time of the murder, a complaining given with particular loquacity in Bacall’s performance.

Yet Poirot is able to piece together what really happened through various slips of the tongue from the suspects and certain inconsistencies in how the events of the night of the murder were presented to him–the far more complex solution that incriminates the twelve suspects. Examples of such slips include Schmidt’s freely-given boast that all of her ladies have praised her cooking, implying that she was the Armstrongs’ cook. Inconsistencies include the understanding that it was Cassetti calling out, on the night of the murder, something in French, a language he couldn’t speak a word of, hence his employment of MacQueen as his translator.

Still, in the end, after contemplating how, as Finney’s Poirot puts it, “a repulsive murderer has himself been repulsively, and perhaps deservedly, murdered,” as well as considering Mrs. Hubbard’s long speech at the end of the novel, explaining the twelve killers’ reasons, which include how “Cassetti’s money had managed to get him off” (page 272), the first solution is preferred.

This judgement is made by Monsieur Bouc (Bianchi in the film–Balsam), who is a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, and Dr. Stavros Constantine (Coulouris) at the very end of the novel (page 274), leaving Poirot to retire from the case. As we can see, compassion for the twelve is far more fitting than for Cassetti. It is their crime, and not his, that should be winked at. Those in power should be the ones brought down when guilty of a crime, not the powerless.

Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, London, HarperCollins, 1934

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 1

[The following is the twenty-first of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, and here is the twentieth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

The best uses of magic, coupled with the old teachings as a guide, have been outlined in writings from before. Now, we must focus on the worst uses of magic, why they must be avoided, what the sins are behind the intentions of this worst use of magic, and the inevitable consequences of such a use of it.

These evil uses of magic have been described in some detail in previous writings, but we must warn again of these evils, and repeat the warnings many times, for so many people never heed us. We must enumerate these evils one by one and give specific instances of them, how they arise, and what results from each of them, hoping that at least some fools will think twice before using these evil spells.

A studious review of the Echo Effect, with its laws of sow and reap, as well as of the Ten Errors, the very sins that lead to the use of the evil spells, should be enough to deter any from being tempted into using the evil spells.

Magic should never be used in aid of lewdness, the enjoyment of erotic pleasure at others’ expense.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling, manipulating, or exploiting other people.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Magic should never be used in aid of taking the land of other peoples.

Magic should never be used in aid of gaining excesses of wealth.

Magic should never be used in aid of stealing from others.

Magic should never be used in aid of oneself, to the exclusion of others’ needs.

Magic should never be used in aid of treating other people unjustly.

Analysis of ‘Dark Star’

Dark Star is a 1974 sci-fi comedy produced, scored, and directed by John Carpenter, his feature directorial debut. It was written by him and Dan O’Bannon, who also acts in the film, does the voices for Bombs #19 and #20, edited the film, and created many of the special effects.

Other actors in the film are Brian Narelle, Cal Kuniholm, Andreijah “Dre” Pahich, and Joe Saunders. Carpenter did the voices of Talby (Pahich) and Commander Powell (Saunders). Barbara “Cookie” Knapp, the only female in the cast, did the voice of the computer. Miles Watkins is Mission Control, and Nick Castle is the alien.

Dark Star started out as a student film while Carpenter and O’Bannon were at the University of Southern California. It was originally a 45-minute film with a budget of $6000. The first version of the film was completed in 1972. With $10,000 in financial support from Jonathan Kaplan, Carpenter and O’Bannon were able to shoot an extra fifty minutes in 1973, thus making Dark Star feature-length.

The film was well-received at Filmex, but not on its initial theatrical release, with nearly empty theatres and little reaction to the intended humour. O’Bannon would later lament that they had “what would have been the world’s most impressive student film and it became the world’s least impressive professional film.”

Nonetheless, by the early 1980s, Dark Star became a cult film among sci-fi fans, and Quentin Tarantino called it a “masterpiece.” O’Bannon reworked the ‘beachball alien’ section of the film into 1979’s Alien. He reasoned, “If I can’t make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream.” George Lucas was impressed with O’Bannon’s special effects, remarkable for such a low-budget film, such as the spaceship jumping into hyperspace and the computer screen effects, so he hired O’Bannon to apply these effects to Star Wars (1977).

The humor of Dark Star was meant to parody 2001: a Space Odyssey. While 2001 is an epic film with profound meditations on the progress of man and his place in the universe, Dark Star is a short, absurdist look at how not only insignificant and bumbling we are, but also how potentially harmful we are to the universe and to ourselves. Instead of such powerful, grandiose music as Richard Strauss‘s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in Dark Star we hear a trite country song (“Benson, Arizona”) during the opening and ending credits, as well as “Largo al factotum,” from Rossini‘s Barber of Seville, and Carpenter’s use of a modular synthesizer.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie.

The film begins with a video message sent from Earth to the spaceship named Dark Star, manned by a crew of four men–Lt. Doolittle (Narelle), Sgt. Pinback (O’Bannon), Boiler (Kuniholm), and Talby (Pahich), while a fifth man, Commander Powell (Saunders), has been cryogenically suspended after a fatal electrocution from his malfunctioning chair–whose mission is to seek out and destroy unstable planets that will threaten Earth’s hopes to colonize space.

The video message is sent from Mission Control, from McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. The man from Earth (Watkins, having the same surname as the actor) expresses condolences over the death of Powell, and informs the crew that their request for radiation shielding has been denied. Cutbacks in Congress have made it impossible to help the crew with the ship’s increasing technical issues: malfunctions, radiation leaks, failing life support and communication systems, the loss of the crew’s entire supply of toilet paper, etc. In spite of this refusal to help, Watkins puts on an encouraging smile and speaks of having every confidence in the crew to solve their problems themselves…as if that were sufficient compensation for having left them all in the lurch.

I see this sci-fi story as an allegory for late imperialism, in which the continuing drive to colonize, extract natural resources, wage endless wars to maintain global dominance, and maximize profit are not only increasing suffering worldwide, but are also harming the imperial core in such forms as rising neofascism, worsening economic crises, and destruction of the environment. The worsening breakdowns and malfunctions of the spaceship, which is used to destroy unstable planets for the sake of facilitating the colonization of space, can be seen to symbolize our end-of-times predicament today.

In this sense, as absurd as the story of Dark Star may be, it can also be seen as prophetic of our growing problems in the twenty-first century, and therefore it’s a warning to us all.

We next see shots of the spaceship approaching a planet the crew is about to blow up. Carpenter’s synthesizer is providing some dark, eerie music, which is fitting (in spite of how this film is supposed to be a comedy), given the settler-colonialist/imperialist allegory I’ve discussed.

Doolittle at first is having difficulty contacting Talby, who’s up at the top of the ship looking out at the stars, and there are technical problems with the communications system; the intercom won’t send Talby a clear transmission from Doolittle. As well as further establishing the extent of the technical issues of the spaceship, this problem also represents the sense of mutual alienation of the crew.

Once communication with Talby is established, him needing to give the other three a diameter approximation of the planet, they get ready to blow it up. Bomb #19 (which, like the ship’s other bombs, has AI, allowing it to think and speak, as well as making the bombs a parody of HAL 9000) is lowered out of the bomb bay. Pinback does a countdown, then drops the bomb, and the crew gets ready to put the ship into hyperdrive to clear away from the explosion.

It is here where, not only do we get a bit of a parody of 2001‘s “Stargate” sequence, but also a taste of O’Bannon’s special effect for seeing the stars fly at us, as they more famously do before the Millennium Falcon when it goes into hyperspace. Now Dark Star never directly inspired the Death Star, which as we know is also meant to destroy planets for the Galactic Empire, but a comparison of the spaceship here with the battle station of Star Wars makes it extremely tempting to imagine Lucas, who as I said above hired O’Bannon, being at least unconsciously inspired by Dark Star to create the Death Star. Certainly some have noted the shape of the ship as similar to the, however much larger, Star Destroyers. In any case, inspired or not, these comparisons reinforce my settler-colonialist/imperialist allegory of Dark Star.

Connected with my allegory is a discussion among the crew of where to go next to find an unstable planet to blow up, now that the current one has been successfully destroyed. Boiler mentions a 95% probability of intelligent life in the Horsehead Nebula sector, but Doolittle has no interest in that “bull” at all since the last time they found intelligent life, it was the reddish ‘beachball’ with two clawed feet that Pinback has taken onboard.

Doolittle’s dismissive contempt of alien life, as well as Pinback’s–let’s face it–abduction and kidnapping of the alien, demonstrates the crew’s racist and imperialist mindset. Remember–they’re space colonizers. Doolittle calls the alien “a damn mindless vegetable…looked like a limp balloon.” This attitude is allegorical of that of British colonizers taking the land away from indigenous people around the world. In spite of the comical spectacle of the film, Dark Star has a dark message.

Doolittle doesn’t care about intelligent life: he just wants to blow planets up. This mentality, in principle, is no different from colonizers like Columbus, who took over land and killed the aboriginals. Doolittle is similarly contemptuous towards Pinback, demonstrating again the mutual alienation among the crew, and also how imperialist/colonialist disregard for aboriginals can spill over into disregard for those of one’s own nation or ethnic group. Alienation is catching.

Boiler finds an 85% probability of an unstable planet in the Veil Nebula; it will probably go off its orbit and hit a star, so the Veil Nebula is the next destination for Dark Star. As they begin their journey there, Boiler puts on some music, “Benson, Arizona,” the country music theme song heard during the credits.

The song’s lyric essentially expresses the homesickness felt by the crew as they sail across the stars. The film’s setting is the mid-twenty-second century, and while the crew have aged only three years, they’ve been out in space for twenty Earth years. One issue the crew has to deal with, therefore, is how being cramped in this small spaceship for so long has been driving them crazy. Their mutual alienation, as well as the continuing deterioration of the ship, is only the tip of the iceberg.

The long, shaggy hair and beards of the crew made Tarantino think of hippies back when he first saw (and initially hated) Dark Star as a kid. That shaggy hairiness, combined with the crew’s indulging in various forms of tomfoolery to relieve their boredom (i.e., Pinback’s practical jokes, Boiler playing the knife game with a switchblade and firing a laser rifle, etc.), reminds me of the Swampmen in MASH. Hippies are supposed to be antiwar liberals, as were Hawkeye et al in the TV show; as we’ve learned over the past fifty years, though, the vicissitudes of time can make liberals bang the war drums as much as conservatives do.

After Doolittle does a video recording for the ship’s log, discussing such things as the deterioration of the ship and the ETA in the Veil Nebula, we see Dark Star going through space while the crew is rocking out to some 1960s blues-based guitar music. Then the ship’s computer, with the female voice, interrupts the men’s fun to warn them of a collision course they are on with an asteroid storm, which once they have gone through it, the technical problems of the ship will of course be even worse.

It’s interesting at this point to compare this film with another of Carpenter’s–The Thing. Both have an all-male cast who are isolated and have an alien among them that is hostile in intent. And just as Dark Star has a computer with a female voice, so does The Thing, the chess computer voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, which plays a game with RJ MacReady (played by Kurt Russell) at the beginning of the movie.

As I said in my analysis of The Thing, we can see a paradoxical merging of negative attitudes towards both women and men in Dark Star. Note how, on the one hand, there’s the lack of women on the ship (a computer’s voice is the only ‘female’ reality for the crew–it’s just an abstraction for the men) as well as the nudie centrefolds on the walls (the exposure of their anatomy removed for the sake of getting a more marketable G rating); yet on the other hand, the bumbling incompetence of the male crew, as well as their lack of mutual empathy, makes them hardly any superior to women.

The asteroid storm seems to be bound by an electromagnetic energy vortex, like one the crew encountered two years before. Presumably, the damage that that one caused to the ship hasn’t been adequately dealt with (i.e., the computer’s defensive circuits, which were destroyed in that other storm).

As the ship is going through the asteroid storm, we see a pinkish glow around it, representing some kind of defensive shield. Still, this isn’t good enough to prevent any damage, for the electromagnetic energy zaps the back of the ship, causing the bomb bay system to be activated. Bomb #20 is let out, programmed and ready to blow up. Carpenter’s synthesizer plays triplets of a chromatic ascension of two minor seconds over a tonic note, going up and changing key each time by a half step and adding to the tension of the moment.

Next, the computer tells Bomb #20 to return to the bomb bay. The AI system in the bombs all have a male voice, in contrast to the female voice of the computer. What’s interesting to note in this contrast also is the rationality of the computer as against the irrational stubbornness of the bomb, which insists that it ought to blow up simply because such is its programming, in spite of the fact that it received no command from the crew and left the bomb bay only because of a malfunction caused by the asteroid storm. Only after repeated arguing with the computer does the bomb return, saying, “Very well” in a slightly petulant tone.

The ship finally gets out of the asteroid storm. After Boiler’s and Pinback’s engaging, in their sleeping area, in a bit of the tomfoolery I described above, Doolittle leaves and goes into a dark room in which he has an odd keyboard instrument constructed of such things as glass water bottles and cans to produce tones. He plays it, though out of tempo. The music is presumably from Carpenter’s synthesizer, but it sounds a bit like a prepared piano.

All of these goings-on have to do with the crew trying to alleviate the boredom they feel between tense moments like the asteroid storms, as I mentioned above. After finishing his keyboard practice, Doolittle goes up to the top of the ship to give Talby some breakfast and to chat with him. The top has a transparent dome through which Talby likes to look out at the stars. Doolittle discusses his old surfing days back in Malibu, and how he wishes he had his surfboard with him so he could wax it.

Talby has isolated himself up in this domed area ever since Powell died. Doolittle worries that Talby spends too much time up here, and not enough time with the others. Talby thinks of encountering the Phoenix asteroids when the ship reaches the Veil Nebula; these circle the universe once every 12.3 trillion years, and Talby understands that they “glow with all the colours of the rainbow.” He’d love to see them.

We’ll come back to a fulfillment…of sorts…of these two men’s wishes by the end of the film.

Meanwhile, down below, Boiler wants to do a little target practice with the laser rifle by firing it at a metal square he’s placed in front of a door. Pinback tries to stop him.

Then, the computer tells Pinback that he has to feed the alien. He’s annoyed at having to do so…well, maybe he shouldn’t have taken it on board, then.

The following sequence was meant to be funny in a slapstick sort of way. Instead, I see an allegorical commentary on how settler-colonialists treat the indigenous people of the places they conquer.

The absurd physical appearance of this low-budget alien–a reddish, spotted beachball with two red, clawed feet–can be seen to represent how the racist colonialist regards the aboriginals as clownish-looking in their–in the opinion of the colonialist–odd attire and darker skin. The alien whimpers in a high-pitched voice, which can also be seen to represent the ‘strange’ language of the native.

Pinback originally thought the alien was “cute”; now, he just finds it annoying. This is not quite so unlike the white racist who imagines blacks to be all just a bunch of entertaining song-and-dance men; then, when they show their wish to be more than that, he is annoyed with them.

Pinback complains about having to do all the work and getting no appreciation–I can hear echoes of “the white man’s burden” here–then the alien jumps on his back. As I said above, this intended slapstick comedy would eventually become the terror of the stowaway xenomorph in 1979’s Alien. Thematic connections between Dark Star and Alien can be seen in how a ship’s crew–alienated from each other and from their own species-essences–are taking aboard an alien to exploit it in some way (as the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would use the xenomorph as a weapon), rather than let it go to live its own life.

Pinback would use the alien as Dark Star‘s ‘mascot,’ but it has other ideas…naturally. Since the comedy of this sequence doesn’t exactly work, I find it more useful to allegorize it as an instance of the native attempting an insurrection against the colonizer.

The crew of Dark Star are space colonizers, who as I’ve said are allegorical of colonizers here on Earth. Space is thus allegorical of the oceans of the world, the spaceship is the colonizer’s sea vessel, the planets are the islands or other lands of the natives, and of course the ‘beachball’ alien is a native. Now, unstable planets, which are a threat to the space colonizers, can be seen as allegorical of unstable, restive, or rebellious societies that are prone to revolution when colonizers try to control them…hence the need to crush them, or in the case of Dark Star, to blow them up. It is in this context that we should understand the actions of the alien on the ship.

Not only does the alien jump on Pinback and disobey him when he wants it to go back into the dark storage room it was initially in, but it also fights back when Pinback tries disciplining it by hitting it with a broom. Later, it lures him into the ship’s elevator shaft…right when the elevator’s to be activated randomly due to more malfunctions, thus putting Pinback in danger. The alien jumps him there, too, putting him in greater danger, since the elevator is about to descend while he’s still hanging there.

He manages to survive and get out of there, but by that time, the alien has activated the bomb’s circuits, which will cause Bomb #20 to emerge from the bomb bay again when not wanted to do so. All of these acts of the alien should not be trivialized as being merely “mischievous,” as the Wikipedia article on the movie characterizes them; they are an attempted rebellion against colonizers.

Once again, the computer has to convince the headstrong bomb to return to the bomb bay, as the crew has not ordered the destruction of an unstable planet yet; after all, they haven’t yet reached the Veil Nebula. Bomb #20 complies again, yet it’s even more petulant and reluctant about it, since blowing up is its whole raison d’être.

It says that this will be the last time it complies, ominously. This AI system is clearly insistent on having its own way, which is not only indicative of how irrational it is, but also how dangerous it is to everyone impacted by it…rather like HAL in 2001, or any misused technology, for that matter.

Now that Pinback is safe, he’s pissed at the alien. He strides through a hall and gets a tranquilizer gun, and as he does so, we hear a military beat played on a snare drum. This music is fitting, given he’s one of the space colonists about to show the, as it were, indigenous alien who’s boss, like a true imperialist. His intention is to discipline the alien with a tranquilizing, not to kill it…though the shot from the gun does kill it, making it deflate and fly about the place like an actual beachball; Pinback surmises it was full of gas.

The almost comical way that the alien dies is tragically apt, given the slight regard colonizers have always had for their victimized natives. Keep in mind how the IDF have joked about and celebrated, in cruelly ghoulish fashion, their brutal killing of the dehumanized Palestinians. Note, in this connection, Pinback’s words on shooting the alien: “Now it’s time to go sleepy-pie, you worthless piece of garbage.”

Doolittle, in his incompetence, couldn’t care about the increasing technical issues of the ship any more than he does about Pinback’s traumatizing incident with the alien in the elevator shaft, or whether or not there’s any intelligent life in the Veil Nebula. These three forms of apathy are interrelated, as far as my allegory of late imperialism and colonialism are concerned.

Doolittle personifies the oligarchs, neocons, and neoliberals today who know of all the dangers we face today on our dying planet, yet do nothing substantive about it; he also personifies the lack of empathy for others’ suffering that is so endemic today; and since intelligent, alien life corresponds with indigenous people in my allegory, then Doolittle in his lack of caring about such life represents the slight regard colonialists have towards natives.

Talby, on the other hand, does care about the new damage the ship has sustained, so he goes to take a look and see if he can repair it. It’s significant that the door to the Computer Room, which Talby is headed to, is shaped like a coffin. In this room, he is going to find out how fatal the damage will be if it isn’t properly repaired. There’s a break in the communications laser down by the emergency airlock.

Meanwhile Pinback wants to tell Dolittle and Boiler the story of how he came to be one of the crew on Dark Star, but the other two, having heard it before a few years ago, don’t want to hear it again. Pinback tells the story anyway, which includes his name not really being Pinback, but Bill Froug (after William Froug, an American TV writer and producer). He replaced the real Pinback after he took off his uniform, ran naked into a fuel tank, and killed himself; Froug then put on the uniform and was rushed onto the ship, which was just about to go off on its mission.

This switching of identities represents Pinback’s alienation from his species-essence; such an alienation can be tied to his alienation from his fellow crew members. Accordingly, he complains in video recordings of how unfairly he’s treated by the rest of the crew. Alienation can also explain why the real Pinback would rather kill himself than go on the ship.

With the help of the computer, Talby has found the source of the malfunction: communication laser 17 has been damaged, which happened during the asteroid storm. This laser monitors the jettison primer on the bomb drop mechanism. Not fixing this will lead to Dark Star not destroying the unstable planet in Veil Nebula, but destroying itself. According to my allegory, this fatal negligence represents late imperialism destroying itself.

The laser is located in the emergency airlock, so Talby will put on a spacesuit and go in there to try to repair the malfunction. While he’s doing this, the ship is approaching the unstable planet to be destroyed. Talby wants to tell Doolittle about the damage, but the latter doesn’t want to hear about it, since he, Boiler, and Pinback are about to have Bomb #20 come out and blow up the planet.

The communications laser has been damaged. The commander of the ship doesn’t want to listen to Talby’s warning of the damage. Bomb #20, with its petulant, stubborn male voice, doesn’t want to listen to the computer’s command to return to the bomb bay and abort its aim to blow up. All these men are going to die…because of a lack of communication.

Talby attempts to repair the laser, but he is temporarily blinded by a sudden flash of light, he staggers, and walks into the path of the laser beam, causing far more serious damage to the ship’s computer. The bomb’s release mechanism is disabled, causing Bomb #20 to be stuck in the bomb bay, just when the crew is doing a countdown to detonation.

Here we see the contradictions of colonialism and imperialism as the seeds to their own destruction. The destruction of unstable planets represents the colonizer’s taking over and destroying the worlds of the natives, not caring about the life there, if there even is life there. The excess of this destruction eventually falls back onto oneself, especially when there’s little regard for the safety and proper functioning of one’s own equipment. Imperialism leads to alienation and apathy towards one’s fellow man, which in turn leads to one’s own destruction.

When the crew realizes they can’t get Bomb #20, counting down to its detonation, to be released so they can get away from the explosion, they of course panic. Doolittle commands the bomb to stand down, but the AI in it refuses to. The damaged computer can’t do anything to save the crew.

Doolittle’s only course of action, bizarrely, is to go and revive a dead man–Commander Powell–and ask him how to stop the bomb. Powell, recall, is in a state of cryogenic suspension…a kind of life in death. This idea is a manifestation of a theme that now comes into prominence in Dark Star: the dialectical relationship between existence and non-existence, between life and death.

Powell is strangely alive and dead at the same time. He’s being held in a freezer compartment. When he speaks to Doolittle, it’s in a weak voice, like someone tripping out on drugs.

Powell tells Doolittle to teach the bomb about phenomenology, an objective investigation of the nature of subjective, conscious experience. Doolittle gets in a spacesuit, does an EVA, and begins to have a philosophical discussion with Bomb #20. We can see in this the absurdist comedy of trying to find meaning among self-aware beings about to die, anyway.

The bomb is made aware of Cartesian doubt, that is, how does it know that it exists, and how can it be sure that everything around it exists? The bomb doubts, so it thinks and therefore exists. But if the existence of all other things around it is in doubt, how does the bomb know it has truly received an order to detonate? It pauses its countdown to detonation to ponder these matters further, just in the nick of time, causing Doolittle practically to swoon in relief.

In this Cartesian doubt, we once again see the theme of dialectical unity between existence and non-existence. The theme also exists in how the bomb’s whole reason for existing is to blow up and cause non-existence…what will cause the bomb to blow up, anyway, in spite of the doubtfulness of its externally-derived orders to do so. After all, the safe and stable existence of the space colonizers is dependent on the destruction and, therefore, non-existence of unstable planets that threaten colonization…rather like white colonizers’ ethnic cleansing of natives.

Meanwhile, Boiler thinks he can break the bomb free of the ship by taking that laser rifle he was using before for target practice and shoot the support pins out. Pinback knows Boiler’s idea is crazy, as he’s a bad shot. The two fight. Here, we see, not just a lack of communication leading to late imperialism’s self-destruction (allegorically speaking), but also how fighting and a lack of cooperation or mutual aid lead to it. Boiler wants to use violence to solve the problem; both he and Pinback are throwing punches at each other.

Once the bomb has stood down to ponder its Cartesian doubt, Boiler and Pinback realize they no longer need to fight, so they leave the area where the gun is and return to their stations.

The bomb, however, has decided to go off after all, since as I said above, blowing up is its whole raison d’être. Non-existence is the reason for its existence. Understanding that only itself is provably existent, while absolutely nothing else can be provably so, Bomb #20 goes into a state of solipsism: it’s like Descartes proving his own existence, yet not proceeding to prove the existence of anything else.

This solipsism is thus like the bomb’s rationalization for narcissistic self-absorption. Only it exists, so only it matters; and if its only reason to exist is to destroy itself and become non-existent, then so…be…it. Narcissism leads to the destruction of all of us.

In a horrifying irony, it prefaces its act of annihilation by alluding to the first few verses of chapter one of Genesis, speaking narcissistically as if it were God, bringing about the Creation of the universe. It says, “Let there be light,” and blows up. Yahweh has thus become Shiva, who in destruction allows a new cycle of birth, life, and death to begin. Existence in non-existence.

Just before the ship has been blown up, Doolittle asked Boiler and Pinback to let him back into the ship. They opened the emergency hatch, but Talby was just by it, so he’s been thrown out into space, and Doolittle has to go off to fetch him. With the ship blown up, and Boiler and Pinback dead, Doolittle and Talby see the pieces of the ship floating by in space. The best that the damaged computer could do to mitigate the severity of the blast was to reduce its diameter to a mile around the ship; hence, the unstable planet hasn’t been blown up, and Doolittle and Talby have only been thrown clear, floating in opposite directions.

Though they’re both soon to die, Doolittle and Talby will, in a way, have their earlier wishes fulfilled. The latter will not only get to see the Phoenix asteroids, but he’ll also be carried away with them…to circle the universe forever. He’s thus a kind of Phoenix rising from the ashes of his world’s whole destruction. He’s found heaven in hell, existence in non-existence.

Doolittle sees Powell spinning away in a block of ice. He, too, is experiencing life in death, existence in non-existence. Finally, Doolittle gets his hands on a ladder from the floating debris of the ship. He’ll use this as a kind of makeshift surfboard, and he’ll surf his way to the planet as a falling star and die there, a genuinely funny visual to end the movie, during which we’ll also hear “Benson, Arizona” again during the end credits.

Now, I’m not saying that the comic book superhero had any direct influence on the movie, but I find it irresistible to make an association between the two here. Doolittle, in his silver spacesuit and on the silver ladder-as-surfboard, looks like the Silver Surfer going through space. I find this comparison apt when we consider Dark Star‘s Galactus-like mission, the destruction/consumption of worlds. Doolittle was the herald, as it were, of the mission, and since he’d do little to repair the malfunctioning ship, his destruction of others heralded his own destruction as a falling star.

His fate is rather like how our own short-sighted imperialists, colonialists, and other oligarchs are heralding our and their own destruction, the falling stars of the West.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 1, Chapter 4

[The following is the twentieth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, and here is the nineteenth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

While it is perfectly good and wise to use magic to aid and benefit others, and wicked and foolish to use it for selfish or malignant ends, the very best use of magic is to gain knowledge and enlightenment. As far as enemies of the community are concerned, magic should be used for defence–never for attack.

Use magic as an aid in meditation, for contemplation of the foundations of all being in the world: the Three Unities of Space, Time, and Action; the Echo Effect, and how to make it return good to oneself, and not evil; the Crims of air, Weleb, fire, Nevil, earth, Drofurb, and water, Priff–not to use them for personal gain at the expense of others, but for how they interact with and parallel the Unity of Action and the Echo Effect; and the most foundational of everything, Cao and the Pluries.

One should use magic to help in studying all of these, to know the world better, to understand its rhythms, and thus to become wiser. This wisdom will aid in making decisions that will benefit the community, deliver them, we hope, from their current slavery under the Zoyans, and protect them from the temptations that do only harm.

In this, we can see the wisdom of combining magic with the old teachings. If used well, magic can give concrete examples of exactly why the old teachings are wise and correct; if used foolishly, to replace the old teachings, magic will be only a curse to the community, if not now or soon after, surely at some point in the distant future, and it will be only a harsher curse the later it comes.

If one wishes to contemplate the Three Unities of Space, Time, and Action, while also contemplating the four Crims of the elements, one can sit in a bath of water up to the neck, with the smell of mud surrounding it, a breeze blowing around one’s head, and a fire burning nearby. With one’s eyes closed and breathing in and out slowly and deeply, one relaxes, goes into a trance, and can feel not only a closeness to Priff, Drofurb, Weleb, and Nevil, but also the waves of Cao with Weleb’s breeze blowing on the water.

In feeling the unity of all things in this way–the unity of the complementing Crims, the wavelike Unity of Space in Cao, and also staying mindful of the ever-present now–the Unity of Time–one can feel how the Echo Effect moves to bring weal or woe to us all. While sitting thus in the bath, one can chant, “Cao, Pluries, make me know you,” over and over again. The bath is best had outside, so that after the chant has been said enough times, the rain should fall, soaking one’s head in the Pluries to achieve even greater illumination. It is good that the rain will quench the nearby flames; the spell will thus help to calm the fires of desire, malice, and selfish craving.

Doing this meditation and spell often enough will help one feel a oneness between oneself and all others, even with animal and plant life, thus strengthening love, compassion, and goodwill to all others, even to those outside the community. If enough of the community does this meditation and spell regularly, it may even cause the Echo Effect to free us all from slavery to the Zoyans.

[The text breaks off here.]