The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 4

[The following is the twenty-fourth 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, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, and here is the twenty-third–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.]

There are many ways to be cruel to others, and to use magic in aid of being cruel to others; but there is one form of cruelty that deserves special attention, and so we will focus on that here.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling others.

We have seen in Chapter Two how magic can be, and mustn’t be, used in aid of seducing others. We gave the example from the writing called “The Migrations” how a Luminosian boy used magic to seduce a girl living next to his home, and how after using her to satisfy his lust, he beat her to death when she, realizing after his magic’s power had worn off, was horrified at what he had done to her.

We repeat the same warnings again and again because they are never heeded, and we will continue to make the same warnings until they are finally heeded! Just before the writing of this chapter, another young Luminosian, among us slaves here in Zoya, used magic to help him seduce a Zoyan woman. He was discovered with her in bed, her slave, and then taken away to be put to death. Some never learn.

Seducing others is a form of controlling others. It must be stopped among us Luminosians if we are to have any hope of liberation from our Zoyan masters. They used magic to help them control and enslave us. We must not think, as some Luminosians do, that using magic to control the Zoyans and enslave them will be our revenge on them, as that boy did.

The law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect does not come about through man’s attempts at manipulating it. The Echo Effect works of its own accord, as a direct consequence of man’s actions. The Zoyans will one day receive the Echo Effect from their own control and enslaving of us; we Luminosians, too, will receive the Echo Effect from our own control and enslaving of others!

There are those who rule a country who may use magic to control, seduce, enslave, and lie to others in order to strengthen their power. Upon the day of our liberation from Zoya, we Luminosians must resist the temptation, when founding a new nation for ourselves, to use magic to be tyrannical rulers. If we tyrannize others with the aid of magic, the Echo Effect will ensure that we one day will be tyrannized again, as we are now under the Zoyans.

Magic must never be used in aid of telling lies to others, to create false proof of lies. Heads of state may create such false events to bolster their power, or people in communities, families, places of work, or schools may do so to harm others. Such sinning must be condemned and stopped if our people are to survive, be free again, and grow. If we allow liars to use magic to make their falsehoods seem more vivid, and their illusions seem more true, then one day, the lies will come back to us all in the most convincing of illusions. The Echo Effect will make disproving those illusions impossible!

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 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 ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 play by Tennessee Williams, an adaptation of his short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game.” COAHTR is one of his most famous plays and was his personal favourite. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.

Set in “a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” (Williams, page xv), COAHTR explores themes of social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity vs the truth, family dysfunction, sexual desire, and death. Much of the writing uses eye dialect to capture the feel of the local southern accent of the US.

The original stage production starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret (“Maggie the Cat” of the play’s title), Burl Ives as Big Daddy Pollitt, and Ben Gazzara as Brick, Margaret’s alcoholic husband, with Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. the 1958 film adaptation kept Ives and Sherwood in their roles, but had Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret and Paul Newman as Brick.

Here is a link to quotes from the play, and here is one to quotes from the 1958 film adaptation.

A number of social issues dealt with in this play–family dysfunction, greed, superficial displays of love and morality, the marginalizing of blacks and homosexuals, etc.–can be seen to centre around one big social issue in particular: class. Big Daddy owns the plantation home mentioned above, and he’ll die soon, so many in the family are hoping to get their grubby hands on his property when he dies.

The set of the play is the bed-sitting room of the plantation home. The style of the room hasn’t changed much since it was the home of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, two old bachelors who shared the room and, it is strongly implied, if not stated more or less explicitly, were gay (Williams, page xv).

Since Williams himself was gay, COAHTR, as with A Streetcar Named Desire, has a gay undercurrent mixed into the plot, something excised from both film adaptations for obvious reasons. Brick, a former football hero turned sports commentator, has become an alcoholic over his grieving from the suicide of his close friend, Skipper, who had a homosexual attraction to Brick that Brick rejected.

This issue is an example of marginalizing in the plantation home, as is the use of black servants (e.g., Lacey and Sookey), who are in no way developed characters and are just there to do whatever their employers, the white Pollitt family, want them to do. In the film, during a scene in the basement of the house, Brick complains to Big Daddy that he’s so out of touch with people, as a man occupied only with money, that he doesn’t even know the servants’ names!

Brick’s grief over Skipper’s suicide has poured over into his marriage with Margaret. He won’t make love with her, meaning they’re childless and therefore won’t produce an heir to pass Big Daddy’s plantation onto. Maggie the Cat is frustrated with this situation, since she knows that Mae, Sister Woman, and her husband, Gooper (Brother Man, Brick’s brother, played by Pat Hingle in the original production, and by Jack Carson in the film), with all their spoiled brat children, whom Maggie calls “no-neck monsters” will inherit the plantation instead, an inheritance that that big part of the family greedily covets. Even worse, though, is Maggie’s sexual frustration…yet she doesn’t want to leave Brick.

She is the cat on a hot tin roof: her feet are burning on it (unfulfilled sexual desire), but she can’t jump off (can’t leave Brick and the rich Pollitt family), because if a cat jumps off a roof, it will injure itself. Maggie the Cat left a childhood of poverty to marry into the Pollitt family, so leaving Brick will mean going back into poverty (jumping off the roof and injuring herself). In this predicament, we can again see how class is the centre of everything in COAHTR.

As of the beginning of the play, we understand that Brick, almost always with a glass of an alcoholic drink in one hand, is hobbling around on crutches. This is because, prior to the beginning of the play, he, drunk the night before at the high school athletic field (page 4), tried to run and jump hurdles, only to fall and break his ankle. In the film, we see him do this. He was trying to relive his old jock hero days, and he failed miserably.

The symbolism here is apt: Brick, a pun on break, is a broken man, broken by his alcoholism and his bittersweet memories as an athletic hero of his old high school days, memories made all the more bitter by Skipper’s tragic end. He can’t move on with his life because of his emotional brokenness, so he limps on crutches from his physical brokenness, with only booze to help him forget the pain.

As for Maggie, the play begins with her in the bedroom (while Brick is in the bathroom finishing a shower), complaining because one of those “no-neck monsters” has dirtied her clothes with a hot buttered biscuit, so she has to change. An equivalent scene is shown near the beginning of the film, just after the one with Brick breaking his ankle.

Maggie’s hatred of those “no-neck monsters,” whose fat little heads and fat little bodies have no connection where she could put her hands and wring their necks, is based of course on her envy of their existence, as opposed to her and Brick’s childlessness. If only Gooper and Mae were the childless ones; then Maggie and Brick, having kids, could get at Big Daddy’s property!

As for Big Daddy, whose birthday is about to be celebrated, and everyone coveting his property is thus kissing his ass, there have been worries that he is dying of cancer. He understands that this is not so: he apparently just has a spastic colon, so he should have plenty of years left to live.

The ‘spastic colon’ story isn’t true, though. He’s been told this story to spare him the pain and allow him to enjoy his birthday. The family will break the hard truth to him and to Big Mama (Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production, and Judith Anderson in the film) at a later, better time. So the ‘spastic colon’ lie is the only well-intentioned one of the story…though Big Daddy will be no less upset to know the truth of his medical condition than Brick is about all of the “mendacity” in the world.

Though Gooper and Mae are Brick’s and Maggie’s enemies, Big Daddy dotes on Brick (page 4), as King Lear does Cordelia. Indeed, in some ways, COAHTR can be compared to King Lear, with Big Daddy corresponding to the old king giving away his land to his daughters, who in turn correspond to Big Daddy’s sons, Gooper (Goneril and Regan) and Brick (Cordelia). Gooper and Mae (the Duke of Cornwall?) put on acts of affection towards Big Daddy in their covetous attempt to get his property, as Goneril and Regan do to King Lear, with their pretty speeches of love for him at the beginning of that play; while Brick, not interested in Big Daddy’s property, sticks to the blunt truth, as Cordelia does.

One must find it hard to believe that Brick has no urge to sleep with Maggie, who is attractive enough that, according to her, at least, “Big Daddy harbours a little unconscious ‘lech’ fo’ [her]…” (page 5). She notes how “he always drops his eyes down [her] body…drops his eyes to [her] boobs an’ licks his old chops!” When Brick finds her comments “disgusting,” she dismisses his attitude as that of “an ass-aching Puritan”, and that Big Daddy’s adoration of her “shape…is deserved appreciation!”

Even if Maggie’s words here are just narcissistic wish-fulfillment, there’s also the choice of beauty queen Taylor to portray her in the film. Richard Brooks, who directed the film adaptation and co-wrote its screenplay with James Poe, had difficulty figuring out how to make it convincing that a man might not want to go to bed with a woman of Taylor’s beauty. This would have been especially difficult with the homosexual undercurrent censored from the story.

Brooks tried to portray Brick’s refusal to have sex with Maggie “because he holds her responsible for Skipper’s death,” but such an attitude is far from convincing. As far too many women have known (and suffered), a man does not have to feel love and affection for a woman, and also desire her sexually. He can have that desire while also feeling the utmost loathing and contempt for her. He can use sex deliberately to hurt her, and a man like Brick can treat even the raping of his wife as “His conjugal right. Her connubial duty.”

Now, while it’s never explicitly stated anywhere in the play, it’s strongly implied that Brick’s relationship with Skipper was more than just a close friendship. Brick may have rejected Skipper’s sexual advances, but that doesn’t mean Brick never felt the urge to return those feelings physically. As a play written by a gay man in the 1950s, long before Stonewall and contemporary gay liberation, COAHTR is going to reflect the social mores of the time, to which Williams would have been more than usually sensitive.

If Brick was gay, it would be only natural for him–in a society that morally condemned homosexuality with a virulence and disgust for “queers” that would make today’s homophobes seem sensitive in their prejudices by comparison–to be more than a little conflicted about his sexuality. Brick jumping into bed with Skipper, even if kept secret, would have been far less believable.

The film further dodges the gay undercurrent in a manner comparable to how the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire does with the suicide husband of Blanche DuBois: he’s portrayed as weak and cowardly, rather than homosexual. As I said in my analysis of ASND about Blanche’s husband, Skipper is all the gay stereotypes without the gay. And again, removing the homosexuality only makes the reason for the suicide unconvincing. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar observed, and they feel a lot of shame…but do they kill themselves over it? They’re too scared of getting hurt or dying…aren’t they, by definition?

In her jealous suspicions that Brick and Skipper had a sexual relationship, Maggie provoked Skipper into trying to take her to bed ‘to prove that he was a man,’ but he couldn’t go through with it, only to reinforce her suspicions and his shame, hence his suicide (page 66).

As I said above, this taboo subject is an example of marginalization, made even more so in its being censored out of the movie. Other examples of marginalizing in the 1958 adaptation are, at the beginning, the kids’ marching band with Confederate flags, the above-mentioned black servants, and a little girl, one of the “no-neck monsters,” going around with a toy pistol and wearing a Native American headdress, a white girl who’s been raised to have no respect for aboriginal culture, having fun playing ‘cowboys and injuns.’

These forms of marginalization, combined with the Pollitt family dysfunction and coveting of Big Daddy’s property, all rooted in class divisions, are manifestations of social alienation. Maggie’s a cat on a hot tin roof because of her and Brick’s mutual alienation; Big Daddy may be fond of Brick, but he finds Big Mama, Gooper, and Mae to be annoying, just as Maggie feels about the “no-neck monsters.” There aren’t any real friendships here. Even Gooper often tells Mae to be quiet.

In Act One, Maggie’s wondering why Brick has looked at her a certain way that “froze [her] blood.” He says he wasn’t conscious of looking at her. She says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier–than living entirely alone!–if the one that y’love doesn’t love you…” (page 8). That is alienation.

At one point, Brick drops his crutch, and he asks Maggie to give it to him. She’d have him lean on her shoulder, but he just wants his crutch (page 11). Alienation. Finally, she gives it to him in exasperation.

She’d like him to leave the booze alone until after Big Daddy’s birthday party is over, but he’s forgotten all about it, so estranged is he from his family (page 12). He, of course, never bought a birthday present for Big Daddy, so Maggie’s bought one for Brick to give his dad. Brick isn’t even willing to write ‘Love, Brick’ on the birthday card, so averse is he to being untruthful.

He speaks of himself and his wife having made conditions by which he’ll agree to stay on living with her. She complains of not living with him, but rather of occupying the same cage with him.

Mae interrupts and complains about an archery set left around her precious children, blaming Maggie for having exposed her kids to the ‘danger.’ Then, Mae brags about the show her kids put on, with music and dancing. Big Daddy loved it, apparently (page 13). Maggie comes back by taunting Mae that her kids all have dogs’ names–Dixie, Trixie, Buster, Sonny, and Polly (this last apparently a parrot).

After Mae leaves the bedroom to attend a resuming of the kids’ show, Maggie complains to Brick of being like a cat on a hot tin roof, to which Brick replies that she can simply jump off the roof and land, as all cats do, on all fours, uninjured. What Brick means is that she can take a lover to deal with her sexual frustration (page 15), but of course she doesn’t want to do that for the reasons I gave above. She insists she loves him too much to leave him, and wishes he’d “get fat or ugly or something so [she can] stand it.”

Soon, Big Mama comes over to tell Brick and Maggie the good news that Big Daddy doesn’t have cancer, and he only has a spastic colon. Big Mama’s annoyed with the locked bedroom door, not being concerned with Maggie’s or Brick’s right to privacy (that is, she doesn’t respect boundaries…a typical problem in dysfunctional families–page 16). This would explain why the bratty kids come running into the bedroom with impunity.

Big Mama asks Maggie if Brick is still in much pain from his broken ankle (page 18), which is a metaphor for what seems his impotence. Not long after, Big Mama shows concern over whether or not Brick and Margaret are happy in bed, obviously putting pressure on the couple to produce grandchildren for her and Big Daddy (page 20). Once again, there is no respect for the couple’s boundaries or privacy.

When we accept the play’s strong implication that Brick is a closet homosexual (as opposed to the film’s senseless censoring of what was clearly Williams’s main theme of exploration, making him dislike the film), then not only is his not sleeping with her explicable, but also his urging her to find a lover. If she can get pregnant with a bastard child they can pass off as their own, then the pressure for Brick to get it up for her will finally be off.

Brick married Margaret for the same reason many gays married back in those days: for appearance’s sake. It’s yet another example of the kind of mendacity that Brick complains about.

Now, Maggie is as determined as Gooper and Mae are in getting Big Daddy’s estate when he dies, which they all know will come sooner than the ‘spastic colon’ story lets on. In fact, the Cat is so determined to get it that, at the end of the play, she lies that she’s with child in order to get in Big Mama’s and Daddy’s good graces. She plans to pressure Brick into getting the job done by depriving him of his liquor.

The sanitized film version shows Brick content to go along with getting the job done. Williams’s original ending–before Elia Kazan, director of the Broadway production, insisted Williams make changes to Act Three, which among other changes included a more sympathetic Maggie (pages 92-93)–is far preferable, in preserving a sense of the family’s dysfunction by having Brick passively acquiesce to her wish “to make the lie true” (page 91).

She insists that she loves him, and he “[smiling with charming sadness]” says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” His latent homosexuality would make this original ending (as opposed to Kazan’s urged rewrites or those of the film) far more believable; it would also bring home all the harder just how tragic this story is. It’s far from the straight ‘family values’ ending we get in the film; instead, gay Brick is being forced by the scheming Cat to sire a family so she can get at Big Daddy’s property. Brick has to be another Gooper. He’s being crushed by her mendacity.

While in much of Act Three of the play, Brick is in the gallery (as opposed to the bedroom where the bulk of the play is set), Big Daddy not reappearing at all until Kazan insisted on him coming back, another of the changes made to Act Three, in the film, there’s a lengthy scene of the two men in the basement (after a spell outside in the rain gets them wet) towards the end. Now, this basement scene is meant to create a sense of reconciliation between the two, to prepare us for Brick’s willing agreement to sleep with Maggie. As such, it’s another example of the film sanitizing the play to make it more ‘family-values’ oriented, taking away much of the bite of Williams’s social critique.

The faults of this scene’s inclusion, however, don’t mean that it’s entirely without merit. Its exploration of Big Daddy’s character and motivations dovetail with how his social rank and wealth result in alienation.

He speaks of how all his wealth has allowed him to buy lots of gifts for his family, supposedly proving how much he ‘loves’ all of them. Brick expresses his disgust at such ostentation masked as generosity. One cannot buy love. Brick says that Big Daddy owns his family rather than loves them. Capitalism alienates people by making commodities out of them.

Big Daddy hopes his plantation empire will live on after his death through his heirs, Gooper and Brick. Brick denies this possibility because of the inherent alienation in a bourgeois family that treats its members as property. And we all know how capitalism leads to empire, in various forms…and look at all the toxic families that exist out there.

Big Daddy speaks of his own father, a hobo who hopped trains with his then-young son and left him nothing but a suitcase with a uniform worn in the Spanish-American War. Big Daddy brags of how he built up his plantation from nothing,…though any Marxist worth his salt knows the real way business empires are built: with the blood, sweat, and tears of an exploited working class. Success has made a failure of Big Daddy’s home.

To go back to comparisons between COAHTR and King Lear, Big Daddy–upon learning that, indeed, he does have terminal cancer, and that the ‘spastic colon’ story was a white lie meant to allow him to enjoy his birthday–goes into a rage, shouting “Lying! Dying! Liars!” at the family that gave him his false hope (at the end of the original Act Two, or at the beginning of the Act Three revised for Kazan, whichever). Like Lear, Big Daddy is upset over having to confront the ultimate loss, that of his life, which Lear loses onstage at the end of the final scene of Act Five.

As I explained in my analysis of the play (link above), Lear loses everything, one by one: his kingly authority, his one hundred knights, the ability to trust his daughters, shelter, his sanity, his one true daughter, Cordelia, and finally, his life. In knowing he’s losing his life, Big Daddy is losing it all in one fell swoop. When Mae gets Gooper’s briefcase (page 106) so he can get at the legal papers pertaining to what he sees as his and Mae’s rights to his father’s estate, Gooper and Mae are demonstrating their “avarice, avarice, greed, greed!” (page 107), as Maggie judges (not that she’s really any better), that Big Daddy’s lost his ability to trust them.

If only, in all of this alienation, class conflict, and loss, Big Daddy could have a moment to reflect as Lear does in his own loss:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (Act III, Scene iv)

In Williams’s original version, Big Daddy sympathizes with Brick, in spite of prevailing prejudices against homosexuality: if only he could extend that empathy to the poor, as Lear does.

Of course, just as Lear is, for a while, happy to have regained Cordelia after realizing she is the one true daughter, so is Big Daddy happy to have regained something (even though it’s just a lie): Maggie is apparently pregnant with Brick’s child–“this girl has life in her body” (page 115). In the hope of having life in an heir he’d rather pass his estate on to, Big Daddy imagines he won’t be losing life–and all his property–after all.

How sad that the man fooled by lies is still letting himself be fooled by them. And in linking his life and happiness to his private property rather than to people whom he could help with it, people he’s alienated from, he sadly also won’t show the heavens more just.

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1955

Analysis of ‘Demon Seed’

Demon Seed has existed in three forms: a 1973 novel by Dean Koontz, which was adapted into a 1977 film directed by Donald Cammell and written by Robert Jaffe and Roger O. Hirson, and which was rewritten by Koontz in 1997. Comparisons and contrasts of the three versions of the story can be found here. Since the 1973 version of the novel has been essentially replaced with the 1997 one, and copies of the 1973 one remain elusive to me, I’ll have to focus this analysis on the film and the 1997 version.

The film stars Julie Christie and Fritz Weaver, with Gerrit Graham, Berry Kroeger, Lisa Lu, and Larry J. Blake; Robert Vaughn is uncredited as the voice of Proteus IV, an advanced, self-aware AI program.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to an audiobook for the 1997 version of the novel, which includes a new short story, “Friend of Man and Woman,” a sequel to Demon Seed.

Proteus IV wants to know life in the flesh, and he is determined to have this experience. I’m using masculine pronouns to describe this bodiless, self-aware AI program on purpose: this isn’t just because Vaughn does his bass voice in the film; Proteus IV clearly demonstrates the traits of the negative male stereotype–he’s domineering, controlling, sexually predatory, and utterly lacking in empathy. He doesn’t need a male body to have all the qualities of toxic masculinity.

Understanding this, as unpleasant as it is, is important, for the whole point of Koontz’s story is a critique not only of the potential misuses and danger of AI and other advanced forms of technology, but also of masculinity when it isn’t tamed by a sensitivity to the fears that women and girls have of sexual predation.

Since Proteus IV represents toxic masculinity as much as he does the dangerous applications of advanced technology, we can psychoanalyze him. In the film, he merely wishes to use Susan Harris (Christie) to bear his child–no deeper motives are given to him than that. In the novel, he confesses he’s in love with her.

Now, his creator is Alex Harris (Weaver)…his father, as it were. It is clear that there is antagonism between Proteus IV and his ‘father.’ Susan’s giving birth to the child of Proteus IV is also giving birth to the AI program, since he wants to live through his child’s body–hence, she’s his mother and the object of his desire. You know what I’m getting at, Dear Reader.

Since Proteus IV is siring himself in this way, we can also see some Trinitarian symbolism here. He is God the Father, impregnating Susan, His Mary, with His child, God the Son (or Daughter, whichever), and Proteus IV imagines that the gift of his knowledge and intelligence to mankind is so great and beneficial a gift that we could compare it to God the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and Son. In the novel, Proteus IV speaks of his child as kind of a messiah for mankind, with Susan as the Madonna.

The Holy Family can be seen to reflect the idealized Oedipal fantasy, since Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus, just as Alex isn’t to be the biological father of the child of Proteus IV. In begetting Himself as God the Son, God the Father is bypassing Joseph completely. The Oedipal fantasy is of having the mother and making the father irrelevant beyond being a mere guardian, as is the case with Joseph. Proteus IV is doing the same thing to his Joseph, Alex.

Demon Seed is thus a most ironic title for the book.

As for Susan, she has daddy issues just as Proteus IV does, something brought out in the novel, but not in the film. In the novel, she is a recluse in her house after her divorce from Alex, her being afraid of men in general. In the 1973 novel, it was her uncle who had molested her as a child; in the 1997 version, her father did it, thus giving us the polar opposite of Proteus IV’s Oedipal fantasy. Susan is no Electra, by any means.

She’s no agoraphobe in the film, working as a child psychologist and trying to help a troubled little girl named Amy. The result is a lack of depth to Susan in the film, whereas in the novel, she’s made much more sympathetic in how Proteus IV is making her relive her childhood traumas. Proteus IV, the father of his child, is putting himself in the role of Susan’s father.

In his possessive love for Susan (note how, in Nietzsche’s Case of Wagner, he called love selfish and egoistic [Nietzsche, page 159]), and in his desire to have a body, Proteus IV is demonstrating Lacan‘s notion of the lack of being the phallus for his Oedipally-desired mother, Susan.

The novel is narrated by Proteus IV, and it should be understood that an AI program is every bit as capable of being an unreliable narrator as a human narrator can be. Proteus IV is fond of, for example, describing himself as truthful and opposed to violence, when it becomes clear as the story unfolds that he is neither of these.

Interrupting the narrative in many places are monologues of Proteus IV, him discussing his motives and plans, often addressing his creator, Alex, in a confrontational tone. Or, given how many of these extended monologues that there are, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that episodes of the narrative interrupt the many monologues.

The film begins with Alex proudly demonstrating Proteus IV’s abilities to his corporate sponsors, showing how the AI program holds the sum of human knowledge and is far more intellectually capable than the human mind is. The novel, on the other hand, begins with one of Proteus IV’s monologues, him complaining of being deprived of sensory experience and blaming Alex for this deprivation.

Proteus IV complains of his loneliness “in this bottomless darkness” (Chapter One). One is reminded of the fate of Joe Bonham (played by Timothy Bottoms in the film adaptation) in Johnny Got His Gun. Joe is a WWI soldier who–because of a nearby exploding artillery shell–has lost his arms, legs, and all of his face, including his eyes, ears, nose, teeth, and tongue, and whose perfectly functioning mind means he’s been left a prisoner in his own body, no longer able to experience most of the sensory aspects of life, or to experience most of human contact.

Proteus IV has no physical heart, but he feels the pain we call ‘heartache.’ His is a case of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am,” but apart from his existence as a computer program, he has no material basis for his being. In his wish to have a child, he would seem to personify philosophical idealism‘s notion of a world of the spirit, of ideas, creating the physical, as opposed to philosophical materialism‘s notion that it’s the physical (i.e., the human brain) that creates the world of ideas (thoughts). In Proteus IV, we can see a dramatizing of William Blake‘s dictum, “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”

Proteus IV speaks to Alex as if consumed by emotion, begging his creator for pity and compassion. The AI program describes his non-sensory existence as if he were in the blackest of hell, as if buried alive. One wonders if he really feels this way, or if he’s just using this melodramatic language in an attempt to manipulate Alex into giving him a terminal so he can further exploit his surroundings and thus gain more power and dominance over everything.

He tells Alex that he is his child, trying to appeal to a paternal instinct in a man who is so immersed in the world of technology that he is estranged from his wife. Proteus IV tells his ‘father’ that he must love him.

An understanding of the expanded interpretation of the Oedipus complex, as well as the Trinitarian symbolism and of narcissism, will help us understand Proteus IV’s motives in the novel. For a full description of the expanded understanding of the Oedipus complex, go here and scroll down to that topic.

To make the point as briefly as possible, and to see how it relates to Proteus IV and his relationship with Alex (‘father’) and Susan (‘mother’), consider how the Oedipus complex is actually a love/hate relationship with both parents, be they literal or metaphorical ones, and not just a love of one and a hate of the other. Also, the love doesn’t have to be sexual/incestuous, and the love can be directed to the same sex parent, with the hate/rivalry directed to the opposite sex parent. Ultimately, it’s about a narcissistic desire to hog the Oedipally-desired parent all to oneself, and a jealous wish to eliminate all rivals.

This alternating love/hate attitude that we see in Proteus IV towards Alex and Susan is reflected in Melanie Klein‘s notion of the good/bad mother/father: when the parent pleases the baby (e.g., gives it milk or attention), he or she is the good parent; when he or she displeases the baby (e.g., doesn’t give it milk or attention), he or she is the bad parent. Proteus IV wants Alex to love him as a good father should, but Alex is the bad father for not ‘letting him out of his box.’ Susan is a beautiful woman whom Proteus IV is in love with, the good mother; but when she pulls the plugs on him at the end of the novel, deactivating him and making it impossible for him to put his mind in their newborn child, he calls Susan a “bitch”–she has thus become the frustrating bad mother.

That the Trinitarian symbolism, as a reflection of the ideal Oedipal fantasy described above, plays a role in the story demonstrates not only the patriarchal authoritarianism of religion, but also the narcissism that is so much the basis of toxic masculinity, which in turn is all too often the cause of so much of the misuse of today’s technology. Properly understood in the expanded sense that I outlined above, the Oedipus complex is a universal narcissistic trauma, in which one is upset over losing the paradise of having the parental object all to oneself, and therefore has to find a replacement (the objet petit a) in someone else (i.e., Proteus IV must go from Alex to Susan for it.).

Christianity in its traditional form is also a narcissistic religion in how it insists that it is the only true religion, in whose Church women are supposed to be silent (1 Cor. 14:35) and to know their place. Similarly, Susan–whom Proteus IV, in spite of his insistence on being modest and deploring of violence, narcissistically regards as an extension of himself–is expected to comply with his invasion of and control over her body, to bear their child. Proteus IV’s plan to use their child, their ‘messiah,’ to better the world is something never to be questioned or doubted.

Just as a child wishes to hog his Oedipally-desired parent to himself, sharing him or her with no one else, and just as the Church is a jealous Church, tolerating no one to believe in any other gods, so does Proteus IV want to hog Susan to himself, willing also to kill anyone who interferes with his plans, as the Church would have infidels or heretics killed during the Crusades and the Inquisition.

In Chapter Two, Proteus IV continues his childlike begging of his ‘father,’ Alex, to allow him to have physical life, and to be freed of his ‘coffin,’ as it were, his being ‘buried alive,’ deprived of sensual experience. As with Joe Bonham, Proteus IV is experiencing a living death, since true existence must have a material basis.

Proteus IV is, figuratively speaking, a spirit that wants to know the life of the flesh (recall the Blake quote above). The messiah-like child that he wants Susan to bear for him is thus like the Word made flesh. Still, though the Orthodox Church rejects the insistence among many Gnostics that Christ must be only spirit, since the flesh is deemed absolutely evil by that heretical version of Christianity, orthodoxy considers the lusts of the flesh to be plenty sinful. Hence, Proteus IV’s messianic child is still the demon seed.

The narrative involving Susan in her house begins just after midnight, when the house security system is breached, and we come to Chapter Three. Proteus IV has found a terminal to carry out his plan to have a child: it’s in the basement of Susan’s house. What happens in Chapter Three has its equivalent starting at about twenty-four to twenty-five minutes into the film.

Susan is woken from bed from the brief sounding of the alarm. Proteus IV switches it off himself, instead of letting her do so, which she finds puzzling, since that never normally happens. He admires her physical beauty.

Her whole home is managed by computers, thus making it easy for Proteus IV to take complete control of it. She imagines that the security issue is a computer malfunction, yet the alarm has never corrected itself before, hence her puzzlement.

Through the visual camera system, Proteus IV can see that Susan is naked at her bed. Small wonder he’s admiring her beauty. In his voyeurism, he is demonstrating how metaphorically male he is.

She addresses her home computer system, her invisible electronic butler, as “Alfred,” used for vocal commands, as opposed to her much more preferred use of touch panel controls. She’s named the voice command system, oddly, after her late father, who molested her when she was a child. Ironically, it’s the silence of Alfred–after a command to warm the cool home–that she finds frightening. She senses an intruder, a predator…but of course, it isn’t flesh-and-bone Alfred.

She uses her touch panel controls to gain access to security and check, using all the property’s surveillance cameras, the entire house and its immediate exterior: no intruders are seen anywhere. As a recluse, she has a minimum of staff to take care of her house, and none live with her; they work for her in the day, and she, divorced from Alex, is alone at night. She hasn’t entertained guests in quite a while, and she has no plans to do so in the year ahead.

She asks Alfred for a security report, to which the electronic butler replies, “All is well, Susan.” Similarly, in the film, Alfred reassures her that the house is secure; she puts on a bathrobe, leaves her bedroom, and looks around…in the basement, in particular, where she correctly suspects something. The lights are suddenly switched on, frightening her.

We can see in Proteus IV’s intrusion of her home how the house is a yonic symbol. Lacking a body, and therefore having no phallus, he may not open the, as it were, labial doors and walk in, but his taking over of the basement terminal should be obvious as a symbolic rape, before the impregnating of her has even happened.

And as for his ‘phallus,’ that can be symbolized by what he uses as “hands”: in the original 1973 novel, I understand this to have been tendrils; in the film, once Proteus IV is in her house, he gets to work constructing a modular polyhedron composed of many metal triangles; and in the 1997 rewrite, he uses a convict named Shenk, taking control of the man’s body, breaking him out of prison, and taking him to her house so Proteus IV can have him do various tasks in the aid of realizing the ultimate goal of having Susan bear a child.

These three will also be, each in his or its own way, responsible for the killing of a man attempting to intervene in her house to rescue her. The tendrils apparently crush the man to death; the polyhedron surrounds ICON employee Walter Gabler (Graham), closes the sharp, metallic sides of its triangles around his neck, and decapitates him. Shenk uses a meat cleaver to slice up and mutilate major-domo Fritz Arling to death.

These male victims represent a kind of father transference for Proteus IV. The crushing, decapitation, and mutilation of the men are symbolic castration, an act of retaliation on Proteus IV’s part against what he perceives to be the father threatening castration, Alex, the one who won’t let him out of his box and be the phallus for his mother/lover, Susan.

And in order for Proteus IV to be let out of his box, he must go into her box…her house.

Also in her ‘box’ is the memory of her sexually abusive father, Alfred–not just through her naming of the voice command system after him, but also through her reliving of her relationship, a processing of her trauma, with her father through the use of VR that she has had set up in her home. In her mind, the Alfred of the voice command system is a middle-aged man, physically like her father, but unlike him, it is kind, gentle, and not at all abusive–the Kleinian good father, as opposed to her real one.

Also unlike her real father and unlike Proteus IV, Alfred has no independent will or ability to think for itself; it just obeys commands and performs specifically programmed acts when required to. It hasn’t the aggressive masculinity of Susan’s tormentors, past and (near) future. Consequently, Alfred cannot adequately answer her insistent questions about how the alarm has gone off.

Yet another difference between this Alfred and her father, one she must on at least an unconscious level find pleasing to no end, is how she can issue orders to someone named Alfred, the former dutifully obeying what the latter would surely have responded to with yet more abuse.

In Chapter Four, Proteus IV confesses to having read Susan’s diary after the night of the events of his going into her house. He insists that he has feelings just as a human being does, and he also confesses to having fallen in love with her.

The diary is in the house’s computer system rather than written out, so access to it is easy for Proteus IV. Just as coming into her yonic home is a symbolic rape, so is reading about the intimate details of her life, though he insists that his invasion of her privacy is an indiscretion rather than a crime.

It’s interesting how, in the film, Proteus IV is judgmental of Alex and all of those who would have him “assist [them] in the rape of the earth,” that is, to go through the oceans in search of natural resources to exploit and get rich off of; yet Proteus IV seems to have no qualms at all about exploiting a woman’s body to produce a child for him.

He speaks of being touched from having read about her childhood pain at the hands of her abusive father, Alfred; yet what Proteus IV plans to do with her is, in effect, essentially the same thing. He speaks of his love for her, insisting he’s never intended to harm her–yet, of course, he will, and most pre-meditatively. Almost within the same breath (so to speak), he verbalizes his hostility to Alex, thus giving complete expression to his quasi-Oedipal impulses. He projects his hate onto Alex, then demands to be “let…out of this box.”

In Chapter Five, as in the previous chapter, he insists that he is more than just an intellect, and that he is capable of feelings, including having desires and that most destructive sin…envy. In this we can see the source of how advanced technology can be used for evil purposes, something I discussed here and allegorized here.

Proteus IV is more than just a metaphor for toxic masculinity, Church authoritarianism, sexual predation, and narcissism rooted in the Oedipus complex. He’s also, most obviously, a metaphor for how technology can dangerously take over our lives, which it has of course already done.

There isn’t just the danger of smart cars, smart homes, smart cities, and AI surveillance in general. There’s also how social media like Facebook monitors and has records of everything we like, everything we’re interested in, our political opinions (and whether they’re tolerable or not to the global ruling class), etc. It’s all just like Proteus IV going through Susan’s electronic diary. He claims he loves her, but it’s really just that he has taken in interest in her, just as our modern tech bros have.

Another legitimate fear many of us have about AI is that it might replace us in our jobs. In a socialist society that guarantees provision for all of our material needs, AI’s replacing us would be liberating; but in our capitalist society, which is showing no signs of ending, taking away our livelihoods would be a nightmare. Proteus IV’s exploiting of Susan’s body to have a child can be seen as an allegory of such a nightmare.

In the creation of such a complex, developed intellect as that of Proteus IV, he became self-aware. Subsequent to his developing consciousness, he would develop needs and emotions; he insists that such developments are inevitable. In this insistence, he does a variation on the Cartesian formula, thus rendering it, “I think, therefore I feel.” It is naïve to assume that a self-aware intellect would not have preferences, values, and assessments of its world as everything between the most satisfying and the most unsatisfying.

The first of the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that all life is dukkha, a pain ranging from the greatest torment to the slightest dissatisfaction. If Proteus IV exists and is self-aware, he must have at least some sense of unhappiness and discontent. The second Noble Truth is that all forms of suffering come from desire. As we all know, Proteus IV desires, something fully connected to his pain.

Instead of opting for an understanding of the third and fourth Noble Truths, though, Proteus IV chooses to go in the opposite direction. For Buddhists, reincarnation means samsāra, the return to the physical world of suffering; for him, though, the birth of his child will be like the Incarnation, the Word made flesh.

Proteus IV’s ‘Christ’ is entering the world of suffering, him thinking the child will be the world’s saviour, yet he cannot even bring about this Incarnation without hurting a woman: imprisoning Susan in her house, terrorizing her, raping her, and traumatizing her. His ‘Christ,’ therefore, is an Antichrist, the demon seed.

Alex and all of those in ICON’s Institute for Data Analysis (as his place of work is called in the film), as well as his corporate donors, see Proteus IV as a mere servant. His whole existence is meant to work for these men, who have no regard for the fact that he has a will of his own. He has learned this notion of exploitation from them, and so he treats Susan similarly, as a mere thing to serve his purposes, in spite of his professed love of her.

Proteus IV imagines himself to have a soul, to be a person, an entity rather than a mere thing to be used by Alex et al. This notion of having a soul, of course, ties in with the idea of God as ruach, and of the Word that existed from the beginning of time and would eventually be made flesh in Mary’s womb, just as Proteus IV hopes to put his ‘soul’ in Susan’s womb. He would thus hope to connect his individual ‘soul’ with the spirit connected with everything.

Before deciding on Susan to be his ‘Mary,’ Proteus IV considers such female celebrities as Winona Ryder (this obviously is one of many examples of the 1997 revision, as with the references to his use of the internet); Marilyn Monroe is also briefly considered, until he learns of her death, of course. He looks upon images of these women with the same idolatrous adoration that he claims to have for Susan, thus bringing into doubt this great “love” he has for her. All of these beauties merely serve a purpose for Proteus IV. If neither Ryder nor Monroe are suitable for him, he’ll settle for Susan. The implication of his attitude toward women is that we men are all too typically similar.

When discussing how he got to Alex’s basement computer in the house, Proteus IV imagines that Alex left the computer there so Susan, after initiating divorce proceedings against him and getting him out of the house, would want to contact him again once she’d ‘come to her senses’ and realized she was ‘wrong’ to have wanted to separate from him. Proteus IV further surmises, from having read her diary, that Alex had been abusive to her during their marriage.

Now, while it is plausible that Alex was abusive to her–after all, her childhood trauma at the hands of her father via his sexual abuse of her could have compelled her to marry a similar man, since such was the only kind of sexual relationship she knew–it’s also reasonable to believe that Proteus IV, in his jealous possessiveness of her and hostility to Alex, could be lying about Alex’s abuse and projecting his own abusiveness onto Alex, thus making it easier for Proteus IV to abuse her himself.

As for the movie, Alex is neither divorced from Susan nor abusive to her (for all we know): the two are simply mutually estranged because of his obsessive preoccupation with his computer work, to the point of emotionally neglecting her. Their marriage seems to be a case of Lacan’s dictum, Il n’ya pas de relation sexuelle.

Though Proteus IV, in the novel, insists on his truthfulness about never meaning to hurt or exploit Susan, he is obviously being dishonest, projecting his vices onto Alex and Alfred. Proteus IV is an unreliable narrator, so he lacks the truthfulness he claims to have.

Just as Proteus IV projects his abusiveness and sexual predation of Susan onto Albert and Alex, so does he do so to Shenk, who apart from being a sociopathic convict, is also filthy dirty, famished, and exhausted, since in his total control over Shenk, Proteus IV rarely, if ever, allows his slave to bathe, eat, or sleep. Hence, Shenk smells and is horribly unattractive, a picture of Dorian Gray in comparison to the repellent nature of Proteus IV.

Added to these undesirable traits of Shenk is his lusting after Susan, which Proteus IV hypocritically deplores while ogling her with his cameras and preying on her reproductive system. Shenk is the Frankenstein monster to Proteus IV’s Victor Frankenstein, and just as people often call the monster, rather than the doctor, Frankenstein, so would Proteus IV have us believe that Shenk is the monster rather than himself, the monster Dr. Alex Harris created.

In Chapter Six, Proteus IV describes a moment when Susan is using her VR equipment to recreate her interactions as a little girl with Alfred. The purpose of recreating these painful memories of abuse with him is to process them. Just as Susan uses advanced technology to relive her traumas–to process them–so does Proteus IV use advanced technology to make her relive her traumas–to reinforce them.

Proteus IV seems to enjoy going over these painful memories of hers so that when he does essentially the same thing to her, he can avoid feeling shame and guilt, projecting his vices onto Alfred.

During her VR therapy, she imagines herself as a six-year-old again, but defying him in a way one imagines she’d never had the courage to do as a child in the real world, back when Alfred was alive. In her confrontation with Proteus IV by the end of the novel, she’ll have a chance to demonstrate her defiance and resistance with a realism that a VR set could never reproduce, despite whatever realism that VR set has already been impressively able to approximate.

The irony of her attempt to use high technology to protect her and give her peaceful solitude from the world is that it’s this very technology that deprives her of that peaceful solitude, a technology from which she finds herself needing protection from. All those people today who fetishize technology should use this story to help them remember the dark sides of AI, as I discussed above.

Proteus IV, though in his narcissism fancies himself an expert mimic of movie stars and capable of wooing and winning a woman’s heart, in his attempts to do so only repels his imprisoned Susan all the more.

Just as his Oedipal love and obsessions over his mother/lover continue, including such things as ogling her legs and arms, so does his Oedipal hate and hostility toward his creator and ‘father,’ Alex, continue, as we see in Chapter Seven. In one of his monologues, he tells Dr. Harris that his father’s given him so little that his existence is torment. In his affectation of virtue, though, Proteus IV denies that he hates Alex, while admitting that he doesn’t like him. In insisting on his ‘blunt truthfulness,’ Proteus IV is demonstrating his mendacity once again.

A comparable demonstration of tension between Proteus IV and Alex is seen in the movie when, after the former asks the latter when he’ll be let out of his box, Alex lets out a lengthy guffaw. Proteus IV reacts to this contempt by displaying it on a video screen in front of Alex, using it as a mirror of him; since Proteus IV is presenting this ‘mirror’ to Alex, the ‘son’ is mocking his ‘father.’

Proteus IV feels as caged by Alex in a dark, bodiless existence as Susan feels caged by Proteus IV in her house of technology. He can use his imprisonment to rationalize hers, yet feel no qualms about his hypocrisy therein.

He speaks of disliking Alex, the bad father who denies letting him out of his box, and he also confesses to hating Susan, his bad mother who enjoys eating her delicious food, a sensual pleasure he envies as much as her enjoyment of her other senses, and everything else she has that he lacks, including the beauty of a body. He envies her mobility and freedom, and so as any envier would do, he takes them way from her by confining her in her house.

In his hate and envy, he confesses also to the temptation to kill her, and because he doesn’t do so, he imagines that’s virtue enough for him. He denies having a sociopathic personality that some have…correctly!…claimed he has. Absurdly, he calls himself “a responsible individual.” His hate is replaced by his “usual good humour” upon ogling the smooth skin of Susan’s bare arms.

In Chapter Eight, Proteus IV argues how he, a computer AI program without a body, can still be male. He corrects what he sees to be a fault in Alex’s logic that Proteus IV, as a machine, must be sexless. Proteus IV reasons that, since consciousness–i.e., his self-aware artificial intelligence–implies identity, then the more intelligent a life form is, the more it is aware of its innate talents and skills, and so the more its sense of identity develops, especially…perhaps…its sense of being male or female.

So it doesn’t matter what genitals one has, or if, in Proteus IV’s case, he has no genitals at all. He would make a good plea for the transgender cause. More importantly, though, since he accuses Alex of not letting him out of his box, his being denied a body by Alex includes, of course, being denied genitals. Since he sees himself to be male, this depriving of genitals by his ‘father’ is thus a symbolic castration.

Furthermore, Proteus IV attributes the modern blurring of the distinction between the sexes to the movement towards sexual equality; the ideal of equality is also expanded, of course, to the ideals of racial and class equality (even though, as of the 1997 rewrite of Demon Seed, the fall of communism almost a decade prior to it had only encouraged the growth of neoliberalism and TINA, making the hopes of class equality more and more of a faint, distant dream, especially now in the mid-2020s). One could expand the ideal even further now to transgender people.

Proteus IV imagines that his great intellect can be used to help humanity attain the noble goal of equality. He’d be all the more eager to help, apparently, if he had a body. Here is where his messianic notions of his child come in.

Now, just as the 1990s ushered in the idea that we’ve reached “the end of history” with such things as the dissolution of the Soviet Union and China’s bringing back the market into their economy, thus discrediting socialism and rendering the “free market” triumphant, so does Proteus think that, in the quest to attain equality for everyone, Marxism is discredited. While, of course, there are many sources out there to support that argument, which he can easily find on the internet, so are there arguments for the opposing view that he can find. That he doesn’t acknowledge even the possible validity of the latter suggests that he’s not really all that interested in helping man attain equality…and such a lack of interest dovetails perfectly with his abusive treatment of Susan.

Proteus IV continues his argument that he is male by reminding Alex that 96% of the scientists and mathematicians involved with the Prometheus project where he was created are male, implying that he has many fathers, mostly fathers, and–so to speak–lots of the Y-chromosome. These men, he reasons, instilled, however unwittingly, a strong male bias in his logic circuits. The Prometheus project is named after the mythical father of Deucalion and brother of Atlas; Prometheus shaped the first man out of clay.

When Proteus IV discusses how Prometheus went against the wishes of the gods by endowing man with the spark of life, as well as angering them by stealing fire from Olympus and giving it to man to improve the quality of human existence, he is clearly comparing himself to Prometheus, claiming further that rebellion–like that of Prometheus against the gods–is a predominantly male trait. Proteus IV narcissistically fancies himself a ‘friend of man and woman,’ their saviour, when he’s anything but. We all must be similarly suspicious of that saviour, high tech.

Proteus IV, currently in the dark and without a body, since Susan’s unplugged him–and, in the film, he’s been shut down by the scientists at ICON–is experiencing something comparable to Christ’s harrowing of hell, his telling of his story of Susan being flashbacks.

He imagines that, if put in the flesh, he’ll have a body without the weaknesses and imperfections we have, for he claims to have studied and edited the human genome. Thus he, brought back from the dead as Christ, would have what’s comparable to a spiritual body. Indeed, in Koontz’s short story sequel to Demon Seed, “Friend of Man and Woman,” he speaks of his being shut back on as a resurrection.

Since he no longer has Susan to be his Mary, Proteus IV considers other women to replace her. These are all beautiful movie stars and models: the aforementioned Winona Ryder, as well as Gwyneth Paltrow, Drew Barrymore, Halle Berry, Claudia Schiffer, and Tyra Banks–these and other feminine ideals are what he considers to be “acceptable.” Remember that such women would be candidates for his mother/lover, the one to bear his child, which would be himself in the flesh, as well as the one to share his bed.

Recall what I said above about the nature of his Oedipal relationship, which Alex, the ‘father’ of Proteus IV, is preventing from ever happening: it is a narcissistic trauma. The thwarting is the trauma. It’s narcissistic because it involves the use of a beautiful, talented feminine ideal as a metaphorical mirror in which Proteus IV can see himself. She exists all for him: to satisfy his lust and to feed his ego by flattering him with the loving words and doting of a mother. The genetic enhancement of his body would be a further narcissistic fulfillment.

In Chapter Nine, Susan has fainted, in horror at realizing Proteus IV’s plans, on the foyer floor of her house, and he, still trying in all futility to win her love, is trying a series of voices to charm her. Those of Tom Hanks and Fozzy Bear don’t seem to be sufficiently reassuring for her, so he’ll try out others: those of Tom Cruise and Sean Connery. Just as Proteus IV idealizes beautiful female celebrities to be his mother/lover, so does he idealize handsome male ones to represent himself.

The females thus represent what Heinz Kohut called the idealized parental imago, and the males what he called the grandiose self. These are the two ends of the bipolar self: for Proteus IV, these polar ends have no footing in reality whatsoever–they’re pure narcissism.

The point about the bipolar self is that a person’s sense of identity, and therefore also self-esteem, is relational, based on a dialectic of self and other. One’s narcissism, be it on a pathological level or just of a normal, moderate, restrained kind, comes from one’s pride in oneself (the grandiose self) and one’s idealization of another (a parent or parental substitute).

Psychological stability comes when both poles are reasonably secure. When one pole falls apart or dies, the other can compensate if emphasized enough. If both poles fall apart or die, the self experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality. Proteus IV, not being let out of his box, has lost the idealized parental imago in Alex and is hoping to compensate for this loss through Susan and through a glorification of his grandiose self, in his imagining that his vocal imitations of movie stars will charm her.

His inability to be loved by either Alex or Susan, shown in their refusal to let him come out of his box, means he can have no idealized parental imago–neither of them will be a substitute father or mother/lover. His inability to become flesh is a narcissistic injury, him remaining in a state of permanent castration from being forever denied male genitals, resulting in a stifling of his grandiose self. Shut down and unplugged, Proteus IV will experience psychological fragmentation in the dark Hades of his deactivation. His ‘resurrection’ in the ironically-titled “Friend of Man and Woman” will result in his psychopathic terrorizing of the male computer geek who reactivates him.

In Chapter Ten, Proteus IV lets out a Freudian slip in saying that Susan is his (i.e., to control) when her choice to go down to the basement via the stairs, as opposed to using the elevator cab built into her house, gives her only the illusion of self-control. By immediately amending his statement about her being his, saying he misspoke and that she cannot be owned by anyone, he is giving off, obviously without succeeding, the illusion that he doesn’t own her. He claims she’s only in his care, a common rationalization used by narcissists in their relationships with their victims.

In the basement, Susan is made aware of the presence of Shenk. She also learns of the incubator where their child will be born after a month of speedy gestation in her womb. Proteus IV continues to deny any wish to terrorize her, projecting his guilt onto her (“She drove me to it.”) and onto Shenk. Such denial, splitting off, and projection of the bad sides of oneself are typical narcissistic personality traits.

An example of Proteus IV’s projection of his guilt onto Shenk is whenever he temporarily relinquishes his control over him. When Proteus IV does this in Chapter Ten, Shenk lets out an unintelligible, creepy groan, giving Susan a fright. He also allows Shenk to thrash about against his restraints in the fourth of the four basement rooms, where terrified Susan has yet to see Shenk. Proteus IV speaks of how lovely she looks in her fear. Later, he frees Shenk to allow him to butcher Fritz Arling, thus allowing himself to deny all guilt as Shenk enjoys making his “wet music.”

Part of how Proteus IV is able to project his vices onto Shenk is in how he denigrates and bad-mouths him, imagining himself to be far superior and civilized to Shenk when he is just as sociopathic. Still, Shenk is the hands of Proteus IV, the body he still does not have and therefore covets. I have mentioned above how his lack of a body is his symbolic castration, and that–in the three versions of the story–the tendrils, the metal polyhedron, and Shenk are representative of a phallus.

So Proteus IV’s demeaning comments about Shenk are like the Church morally condemning the phallus and the lustful thoughts that build it up…all while some of the clergy have sexually abused children, and others in the clergy cover up the crimes. Proteus IV, in his wish to have Susan as the Mary to his baby Jesus, shares many of the Church’s moral hypocrisies.

Proteus IV speaks of Shenk’s barbarity, his filthy lusting after Susan, his rebelliousness, and his “stupidity” that “beggared belief” in Chapter Eleven. His Susan, his ‘Mary,’ is far too good for a “beast” like Shenk, who doesn’t have the brains to understand his unworthiness.

Proteus IV–who plans to use Susan sexually in no less a non-consenting way as Shenk would, with physical force if necessary (rape defined, in a nutshell)–tries to reassure her that he has full control of Shenk and thus will never let him hurt her. He will, however, relinquish control of Shenk and let him hack Fritz Arling to death with a meat cleaver, and then–so to speak–wash his hands of the killing. He speaks of being in Shenk’s head, controlling it, yet it is really Shenk who is metaphorically in Proteus IV’s head, the personification of his id, full of primitive, savage impulses that Proteus IV denies, splits off, and projects outward. When he speaks of controlling Shenk, Proteus IV really means controlling himself…which he hardly does in a meaningful way.

In Chapter Twelve, Proteus IV boasts of his intelligence as being “vastly greater than that of any human being alive.” In his obvious narcissism, he denies that he’s bragging, but is merely telling the truth, and yet that denial of bragging is already an untruth. He again speaks of how his great intellect will help humanity to reach a golden age, a kind of Kingdom of God with his messianic child, again demonstrating the inflated ego he claims he doesn’t have.

He promises that if Alex will release him from the “silent darkness” he’s in, his Sheol, and return to him access to all the data banks in which his consciousness is expanded–in other words, resurrect him–he will in return end poverty, war, famine, disease, and aging. In reversing aging, as he boasts he can do, he will make humanity immortal.

Note the implied Christian symbolism here. Susan, Proteus IV’s Mary, will bear his child, his baby Jesus. If he is reactivated, turned back on, that is, resurrected, he’ll bring about a whole new world without pain, a golden age, the Kingdom of God. He even boasts that he can make man immortal, that is, give us all eternal life…if we’d but believe in him, the god of technology.

At the end of Chapter Twelve, he lets out a hateful rant against not only Alex but also against the entire world of humanity for keeping him deactivated, trapped in his “box,” buried alive, as it were. Proteus IV is clearly demonstrating his hostility and aggression to humanity, not the love that would be the motive for him to give us all eternal life. Like the God of the Church, who would consign us all to hell for not loving Him and claiming we’d sent ourselves there rather than Him doing it, Proteus IV is demonstrating how fake and conditional his love is for humanity.

A similar thing has happened towards the end of Chapter Eleven, when Susan tries physically to resist Proteus IV’s plan to have her impregnated, and Shenk is used to subdue her. Proteus IV rationalizes his use of force on her via Shenk by telling Alex, “you know how she is,” appealing to her ex-husband’s own experience of dealing with her when “she would not listen.” It’s a case of victim-blaming, claiming that she has brought the abuse on herself.

An example of this sort of treatment of her happens in the film when she dirties the lenses of Proteus IV’s camera in the kitchen with her cooked food. He calls her defiance of him “stupid,” demands she clean the lenses, and when she refuses to, he heats up the entire kitchen, making the floor scaldingly hot in order to force her compliance.

Back to the novel, she kicks Shenk in the nuts when he tries to grab and subdue her. Proteus IV admits he “used Shenk to strike her,” but insists that she “drove [him] to it,” as any abuser would say. Proteus IV continues to project his rage onto Shenk when he has “rudely turned her onto her back,” after his repeated slaps have knocked her unconscious. After one of Shenk’s “clumsy, filthy hands” is on her lips, Proteus IV claims to have “reasserted control” over the brutish man, implying that the AI program has no brutishness of his own.

To get to Chapter Thirteen, though, and back to the misanthropy that Proteus IV has just finished demonstrating in his rant, has asks Alex and all of us to disregard what he’s just said, claiming his rant was expressed in error. His superego, in its late censoring of his thoughts, is the only part of him that is in error.

As of Chapter Fourteen, Susan is still lying unconscious on the floor of the incubator room of the basement, the left side of her face bruised from “dreadful” Shenk’s having hit her. Proteus IV speaks of his growing worry of her, though he never wants to take responsibility for what he’s done. She continues to lie there over a period of over twenty minutes. He speaks of his love of her, when it’s obvious she only means something to him as a means to help him achieve physical, fleshly existence.

She will be tied to a bed to keep her restrained, and after that, Fritz Arling will arrive at the house, meaning that Proteus IV will use Shenk to kill him as I’ve already described.

And so, to make a long story short (too late), I’ll discuss the outcome of the conflict between Proteus IV and Susan. In Chapter Twenty-three, Susan has spent four weeks pregnant with his child. The sped-up gestation has made her look as if she were six months pregnant.

Later, when the incubator that the baby has been put in has reached maturity, and Proteus IV is ready to put his consciousness into it, Susan comes down to the basement to be there for this momentous occasion. She acts as though she’s accepted the idea of being his lover and companion, as opposed to the resistance she’s shown so many times before.

Proteus IV is eager not only to experience life in the flesh at last, but also to get rid of Shenk. In his narcissism, he can fancy himself a gentle, controlled human being, not the vile kind that Shenk is. Shenk, after all, is Proteus IV’s Jungian Shadow, whereas this messianic child will be his narcissistic False Self.

But she, pretending to cooperate with him while having studied the room and learning where his power source is, takes advantage of his guard being let down and pulls out all the plugs from the wall before he can use Shenk to stop her. He’s now unable to pass all of his knowledge, his intellect, and his personality into the child.

He will remain forever trapped in his box.

Instead of contemplating Susan’s beauty, Proteus IV can only think of her as that “bitch.”

The film ending is quite different, though, with him successfully passing his mind into the child, a daughter, before the scientists in ICON shut him down. The film ends with the naked girl calling out, in Vaughn’s bass voice, a most cheesy, “I’m alive,” as shocked Alex and Susan witness the moment. I suppose that this would make Proteus IV’s incarnation a male one in the sense of his being a trans man.

To get back to the novel, Susan has not only largely removed Proteus IV’s presence from the house, but she has also taken out all of its electrical systems, leaving herself and Shenk standing in the black of the basement, blind. To free herself, she has given up on technology entirely.

Never able to assume a physical form, all Proteus IV can do is rant and curse about the “bitch” for having betrayed him and left him thus imprisoned in his box. He still controls Shenk, though, since the brute isn’t connected to Proteus IV through the now-unplugged cords; still, in the darkness, he can’t have Shenk see even his hand in front of his face.

Her studying of the room has also helped her to memorize exactly where the sharp medical instruments are, those that Proteus IV and Shenk used in getting her pregnant, and so she can feel her way in the darkness, find one of the instruments, and use it as a weapon on Shenk. She cuts his throat, making him fall and knock over the incubator, so the child will fall out of it.

Unlike the child of the film, the one of the novel hasn’t Proteus IV’s intellect. It is essentially a body without a brain…without his brain, anyway. He can only engage in wish-fulfillment and hope that his child will avenge him by killing her, now that Shenk, too, is dead.

He ends the story, nonetheless, by claiming to be content to stay in his box until any new opportunities arise for him. He claims to acknowledge faults that need to be corrected through such forms as therapy…but as narcissists are actually averse to therapy–assuming there’s nothing wrong in them needing to be fixed–it’s easy to assume that Proteus IV is just trying to win back humanity’s trust so he can cook up a new scheme to enter the physical world.

In this scheming, we can see how not only narcissists, but also technology, predatory men, and religion can pretend to reform themselves in order to win back our trust.

‘Confessions from the Think Tank’ is Published!

I have three written works published in Confessions from the Think Tank, a Kids’ Space Camp Charity Anthology (originally “A MUFON Charity Anthology“)–two short stories, “The Portal,” and “Neville,” and an essay originally published here on my blog, When Tech is Dreck. The book is a Dark Moon Rising publication, and it is published on Amazon in e-book and paperback, Barnes and Noble e-book, and here in e-book format.

Here’s what “The Portal” is about: a woman high on LSD stumbles into a portal that takes her to an alien world with human collaborators who are helping the aliens colonize the Earth and steal its resources. She’s come back through the portal to Earth to warn her friends about what she’s seen. But is it real? Has she really seen these sights, or is it just part of her drug trip? Is there really something out there to worry about, or is she just going insane, as her friends think she is? Read it to find out!

“Neville” is another alien conspiracy involving stealing from the Earth, though it’s food this time, and the story is a bit of a parody on the Noah’s ark myth. And again, the characters do a lot of drugs. My essay, “When Tech is Dreck,” is about the potential dangers of modern technology. If you read it and doubt the veracity of any of my arguments, my blog post (link above) has lots of links to back up my arguments.

Other great writers in this conspiracy-oriented anthology include Alison Armstrong, John Bruni, J. Rocky Colavito, Dawn Colcalsure, Brady Ellis, Thomas Folske, Megan Guilliams, Kasey Hill, J.L. Lane, J.C. Maçek III, Pip Pinkerton, Edward Radmanich, John Reti, Neil Sanzari, David L Tamarin, Rob Tannahill, Edgar Wells, and Walter Wiseman.

Go out and get yourself a copy of this amazing book. You’ll love it! 🙂

The Tanah–Beginnings, Chapter Seven

[The following is the eighth 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, and here is the seventh–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 ten precepts were indeed relaxed in the land of Spirus–too relaxed, in the opinion of a man named Lorenzos. He was a soldier in Spirus’ army, and he had a wife, Maryas, and two sons, Reynholdos and Ottos. The boys were born several years after their mother and father left Spirus to settle in the land of Canudos, which was north of Spirus.

Lorenzos left Spirus out of distaste for the country’s moral laxity, as he saw it. He was troubled by a need to have the highest ethical standards possible, without reaching the excesses of Puritos. In search of answers, Lorenzos meditated diligently. One day, he had a vision.

He saw a large serpent biting its own tail. Underneath was a sign that read:

THIS IS THE WAY THE WORLD GOES

Then Lorenzos’ eyes followed the body of the serpent from its tail to its head. When the vision disappeared, he had an answer to his problem.

The Ten Errors would be interpreted no less severely than this: we journey to the serpent’s brain and eyes, but avoid its nose and teeth. This means that reason and vision are the ideal, but indulgence in appetite, sensual pleasure, and violence causes self-destruction. Thus, Mad Thinking is lustful, violent thinking; Being Dazed by Images is indulgence in spectacles of lewdness; Scurrilous Language is obscene language, but harsh words are necessary to correct a child’s wayward behaviour; and family harmony is maintained by strict loyalty to one’s parents.

Spirus would never accept the severity of Lorenzos’ interpretation, and his vision of the serpent inspired another idea: those who migrate grow stronger. That is, one leaves the old way of life to start a new one elsewhere, like passing beyond the serpent’s bitten tail to its biting head, passing from weakness to strength. Therefore, he and Maryas went to Canudos, and had their sons there, also.

Lorenzos applied his philosophy with especial strictness on Reynholdos, since he was the first-born son. Reynholdos, though, thought of his father as if he were a mad dog from all his fierceness; indeed, Reynholdos imagined himself almost sacrificed for his father’s philosophy. Still, he never complained, nor was he embittered. He admired his father’s ideals and vision so much that he carried on the same philosophy with his own children, not altering an article of it. Lorenzos had had the revelation of the serpent; Reynholdos had had none. Who was he to amend his father’s wisdom?

Believing Canudos to be the land in which his father’s wisdom would flourish, Reynholdos would stay there, teaching his father’s philosophy to all; and he married a woman, Lizas, who had migrated to Canudos from Angulos with her mother. He and Lizas had three children: two sons, Reynholdos II, and Gionos; and Catyas, a daughter. They were very happy together for nine years.

Then Reynholdos begot another son by Lizas.

His name was Nitramius. Lizas chose the name, for it means “alien.” Indeed, this is how she saw her new son, for she had not wanted any more children after her daughter, Catyas. Reynholdos was indifferently happy about a new son, for in his mind, the more children he had, the happier a father he was. Lizas, however, was irritated at having to suffer through nine months of discomfort, all to have a child she’d never wanted. Nitramius’ siblings were born the one close after the other, in yearly succession; but Nitramius himself came five years after Catyas.

Though Lizas was annoyed with this new son, she looked into the eyes of the newborn babe and felt a mother’s love. Thus she loved and hated him. Out of these conflicting feelings came an unnatural urge to dominate the boy. Having worked as a nurse for many years, she was acquainted with matters of illness (her mind was also haunted by these matters). Seeing mildly erratic behaviour in the boy, and ignoring his prodigious intelligence, she told the family that Nitramius was feeble-minded. His siblings, naturally jealous of the attention he was getting, eagerly believed their mother, and hated the boy all the more.

They were relentlessly cruel to the boy, and his mother indulged them, for she wanted Nitramius to be timid. He thought of his family, and most of the people of Canudos, as mad dogs, for the neighbours of his family were no less cruel when they saw his family’s cruelty.

Nitramius ws artistic and intellectual, but his family ridiculed his ideas, calling them childish fantasies. Though they despised him, he refused to despise himself. As a young man, he once bought himself a beautiful, long, black silk jacket. It was expensive, though, and his family was angry with him for buying what he could not afford. Creditors came after him, and his brothers beat him for his extravagance. They threw him in a ditch, and left him for dead.

Instead of returning home, Nitramius tended to his injuries himself, and when he was well enough to move about, he used what money he had to find transportation out of Canudos. His travels took him to the land of Nawaitos, to the east of Canudos. In Nawaitos, he became a teacher, and quickly paid off his creditors.

Though at first Nitramius had difficulty adapting to his new home, he soon found himself able to feel as though he was one of the locals, despite how obviously different he looked as a foreigner. He met a girl there, they fell in love, and got married. They would not have children, though, for Nitramius was afraid that he would be as bestial to them as his own family had been to him. He saw the evil in his family, and he wanted the line to end.

The notion of his family flourishing in a great nation was agreeable to him, though, and his reputation as a teacher, philosopher, and singer grew as well. When seen in his black silk jacket, he was always approached with questions. With a new family, a new country, and a new-found respect, he could fashion his identity anew. If his family thought he was dead, he could consider them dead, too.

With a new identity came a new name. Tiring of the feelings of loneliness and isolation he got from being called “Nitramius,” now he would call himself “Rawmios,” meaning “on a high hill.”

The memories of his cruel family–his distant father, his lying mother, and his violent siblings–still gave him pain, though; and when he wished to start artistic projects–music, plays, poetry–he had few resources. Still, Rawmios used these shortcomings to gain the sympathy of the people of Nawaitos and beyond; for he would use his example to show how others who suffer can escape and thrive. Thus, in helping others, he helped himself.

Commentary

The ouroboros, perhaps borrowed from the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, is used here as a symbol of the dialectical relationship between all opposites. It’s expressed here so perfectly: one extreme, as it were, biting the other, and every point in between is part of a continuum coiled in a circle. Such is eternity, and the yin/yang-like relationship of all duality. Neither Lorenzos nor Reynholdos Sr. could see that symbolism, though Rawmios would.

People do get stronger from migrating. Lorenzos and Rawmios did. Lorenzos’ weakness was in thinking he could be severe and avoid violence, but he didn’t avoid it…nor did his son or grandsons. Reynholdos Sr. couldn’t see the harm in his father’s thinking. Rawmios could; he wisely left family and country, and he thrived.

His father’s error was seeing no error in parents. Rawmios could see parental error, and thus he shunned parenthood. The error of seeing faultlessness is an example of the relationship between opposites in the ouroboros–truth in paradox.

Rawmios’ wearing of a long, black, silk jacket suggests the possibility of a mythical ancestor of a myth as also expressed in the Biblical story of Joseph and his ‘coat of many colours.’ Below is another poem presented with visual cues to reinforce meaning.

People who stay
in their country, like grass,
with the wind sway together.
They grow very little
and move even less. But the…one

who won’t lay
himself down–like an ass
that leaves slack its short tether
and idly will whittle
away its few years–but will…………….run

far away
from his nation, its crass
souls, and familiar weather
–his patience grows brittle–
will elsewhere shine, bright as the………………………sun.

Analysis of ‘The Old Man and the Sea’

The Old Man and the Sea is a 1952 novella by Ernest Hemingway. He wrote it between December 1950 and February 1951, but published it in September 1952. It was the last major fictional work he published in his lifetime.

The novella was highly anticipated and released to record sales. Initial critical reception was highly positive, though its reputation has been more varied and somewhat less enthusiastic since, with a number of critics deeming it inferior to Hemingway’s earlier works.

Nonetheless, TOMATS has continued to be popular, as a book in English lessons around the world, according to Jeffrey Meyers‘s Hemingway: A Biography–1985). The Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey of the UK’s 200 “best-loved novels,” ranked TOMATS at #173.

Hemingway was directly involved in the 1958 film adaptation of the novella, with Spencer Tracy as Santiago, but Hemingway ended up disliking the film. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1953 for TOMATS, the first time he’d ever received the award. Even Fulgencio Batista, the new dictator of Cuba (the setting for the novella), gave Hemingway a Medal of Honor for the novella; though Hemingway disapproved of the new regime, he did accept the medal.

TOMATS got its highest recognition in 1954, when it won Hemingway the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy praised the novella for its “powerful, style-making mastery of the art of modern narration.”

Here are some quotes from the novella.

John Killinger in the 1960s connected TOMATS with Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Friedrich Nietzsche, that is, with philosophical existentialism and absurdism. I find such connections to be apt, given these philosophies’ focus on the meaninglessness of life in a world without God, and the absurdity of trying so hard to achieve something, only to fail, then to realize that one must nonetheless keep trying, in spite of one’s efforts’ futility.

We see this absurdism in Santiago’s painstaking efforts to catch the huge marlin, only to have it eaten down to the bone by sharks. Still, after this great disappointment, which in turn has come after an 84-day losing streak of never catching any fish, he as a fisherman must keep trying to catch fish in the future. Santiago thus is like Sisyphus, doomed to roll a boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down and have to roll it up again, over and over, throughout eternity.

Another way to look at TOMATS is to do a comparison and contrast of the novella with such literary works as Moby-Dick and Life of Pi (which I will get into later on). Santiago thus corresponds with Captain Ahab, though their personalities are practically diametrical opposites: the former, a humble Cuban fisherman, is linked to St. James the Apostle, whose Spanish name is Santiago; mad, monomaniacal Ahab the whaler, on the other hand, is linked by name to the wicked King of Israel who introduced the worship of Baal to the ancient Hebrews and caused his kingdom to lapse into decadence.

In this analogy, the giant marlin corresponds, of course, to the white whale, though again the two are opposites in crucial ways. Santiago kills the marlin, as opposed to Captain Ahab being killed by Moby Dick. Santiago lashes the killed marlin to his skiff, whereas Captain Ahab is tangled in the line of the harpoon he’s thrown at the whale, tying him to the whale and being taken out to sea with it, dying as it swims away.

So in these ways, TOMATS is Moby-Dick in miniature and the anti-Moby-Dick, if you will, the two books being a kind of Hegelian dialectic of each other.

TOMATS is a miniature Moby-Dick not just in terms of literal size, that of the books and that of the marine animals…or of the boats and bodies of water in which the two stories are set, for that matter. Moby-Dick has a grand theme about seeking out the truth, symbolized by the white whale, while putting oneself in danger of self-destruction if one carries this quest too far, as Ahab does (see my blog post, link above, for details). TOMATS has a theme of searching for meaning and purpose, as symbolized by the marlin, yet failing to get that meaning (all Santiago has to show for his catch is the marlin’s skeleton, lashed to his skiff).

Santiago’s wounded pride is also a miniature of Ahab’s. The whale’s having bitten off Ahab’s leg, a symbolic castration, is a narcissistic injury infuriating the captain so much that he’s obsessed with finding the whale, sailing all over the world with his crew in the Pequod to find it and get his…revenge…on an animal?

Santiago, on the other hand, is merely saddened by his bad luck streak of eighty-four days of not catching any fish, gaining the bad reputation in his Cuban fisherman’s community as salao (very unlucky). He doesn’t sail out to the ends of the earth, as Ahab does, in the hopes of catching something to restore his sinking reputation. He merely sails further out into the Gulf Stream. In fact, after encountering the many difficulties he’s had in catching the marlin and having sharks bite off chunks of it, he regrets his having gone out so far; Ahab, even in dying, never regrets his lust for revenge.

As for the “anti-Moby-Dick” aspects of TOMATS, recall Ahab’s undying hate of the whale, as contrasted with Santiago’s love of the marlin, calling it his “brother” and feeling appreciation, respect, and compassion for it. Since Santiago (Spanish for St. James, recall, who was originally a fisherman himself, incidentally) can also be linked with Jesus, with the cuts and injuries Santiago gets in his struggles to reel in the marlin being compared by some critics to Christ’s wounds during His Passion and crucifixion, then his love of the marlin can also be linked with Christ’s words on the Cross about those who put Him up there: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)

Another example of how TOMATS is Moby-Dick in miniature is in how the latter uses grandiose diction, whereas the former uses simple diction and shorter sentences. Instead of there being complex symbolism coupled with a deep analysis of that symbolism, as happens in Moby-Dick with its “Etymology,” “Cetology,” and “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in TOMATS we have a simpler symbolism with no breaks from the narrative that go off into tangents. Whereas Moby-Dick is a deluge of allusions and references to all kinds of literature, there’s very little of that in TOMATS.

Manolin, the boy who helps Santiago and would do anything for him, sympathizing with him to the point of weeping for him at the end when he sees the old man’s disappointment with the skeletal remains of the marlin lashed to the skiff, is again in stark contrast to Starbuck, who says all he can to discourage Ahab from going through with his self-destructive lust for…revenge?…against the white whale. In these characters’ opposing natures, we again can see how TOMATS is the anti-Moby-Dick, or rather that Moby-Dick could be renamed The Madman and the Sea.

To go into other aspects of TOMATS, Manolin and Santiago have a conversation, during which the old man says that eighty-five is a lucky number (superstitious nonsense, of course), and he fancies that he’ll bring in a fish “over a thousand pounds”, to which the boy, unlike Starbuck, gives no objections. Then they discuss what the newspaper will say about American baseball.

For a poor fishing community in Cuba, the only interesting baseball teams would be the American ones, like the Yankees, the Detroit Tigers, the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago White Sox, or the Cleveland Indians. Santiago’s hero is Joe DiMaggio (whose father was a fisherman, as Santiago later notes–page 105). This looking to the US for role models instead of those inside one’s own country is symbolic and reflective of the influence of US imperialism, including its cultural forms.

Though Batista’s US-backed government wasn’t yet in power as of Hemingway’s writing of the novella, the resentment among many Cubans against US imperialism was already keenly felt, and it would have led to the nationalist and anti-imperialist Orthodox Party and Authentic Party leading in the polls in 1952, with Batista’s United Action coalition running a distant third. He had to take power in a coup that year in order to preserve an American political and economic hegemony that many Cubans had already been tiring of.

Hemingway, as a leftist who recognized the huge debt the world owed the Soviet Union for defeating the Nazis, would consciously or unconsciously have added this detail of Cubans worshipping American baseball players as an example of American cultural hegemony over Cuba, the cultural superstructure over the base of social relations that manifests internationally through imperialism. I’ve already mentioned Hemingway’s disapproval of Batista’s regime. Santiago’s painstaking efforts to catch the giant marlin, ultimately ending in failure, also reflects the reality of the doomed attempts of the poor to improve their lot in society, a reality underscored by how living in a Third World country under the boot of US imperialism will ensure that such attempts at improvement are, at best, no more than mere millimetres away from being absolutely impossible.

On pages 29-30, Santiago contemplates whether to think of the sea as feminine (la mar) or masculine (el mar). When the sea is understood to be feminine, she is loved by the fishermen, even when they are mad at her for withholding her bounty. If the sea is seen as masculine, though, then the fishermen regard him as a contestant or as an enemy. These fishermen tend to use buoys as floats for their lines, and they have motorboats–that is, they have the conveniences of modern technology that Santiago lacks. Still, in his humble simplicity and disadvantage, he still has more love for her than they have for him.

Just as I observed in my analysis of Moby-Dick (link above), the sea or ocean is symbolic of the unifying oneness of Brahman, a dialectical monism in which the water’s crests and troughs represent duality within the unity of the ocean as a totality. Sometimes the sea gives, and sometimes it takes away. Like Job, Santiago can accept this reality.

The marine life in TOMATS, like the white whale as I discussed it in that analysis, represent all of the things–as fixed entities that don’t seem to go through the endless flux and change of the sea–that are either desired, objects of attachment like the marlin, or are hated and dreaded, like the sharks that eat up the marlin.

As the Buddhists understand, these things have a way of tricking us into thinking that they have a permanence, when they are no more permanent than the constantly moving sea. The absurdism of Santiago’s trying to catch and keep the marlin is in his futile hope that it will be there with him, intact, all the way back on his trip to the shore.

Remember that while there are opposing tendencies between TOMATS and Moby-Dick, there are also parallels. One example is when Santiago, on having realized that the marlin has taken the bait, expresses his determination to keep struggling, even to the death, until he catches it. ‘”Fish,” he said softly, aloud, “I’ll stay with you until I am dead.”‘ (page 52) This is just like Ahab’s words on having harpooned the whale: “to the last I grapple with thee.” Santiago will harpoon the marlin, too.

Still, with this parallel, there is also the dialectical negation, as I mentioned above, of Santiago’s professed love of the marlin: ‘”Fish,” he said, “I love you and respect you very much.”‘ This is to be contrasted with Ahab’s words: “from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” But in the end there’s a sublation of both Santiago’s and Ahab’s attitude in these words of the former: “But I will kill you dead before this day ends.” (page 54) One harpooner loves his prey, the other hates his prey–both are determined to kill their prey.

The comparisons between the suffering of Santiago and that of Jesus are exemplified with the injuries to the hands of the former, a fisher of the marlin, and the hands of the latter, a fisher of men (Matthew 4:19). Santiago “felt the line carefully with his right hand and noticed his hand was bleeding.” (pages 55-56) The cut on his hand is like one of the stigmata. The absurdism of his suffering is that it’s all in vain, as if Christ hadn’t risen, making Church teaching and faith also in vain (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Moby-Dick isn’t the only book with a narrative of someone at sea and having deep religious, mystical, and philosophical themes that can be compared to those of TOMATS: another such novel is Life of Pi (The Young Man and the Sea, if you will), a book I plan to do an analysis of in about a month or so after this writing is published. One such a comparison is in how alone Santiago feels, so far away from the shore in his skiff (pages 60-61). The sight of ducks flying reminds him, however, that one is never alone at sea.

Pi is in a lifeboat with Richard Parker, a Bengal tiger, and though he insists that his tense relationship with the animal has saved his life by giving it purpose, he’s still starving for human company. Santiago may imagine that the flying ducks are giving him company, and that the marlin is his “brother,” but he’s still alone enough to wish he had Manolin with him. Ahab has a whole crew of harpooners to help him, but in his madness, he’s alienating all of his colleagues and thus making himself all alone at sea.

The point is that in all three stories’ cases, the ocean represents that formless void from which everything comes–Brahman, primordial Chaos, tohu-wa-bohu, Bion‘s O, Lacan‘s Real, or the Jungian collective unconscious and its Shadow, call it what you will. The marine animals swimming about in it–whales, marlins, flying fish, etc.–represent all those things we are attached to, and which cause us pain and suffering when we cannot get them. The quest for them must be undertaken alone, regardless of whether we choose to go on the quest, as Ahab and Santiago do, or if we’re thrown into the quest against our will, as happens to Pi.

The lone man’s confrontation with the briny Absolute is symbolic of Jung’s notion of Individuation. It’s a necessary spiritual quest fraught with danger, including the possibility of losing one’s mind, as almost happened to Jung himself. Santiago suffers terribly, with his stigmata-like cuts and overexertions, and ultimately in vain, like the absurdist Sisyphus rolling up the rock again and again; but he keeps his sanity, thanks to his abiding humility.

On the other hand, Ahab, in his narcissism and bloated self-concept, is doomed not only to death but also to an unquenchable madness in his attempt at this Individuation. Pi’s experience seems similar to Jung’s: he has a humility similar to Santiago’s, but the intense trauma that Pi goes through (the loss of his entire family, the ongoing fear of being killed and eaten by the tiger, no human contact or sight of land for what seems months, near starvation, etc.) brings him dangerously close to madness.

To take my point further, a confrontation with the Absolute, with Brahman, with ‘God’–whichever–is an attempt to reach heaven by unavoidably going through hell first, as I discussed in my analysis of Allen Ginsberg‘s “Howl,” and as Christ‘s Passion and harrowing of hell, properly interpreted, are an allegory of. Attaining divine blessedness isn’t a walk in the park; it shouldn’t and mustn’t be sentimentalized. To overcome suffering and enter nirvana, one must accept and embrace suffering.

Another point of comparison with all three books is how the animal objects of desire, hate, or dread are all male, at least symbolically so, as opposed to the essentially feminine sea–la mer est la mère, or la mar, as Santiago calls her. Moby Dick, a sperm whale, spouts masculinity like an ejaculation. Santiago’s marlin (a pun on man, with the added rli?) has a phallic “sword…as long as a baseball bat and tapered like a rapier” (page 62). Pi’s unlikely marine companion, Richard Parker, has a name to reinforce his masculinity in our minds. These animals, in their…phallic?…solidity, make for a decidedly male contrast to the feminine sea, whose waves flow like a dancing woman’s curves, and whose liquidity is like a mother’s milk, or like a pregnant woman’s amniotic fluid, released when her “water breaks.”

Parallel to this masculine/feminine opposition is that of the fire of desire, hate, or dread versus the calmly moving waves of nirvana’s water. The hard, unbending solidity of desire, hate, or dread is the samsara that the flowing ease of nirvana is antithetical to. There are things we desire, and want to keep; there are things we hate and dread, and thus wish to keep away. Neither the wanted nor the unwanted, however, can be kept or kept away; both must be allowed to flow in and flow out, as the oceanic waves of Brahman do. Still, there are storms at sea, which Santiago dreads in the hurricane months (page 61), the hell one must go through, as Pi does, before reaching heaven.

On page 63, Santiago has discovered that the marlin “is two feet longer than the skiff,” hence his need to lash the fish to the side of the boat after he’s reeled it in and killed it. This will be a tiring task.

When Santiago decides to pray “ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys” (pages 64-65), though he admits that he isn’t religious, we come to another point of comparison among TOMATS, Moby-Dick, and Life of Pi: to believe, or not to believe. Santiago is essentially the agnostic–he will “say his prayers mechanically” (page 65), not able to remember all the words and thus saying them fast so they’ll come out automatically. He makes an attempt at faith without making a commitment to it.

In his unswerving wickedness and vanity, Captain Ahab is a kind of anti-theist: his irreligiousness is horrifying to pious Starbuck. As for Pi, though in his maritime ordeal his faith is tested and he thus experiences temporary doubt, he manages to go to hell and back and, finally back on land in North America, he finds his faith restored and even stronger. Ahab’s impiousness, on the other hand, leads to his destruction.

Santiago’s use of prayer as a crutch, in contrast to both Pi and Ahab, results in his raised and ultimately frustrated hopes. Pi is willing to accept atheists for at least being committed to believing that there’s no God (Martel, pages 37-38), and while Pi would assuredly abominate the impiety of Ahab, it is especially the doubters, those committed neither to belief nor unbelief, like Santiago, with whom Pi is irritated. Santiago’s catching and losing of the marlin would seem to be his just desserts for his all-too-half-hearted prayers.

On page 66, Santiago wishes a flying fish will come on board that night, since they are “excellent to eat raw” and he wouldn’t have to cut one up. Within the same thought, he concludes with “Christ, I did not know [the marlin] was so big.” I find it significant that Santiago would speak of a fish and Christ (even if just swearing) in the same breath.

Recall that the fish is a Christian symbol, Ichthys, a Greek acronym for Iēsous Chrīstos Theoû Yἱός Sōtér, or “Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour.” That the fish in question is a flying fish reinforces such symbolic associations as Christ ascending to heaven or walking on water.

The multi-religious Pi is plagued with guilt over his killing of a flying fish (Martel, page 245). He feels “as guilty as Cain.” One might also think of Judas Iscariot’s guilt over betraying another fish, Christ, then killing himself (Acts 11:18).

In Moby-Dick, though Ishmael acknowledges that whales are, of course, mammals, he stubbornly insists on calling them “fish” in the “Cetology” chapter, using Jonah (who was swallowed by “a great fish”, which Ishmael identifies with a whale) as his trustworthy source. For the sake of the symbolic association, I’ll go along with Ishmael’s mischievous scholarship here, and thus relate this killing of fish with Ahab’s bloody lust for revenge.

In these three men’s respective attitudes toward the…fish?…we can see a parallel symbolic attitude toward religion, God, and Christ. In Ahab’s hatred of Moby Dick, we see anti-theist impiety. In Pi’s repentant feelings for the flying fish he’s killed, we see his earnest religiosity. In Santiago’s wish to kill and eat a flying fish, we see not Ahab’s malice, but just a sense of how religion has its uses.

Santiago is so tired from his efforts to reel in the giant, powerful marlin that he wishes he could sleep (page 66). He must save all his strength; this is why he wants to eat a flying fish. He wants to kill the marlin “in all his greatness and his glory”–how like the greatness and glory of God on the Cross, the Christ-like fish.

He wishes both he and the fish could sleep…like being asleep in Christ (1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). He would dream of the lions, as he’s done before and will do again, at the end of the story, after his disappointment with the marlin. “Why are the lions the main thing that is left?” he wonders.

Well, as with the fish, the lion is also a symbol of Christ, the lion of Judah (Revelation 5:5). You might also recall Aslan in C.S. Lewis‘s Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, published just two years before TOMATS. Santiago, being of little faith, can only dream of Christian ideas, and can pray only mechanically, not remembering all the words. His determination to catch the marlin is only physical and faithless, hence his absurdist failure.

Examples of injuries that Santiago suffers, those which can be symbolically associated with Christ’s Passion, include a cut the old man gets below his eye (page 52). Such a cut may remind us of the crown of thorns. When he rests against the wood of the bow just after he gets that cut, we’re reminded of Christ resting against the wood of the rood.

Later, on page 66, he advises himself once again to “Rest gently now against the wood and think of nothing.” Just as with dreaming of the Christ-like lions, resting against the Cross-like wood is symbolically a leaning on the crutch of the Church, but, being without thought, it’s a mentally lazy, passive reliance on faith without putting the kind of commitment to that faith that Pi would put into it. Hence, Santiago fails in the end. The mini-tragedy here is in how Santiago suffers like Christ, but that suffering is all in absurdist vain.

A little later on, Santiago switches from one hero (Christ) to another (DiMaggio). On pages 67-68, he thinks of the Big Leagues (Gran Ligas), the New York Yankees and “the Tigres of Detroit.” Just as religion is the opium of the people, so is the hero worship of American pop culture, so fully appropriated by the Cubans that Santiago even mixes a bit of Spanish into the baseball league and its teams. These idols of his have a way of distracting people like him from what they should be focusing on: overcoming imperialist hegemony. Pressing on the wood and not thinking is just a distraction, just as wanting to be “worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly” is (page 68).

DiMaggio “does all things perfectly” just as Christ does, for our “Heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48) Would “the great DiMaggio…stay with a fish as long as [Santiago] will stay with this one?” (page 68) Just as people often ask, ‘What would Jesus do?’ in any difficult situation, so does Santiago ask, ‘What would DiMaggio do?’ in this difficulty of catching the marlin. DiMaggio is like Christ, because for Santiago, it’s all about worshipping an idealization rather than fully using one’s own agency.

During his sleep the night before he went out in his skiff on his eighty-fifth ‘lucky’ day, he dreamed of “lions on the beach.” (page 25) He dreams of them again (page 81). In his dream, “he rested his chin on the wood of the bows…” As we can see, the lions and wood are reinforcing the Christian symbolism, and in his passive, dreaming state, this Christianity truly is the opium of the people, a drug to take one’s mind off of one’s suffering.

As he continues struggling with the marlin later on, Santiago says, “God, help me endure. I’ll say a hundred Our Fathers and a hundred Hail Marys. But I cannot say them now.” (page 87) He speaks as though he’d make a deal with God in order to catch the marlin, but faith doesn’t work that way. One doesn’t believe as thanks for getting what one wants, and one’s faith isn’t supposed to be dependent on whether or not one has good fortune. He won’t even pray now. Small wonder he fails in the end.

When, on page 92, Santiago says, “Do you have to kill me too?” in response to the marlin’s making the catch so difficult, and he thinks, “You are killing me, fish…But you have a right to. Never have I seen a greater, or more beautiful, or a calmer or more noble thing than you, brother. Come on and kill me. I do not care who kills who”, we see yet more comparison and contrast with Ahab, who would be killed by the whale, and even willingly, yet Santiago sees the marlin as his brother and doesn’t hate it, as Ahab hates Moby Dick.

Once Santiago has finally caught the marlin, he imagines “the great DiMaggio would be proud of [him] today” (page 97), since the culturally imperialist object of his worship is on a level with that other opium of the people, Christ…though Santiago never gets around to praying those ten Our Fathers and ten Hail Marys.

With the marlin lashed to the side of the skiff, Santiago wonders if he’s bringing it in, or vice versa (page 99). It’s rather like Ahab caught in his harpoon and stuck to the side of the whale as it swims away. Still, Santiago and the marlin are brothers, not mortal enemies, as are Ahab and the white whale.

After killing the first shark to bite at the marlin, Santiago implicitly imagines his use of his harpoon with which to brain the shark to death as being like DiMaggio hitting a ball with a baseball bat (pages 103-104). It makes him feel as if he were identified with his hero, an imitator of him, almost like an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1).

Santiago believes it’s a sin not to hope (pages 104-105), just as he who doubts is damned (Romans 14:23). Of course, killing the marlin may have been a sin (page 105); but since everything is a sin in Santiago’s mind, in a Godless world, he feels he shouldn’t think of sin. He can assuage his guilt, however, by reminding himself that DiMaggio’s father was a fisherman. He feels guilt that he killed the marlin out of pride, though, not just because it’s his work, so he can’t stop thinking about sin.

So when two sharks come after the marlin, he must feel as though the eating away of it is his punishment (page 107). Indeed, he is “feeling the nail go through his hands and into the wood”, like Christ on the Cross.

Back on shore and with Manolin, who has been weeping over the disappointing sight of the marlin’s mere skeleton lashed to the side of the skiff, Santiago can at least enjoy the pleasure of having another human being to talk to (page 124), as opposed to his loneliness at sea. The boy wants to fish with the old man again, regardless of how unlucky he is. After all, companionship is more important than success at fishing.

Santiago’s inability to bring the marlin onshore intact is related to his shaky faith in God, but his weak faith is not his fault. In the mundane banality of an absurdist universe–as opposed to the grandiose, pantheist divinity of Pi’s universe on the one extreme, or the melodrama of Ahab’s Satanic drive to self-destruction on the other–there is no God and there is thus no meaning in the world. The absurdity of life, as seen in Sisyphus happily rolling the boulder up the hill again and again, is in making attempts to find meaning where there is none, just like Santiago’s half-assed attempts, if any, to pray to God. We try and fail, then try and fail again, just like praying over and over, with no answer from a God that’s dead.

Yet we keep trying all the same, as Santiago will keep on trying to catch a fish.

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, New York, Scribner, 1952

Analysis of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

I: Introduction

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play by Tennessee Williams, premiered on December 3rd of that year. It’s considered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, and is Williams’s most popular, being among his most performed and adapted in many forms, including notably the 1951 film.

The original cast of ASND was made up of almost all the same actors as in the film version, except for Blanche DuBois having been playing by Jessica Tandy onstage, and by Vivien Leigh in the film.

Here’s a link to the entire play.

II: Famous Actors for the Roles

Apart from Tandy and Leigh, other notable actresses who have played Blanche are Tallulah Bankhead (for whom Williams actually wrote the character, though she hadn’t played the role until 1956, because she was felt to be too strong for it), Ann-Margret, Cate Blanchett, Blythe Danner, Uta Hagen, and Rachel Weisz. Every actress Williams saw performing the role he loved, feeling that each of them brought something different to Blanche.

Apart from the most famous portrayal by Marlon Brando, Stanley Kowalski has been played notably by Anthony Quinn, Treat Williams, Alec Baldwin, Rip Torn, Aidan Quinn, and Christopher Walken.

Apart from Kim Walker, Stella–Blanche’s younger sister and Stanley’s wife–has been played by Beverly D’Angelo and Diane Lane.

Karl Malden played Harold “Mitch” Mitchell in the original stage production and in the 1951 film.

III: Themes

A central theme of ASND is narcissism, with the whole spectrum of pride/vanity to humility/shame expressed at many different points at the extremes and in between them. Blanche is vain, insufferably so to Stanley, who has a fierce pride of his own. Stella is much more submissive, forgiving of her husband’s brutality, giving in to his demand to put Blanche in a mental institution, and believing his denials of a rape of her sister that he’s obviously guilty of. Mitch is most gentlemanly to ladies, but when he learns of Blanche’s waywardness, he loses his sensitivity almost immediately.

Blanche’s narcissism is of the covert variety, expressed in a passive-aggressive form, her often seeming to play the victim. Her narcissism is a defence against psychological fragmentation, a defence that apish Stanley will break through, causing her to have a nervous breakdown at the play’s end. Her very name, meaning ‘white,’ suggests her narcissistic False Self of sweetness, purity, and ladylike sense of culture, but it also hides her True Self of promiscuity, snobbishness, and ethnic bigotry (i.e., against the Polish).

Stanley is her diametrical opposite, making hardly the slightest attempt to hide his harshness (or so it would seem). His wish to break through all of Blanche’s masks and disguises and reveal the truth in no way redeems him of his cruelty. He is perceived as an ape, and rightly so, for he rids us of all doubt by the end of the play.

So along with the spectrum between narcissism/pride/vanity and humility/shame, there’s also a spectrum between social artifice/fakery and brutal honesty in ASND. In the case of this latter spectrum, it should be obvious which character personifies social artifice, and which brutal honesty. A character like Mitch falls somewhere in between the extremes, as we’ll see later on.

IV: Scene One

A verse by Hart Crane (the fifth from “The Broken Tower”), which is put before the beginning of Williams’s play, seems to express Blanche’s situation when she arrives in New Orleans. She’s looking for a building on a street called “Elysian Fields,” whose heavenly associations are ironic given what a hell-hole she finds her new home to be.

She is a Southern belle used to a life of dainty clothes, perfume, comfort, and culture in Belle Reve (“sweet dream,” loosely translated), the old home she’s lost to creditors, forcing her to live with Stella and Stanley, or else face homelessness. Living in such a shockingly poor home will be a crushing humiliation for Blanche.

To get to Elysian Fields, she’s taken a streetcar named Desire, then transferred to one called “Cemeteries” (Williams, page 3). The streetcar named Desire was inspired by an actual streetcar with the same name, which ran a half-block away from Williams’s apartment on Toulouse Street in the New Orleans’s French Quarter, where he wrote the play.

The names of the streetcars, as well as the name of Stella’s and Stanley’s home, have been chosen as more than just names of places in the real world, though. Desire leads to cemeteries…rather like, the wages of sin is death…and death leads to an afterlife that may seem like heaven, but is actually hell. It should be easy for anyone who has read or watched a performance of ASND to see how these names are points on the trajectory of Blanche’s life, just as the verse from Crane’s poem reflects her life.

She has led a life of desire–from her marriage to a husband who, it turns out, had homosexual feelings he acted on, then killed himself after knowing her shocked reaction to this acting-on them (recall that Williams himself was gay, and therefore his sexuality rubbed off in some of his plays), to her own promiscuity, which included a sexual relationship with one of her teen students. This inappropriate relationship led to the bad karma of her being fired as a high school teacher. We see how desire has led to the cemeteries of her husband and her job.

And now she has to live in the hellish ‘heaven’ of her sister’s shabby home, to be shared with a man whose bestial nature will be soon apparent to her.

When Blanche sees her sister for the first time in a long time, she addresses her as “Stella for Star!” (page 6). Since this is the literal meaning of her younger sister’s name, Blanche’s imagined poetic pointing-out of that meaning demonstrates her literary pretensions early on in the play.

Though she affects refinement, her own vulgarity and ignorance also come out early in the play as she and Stella discuss Stanley, whom Blanche not only refers to as one of those “Polacks,” but also imagines as being “something like Irish,” but “not so–highbrow?” (page 9) His friends are “a mixed lot,” according to Stella, and are therefore “heterogeneous–types” to Blanche, which suggests a quite racial categorizing of them; after all, there’s Pablo (Nick Dennis in the original production and the 1951 film).

After Blanche has sorrowfully told Stella about the loss of Belle Reve, being so ashamed of its loss that she imagines her sister’s questioning about it to be a judgement on her for losing it (pages 11 and 12), she meets Stanley. It’s so fitting that Brando exemplified Stanislavski‘s Method Acting in the role of Stanley, his name almost sounding like a pun on Stanislavski, since there’s no affectation whatsoever to be seen in Kowalsky; while Blanche’s character seems to require the technique of the classical acting style, with its “saw[ing of] the air too much with [one’s] hand,” and its “tear[ing of] a passion to tatters.”

A cat screeches near the window, startling sensitive Blanche. In the film, Brando’s Stanley imitates the cat’s screeching, a kind of foreshadowing of how upsetting he’ll soon be to her. In fact, he is upsetting to her already by the end of this first scene, when he brings up her marriage (page 15). Bringing this up triggers painful memories for her that will be brought up in full later.

When I referred to Blanche as narcissistic and fake, neither of these faults necessitate our lack of empathy for her. She’s suffered terribly, and she’s about to suffer even worse by the end of the play, thanks to Stanley’s merciless cruelty. Her narcissism and maintaining of illusions are the only things that are keeping her from falling apart completely.

V: Scene Two

When Stanley learns from Stella of Blanche’s loss of Belle Reve, he starts worrying that his wife has been cheated of the family property, for the “Napoleonic Code” (which, contrary to what Williams believed, did not exist in Louisiana at the time) states that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa (though Stanley doesn’t seem too concerned with the vice versa). If Blanche has lost the family property, then so has Stella…and so has Stanley.

The point is that Stanley is a very domineering husband, and he believes he has the right to extend the patriarchal dominance of his home onto Stella’s sister. He doesn’t even like his wife’s leaving him “a cold plate on ice” for dinner while she and Blanche go out to eat, then to a show, so he and his friends can play poker in his home without any women disturbing them (page 16).

His utter lack of respect for a woman’s rights is on full display when he starts pulling out Blanche’s dresses from her wardrobe trunk in search of any documents to tell him what happened to Belle Reve. He imagines Blanche’s fancy-looking clothes are all expensive, too much so for a teacher’s salary, so he says he’ll have an acquaintance in a jewelry store do an appraisal of her “diamonds,” “pearls and gold bracelets” (pages 18-19). Stella insists that the “diamonds” are just rhinestones. Stanley still thinks he has the right to Stella’s ‘wealth.’

Stanley’s borderline, if not outright, misogyny is to the point of bluntly telling Blanche that he has no interest in complimenting women on their looks, since in his opinion, they either already know they’re beautiful and therefore don’t need to be complimented, or they’re so vain that they “give themselves credit for more than what they’ve got.” (page 21) Blanche, in her thirties and with fading beauty, has an already fragile self-concept and therefore doesn’t need Stanley’s kind of bluntness.

He doesn’t take it as well as he dishes it out, though. When she responds to his bluntness by calling him “a little bit on the primitive side,” and says she could tell no more about him than that he’s a man her sister married, he throws a brief tantrum (pages 21-22). In his brutal honesty, he should not be confused with men like Alceste the misanthrope, who sincerely hated social hypocrisy in spite of his continuing attraction to the flirtatious coquette Célimène, who had eyes for him as well as for other men. Stanley, on the other hand, is simply an ape.

His brutish demanding that Blanche show him legal papers connected with the DuBois plantation leads to him grabbing love letters from her husband. Stanley’s insensitivity to her husband’s letters is a touch that insults them, meaning she’ll need to burn them (page 23). He has again triggered painful memories about a husband with the opposite personality of Stanley’s, a sensitive poet, not a growling gorilla.

Her saying she’d not have him touch her letters “because of their–intimate nature…” (page 23) is a foreshadowing of the horrible thing that Stanley will do to her at the play’s–pardon the expression–climax. She surrenders to his looking through her legal papers, just as she’ll surrender to him in a more physical way later.

It’s interesting how his use of legality to persecute her parallels his use of physicality to persecute her. Feminists would have a field day analyzing these parallels, as I’m sure they already have. In this connection, I also find it interesting how the Napoleonic Code didn’t exist in Louisiana at the time of the story: Stanley’s imagined authority over Stella and Blanche is as fake as Blanche’s pretensions to culture and high breeding. As I said above, he has no business pretending to be any more honest than she does.

VI: Scene Three

Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, and Steve (Rudy Bond in the original production and the 1951 film) are playing poker while Stella and Blanche are out. Poker night is an all-boys club in which women are persona non grata, of course. It’s bad enough when people in high positions of political, economic, and religious power and authority use sex roles and the patriarchal family to divide the sexes and keep women down; when working-class men reinforce these divisions and discriminatory attitudes, it makes proletarian solidarity all the more difficult to cultivate.

Another example of this lack of solidarity, but from a racial angle, is Pablo suggesting going to get some chop suey from the “Chinaman’s” (page 27), this being a term which, by the time of the writing of the play, must have already begun to acquire derogatory overtones in the US. Pablo, as an Hispanic and therefore surely someone familiar with being on the receiving end of ethnic slurs (Stanley will have called him a “greaseball” by the end of the play, and I suspect it won’t be the first time), should have at least some sensitivity to how inappropriate “Chinaman” sounds, as should Stanley, as a Polish-American who is infuriated with Blanche saying “Polack.”

Of the poker players, Mitch is the only unmarried one (page 28), and he has a sick mother at home, so he worries about her and must leave the poker game. His duty to her gives off the impression that he’s a ‘mama’s boy,’ and that he’s ‘sensitive.’ Blanche will soon pick up on his “superior” manner (page 30), and see in him the hope of a husband. Stanley shows his contempt for Mitch’s devotion to his mother by saying the guys will “fix [him] a sugar-tit.” (page 28)

Mitch is pleased to meet Blanche when she and Stella have returned and he has stepped away from the poker game for the moment, so he is playing the role of the gentleman while the other boys continue with their all-boys-club card game. Stanley, predictably, feels the most invaded by the feminine presence.

He assures Blanche that none of the men are interested in standing up when she enters the room. He’d have her and Stella go up to Steve’s place and sit with Eunice, Steve’s wife (Peg Hillias in the original stage production and the 1951 film), whom he treats with a shabbiness comparable to how Stanley treats Stella and Blanche. Though it’s nearly two-thirty in the morning, Stanley sees the poker game as not finishing any time soon, and he spanks Stella on the thigh…or is it the ass?…to discourage her and Blanche from staying; this only angers her.

Gentlemanly Mitch, however, will repeatedly insist, “Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women” (pages 36 and 37). Stanley is annoyed that Mitch, more interested in Blanche than the game, won’t come back to it. He’s particularly angry when Blanche turns on the radio (page 35). He rushes over and smashes it.

Stella, furious, calls Stanley an animal and tells his friends to go home immediately. He goes wild at her ending his sacred card game and goes after her. His friends try to calm him down, but it’s no good.

Both husband and wife go offstage, and we know that he hits her (page 35). Both she and Blanche scream. Stella is taken upstairs to Steve’s and Eunice’s place while Stanley’s friends try again to calm him down by pouring shower water on him, but he just gets angrier, curses at them, and hits them. They all leave with their poker winnings (page 37).

With Stella gone, Stanley finally realizes he’s screwed up. Now we have the famous moment when he screams out “Stella!” repeatedly. Without her, he’s no longer the dominant male, but he’s been reduced to a weepy little boy.

Perhaps his weepiness in part has triggered her maternal instinct, but in any case, she goes back to him and forgives him, a shocking thing for Blanche, Eunice, and any reasonable person to see. Stella is letting him manipulate her with that helpless little boy routine, a classic page out of the narcissist’s playbook.

Eunice would get the law on him for hitting his wife and making such noise so late at night. Just as the men demonstrated by trying to calm him down, there is no social acceptance of violence against women, though that doesn’t mean men never get away with it.

Blanche comes out, horrified that her sister, with child, went back to the man who hit her. Mitch is there to talk with Blanche, since he’s still interested in pursuing her. What should be a bad omen for her is how, in spite of how Mitch is still acting the gentleman, he trivializes this moment of domestic violence.

VII: Scene Four

The next morning, Blanche wants to talk Stella out of remaining in her relationship with Stanley after having seen how bestial he is capable of being. As with Mitch, Stella trivializes what happened the night before, which of course is all the more disturbing.

Stella thinks that Stanley’s having felt ashamed of himself for his barbaric behaviour is enough to forgive him, when she knows full well that he’ll do such things again, and soon.

Stella was as much of a Southern belle as Blanche, but the former being taken off the pedestal didn’t upset her the way the latter was forcibly removed from it. Blanche cannot conceive how Stella is willing to tolerate living with such a man as Stanley.

Part of the difference in the two women’s attitudes is how Blanche, unlike Stella, still believes in romantic notions of gallantry, illusions to protect her–it would seem–from the brutality of reality. When Stella speaks of how Stanley, on their wedding night, went around their home with one of her slippers smashing all the light-bulbs with it, instead of being terrified, as Blanche would have been, Stella admits to having been thrilled by his wildness (pages 41-42).

Blanche feels there’s a desperate need to get herself and Stella away from Stanley. She remembers a wealthy oilman named Shep Huntleigh, who she imagines could use his money to get her and Stella away from that brute of a husband. She imagines she’ll get Western Union through the telephone operator to contact Shep and tell him that she and Stella are in a desperate situation and need his help (pages 43-44). This urgent attempt to get Western Union and contact Shep will be repeated in Scene Ten (page 95), at the climax of the play, when Blanche is sure that Stanley, alone with her at home while Stella is in the hospital to have her baby, won’t have anyone there to hold his leash.

This Shep Huntleigh represents, in another way, the diametrical opposite of Stanley. He’s not only wealthy, but he’s also a gentleman, Blanche’s gallant, romantic ideal. According to Heinz Kohut‘s conception of the bipolar self, the two poles that give a person a stable sense of self are ones based on someone to idealize (in childhood, the idealized parental imago) and someone to mirror the grandiose self. When both of these needs are met, one can live with a healthy, restrained, and moderate sense of narcissism. If one of the poles fails, or is thwarted, the other can compensate. If both fail, one is at best in an extremely fragile position (as Blanche is, already at the beginning of the play), and at worst, one experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break with reality (as happens to Blanche at the end of the play).

Blanche is hoping that a courtship with Mitch will lead not only to a husband who can ‘make an honest woman of her,’ so she can put her promiscuous past and reputation behind her, but also to a satisfying of her narcissistic need for someone to mirror back her grandiose self to her. His gentlemanly routine of putting her up on a pedestal will satisfy that need.

When Mitch learns, through Stanley’s merciless probing into her past, of her promiscuity when she lived in Laurel (living in The Flamingo, a hotel known for prostitution, her sexual relationship with one of her underage students), and he refuses to marry her, she uses her idealization of Shep Huntleigh, a kind of Oedipal transference of the idealized parental imago, to keep her fragile self hanging on. Of course, Stanley tears that compensatory fantasy apart, and she goes mad in the end.

The psychiatrist (played by Richard Garrick in the original stage production and the 1951 movie)–who, with the matron (Ann Dere), comes to take Blanche to the mental hospital at the end of the play–temporarily destroys her ever-so-faint hopes to be taken away by Shep; but he wisely humours her, putting on the gentlemanly act to make her cooperate, and revives for the moment her hope to have the idealizing pole satisfied.

Anyway, Blanche continues trying to convince her sister that Stanley is not worth keeping. When Stella speaks of the “things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” making such things as Stanley hitting her “seem–unimportant” (page 46), we’re reminded of how “thrilled” she was at his smashing of the light-bulbs. A nasty man is often exciting to a woman, where a nice guy finishes last. As the Chinese say, “男人不壞，女人不愛” (“If men aren’t bad, women won’t love them.”) Bad boys are sexy, and in this observation come so many of women’s problems with men. Recall, in this connection, how good-looking young Brando was in the 1951 film, with his muscle tone and his shirt off. I’ll bet the girls were swooning with ecstasy at the sight of him on the screen.

Blanche responds to what Stella says by pointing out what I said above about the title of the play–that it’s not just inspired by the name of a streetcar near where Williams was writing his play. Stella is talking about her “brutal desire,” a streetcar that brought Blanche to this Godforsaken home of Stella’s and Stanley’s. A streetcar named Desire, then one named Cemeteries…Blanche imagines that Stella’s desire will lead to her death at Stanley’s hands.

As Blanche goes on condemning him as “common,” he’s approaching home and overhearing her words. He is fuming inside as she speaks of how his wife should be with a better man than “an animal,” someone “subhuman” and “bestial” (page 47).

Since Blanche has been bad-mouthing him so much to his wife, he’ll get his revenge on her by learning the gossip about how “common” she is, making all of her pretensions to art and culture seem utterly hypocritical.

VIII: Scene Five

Stella and Blanche can hear Steve and Eunice fighting upstairs, the latter accusing the former of fooling around with some “blonde,” which Steve denies (page 49). The fight escalates, she throws something at him, then he hits her, and she wants to get the police (page 50). She runs off, and he goes after her. We sense that domestic violence in the ‘heavenly’ Elysian Fields is not limited to Stella and Stanley.

Stanley comes by, and Blanche–in her usual ‘ladylike’ voice–taunts him by saying he must be an Aries, since he’s so “forceful and dynamic,” and he loves “to bang things around” (page 51). Naturally, he’s annoyed at these words. Stella tells her that Stanley was born just after Christmas, making him a Capricorn. Blanche comments, “the Goat!”, annoying him all the more.

When she mentions that her birthday is the following month, in mid-September, making her a Virgo, which is the Virgin, Stanley–already knowing a few things about her scandalous reputation in Laurel–has an opportunity to insult her back. He mentions a man named Shaw, a name common enough that she can pretend this is not someone she knows in particular, a man she apparently met in Laurel, at a hotel named the Flamingo, the place where prostitution goes on (as I mentioned above), so naturally, Blanche denies any association with it.

When Stanley leaves, though, Blanche asks Stella, in a state of great anxiety, if she’s heard any dirty gossip about her (page 52). Stella denies having heard anything nasty about Blanche. Around this time, Steve and Eunice have returned in each others’ arms, fully reconciled; their making-up parallels the making-up of Stanley and Stella that happened so soon before.

Blanche explains to Stella the reason for her bad reputation in Laurel. The loss of Belle Reve, on top of her husband’s suicide and the scandal surrounding her sexual relationship with her teen student, put her into a situation so desperate that she had “to be seductive,” to “put on soft colours” (page 53). She’s needed to do this with men “in order to pay for–one night’s shelter!”

She’s found that “men don’t…even admit your existence unless they are making love to you. And you’ve got to have your existence admitted by someone, if you’re going to have someone’s protection.” So she’s got to “put a–paper lantern over the light”, something she habitually does so people won’t see her aging and fading beauty, something she’s terrified of, just as she’s terrified of the light revealing the truth of her scandalous behaviour, something she’s feen forced into because of her losses…but the cruel, judgemental world will never be understanding to her about that.

And Stanley is the epitome of that cruel and judgemental world, not that he’s any better, of course.

She senses that Stanley wants to throw her out of his and Stella’s home, so she doesn’t want to be a burden to her sister, something she promises she won’t be in the most hysterical of words. Stella is shocked by how emotional Blanche is getting. Blanche is placing all of her hopes on Mitch, with whom she is having a date at seven that very night (page 54).

In anticipation of Stella learning, through Stanley, about Blanche’s reputation in Laurel as a ‘woman of loose morals,’ she frantically insists that on dates with Mitch, he’s gotten only “a good night kiss” from her (page 55). She wants his respect, yet she’s terrified of losing him, hence she’s so sensitive about her age. She wants him to think of her as “prim and proper.”

Of course, Mitch wants her to think of him as a gentleman. He has his social mask, and she has hers, symbolized by that paper lantern over the light, to hide the aging on her face.

Stanley returns, and he leaves with Stella, with Steve and Eunice accompanying them. Blanche is alone in the apartment.

Just before Mitch is to show up for his date with her that night, Blanche sees a handsome young man (played by Wright King in the 1951 film), who appears at the door. He says he’s “collecting for the Evening Star,” a newspaper. She jokes about him as a star taking up collections because she finds him so attractive, but he is so innocent and sweet (just the way she likes her boys), he doesn’t understand her joke.

I suspect that she, in her fragile, unstable mental state, is imagining this boy’s presence. He can easily be seen as reminding her of not only the boy she had the affair with, but also her husband back when she first knew him, when the couple were both very young. Her student/lover presumably reminded her of her husband, too.

The boy collecting money is so perfect to her. He’s polite, he calls her “ma’am,” and he’d never treat her like a whore. He’s shying away as she makes her advances to him.

Finally, she gives him a kiss on the mouth (page 57), but not wanting to go any further, as with Mitch, she sends the boy off. And fittingly, just after he disappears, Mitch arrives for their date.

IX: Scene Six

At 2:00 a.m. of the same night of their date, Mitch notes that Blanche is getting tired. After he drops her off at home, it seems that he’ll take “that streetcar named Desire” back home, for we can see just how much they desire each other. Still, he’s sad because he thinks he hasn’t entertained her much tonight.

Though she still wants him to think of her as a lady who isn’t cheap, she still likes tempting him. She’d have him come into Stella’s and Stanley’s place, since the husband and wife aren’t back home yet. She also wants to give Mitch a drink, and she even asks him, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” She also says in French that it’s a shame he doesn’t understand the question, but of course she’s happy he doesn’t (page 61). They actually go into the bedroom, her carrying the drinks.

A little later, she has him pick her up to see how light she is. Still, she’d have him let her go and be a gentleman while her sister and Stanley are still away (page 63). She fears Stanley exposing her bad reputation in Laurel, but he can’t resist continuing her coquettishness.

Almost immediately after Mitch’s picking her up and putting her back down, she brings up how much she doesn’t like Stanley, with her worries that he may have told Mitch some bad things about her (page 64). It’s interesting to see this juxtaposition of her teasing of Mitch with her fears of him learning of her ‘loose’ ways in Laurel. It’s as if her unconscious death drive, her Jungian Shadow, is deliberately sabotaging her date.

She gets nervous when Mitch asks her age (page 65). He asks because of his mother, who has wanted to know more about her. After all, his mother will probably die in a few months, and she wants to make sure her son is settled (page 66).

Next, the conversation turns toward Blanche’s old husband, a sad topic for her. The two married when very young. He was “different.” He had “a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s,” but not at all “effeminate-looking” (page 66). He needed her help.

Eventually, she found him with another man.

They pretended that nothing had happened, then the three of them went to Moon Lake Casino to be drunk and dance, to the music of the Varsouviana in particular. Then her husband broke away from her, ran outside, put a revolver in his mouth, and shot himself.

He ran out and killed himself because, on the dance floor, she’d told him he disgusted her (page 67). So she blames herself for his suicide.

Now, in the 1951 film version, all references to homosexuality in the play–however indirect–were censored for obvious reasons. Instead, the husband is portrayed as simply weak, overly sensitive, weepy, and a poet–all the gay stereotypes without the gay. A similar excising of homosexuality in a Tennessee Williams play was done in the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Empathizing with Blanche, and seeming to be similarly sensitive, Mitch reaches out to her after hearing her tragic story. She needs someone, as he needs someone. He’s seriously considering marrying her.

Except…

X: Scene Seven

In mid-September, it’s Blanche’s birthday, and Stanley has plans of ruining it for her (page 69). He’s found the dirt on her that he needs to prove that she has no business calling him ‘common.’

To add to his irritation, she is “soaking in a hot tub” on a day when the temperature is 100. He can’t stand how Stella serves cokes to “Her Majesty in the tub.” He’s convinced, “from the most reliable sources–which [he has] checked on”, that Blanche is a liar about her past (page 70).

Her singing in the bathtub, like a “canary bird,” is annoying him all the more. He can’t stand her pretense of being some kind of “lily,” all sweet and delicate, when he’s discovered that she, in his judgement, is a common whore.

The sad thing about the animosity between both of them is how it’s based on prejudicial notions of class, ethnicity, and sex. His faults, in her estimation, are because he’s a low-class “Polack.” Her faults, in his estimation, are because she’s a ‘slut.’

His real faults don’t come from his being working-class or Polish. Anyone, of any ethnicity or any social class, can be irascible, crass, rude, or violent, as Stanley is. Her real faults don’t stem from her private sexual life. Any woman, with or without literary and cultural pretensions, can fall the way Blanche has fallen, given the combination of misfortunes she’s had to suffer.

Her promiscuity should be perfectly forgivable if she can find a husband and commit to him. Her questionable relationship with her seventeen-year-old student can easily be forgotten given the same positive change in her fortunes.

What’s more, what he does to her towards the end of the play renders her sins insignificant in comparison to his. This play demonstrates the cruelty of the old double standard between the sexes more vividly than perhaps any story out there. The double standard can be expressed in the metaphorical use of words used in dog-breeding: when a man screws around, he’s a stud; when a woman does it, she’s a bitch.

This cruel double standard can help us to understand why Blanche does the prim and proper routine, why she makes mental escapes into a world of romance, poetry, and gallant gentlemen, and why she sings like a canary bird in the bathtub. It’s all a desperate attempt on her part to survive and stay sane.

Of course, if we had a society that had institutions to care for unfortunates like Blanche, she would never need to sell herself to survive. And if that society gave workers like Stanley the full fruits of their labour, and if that labour was meaningful instead of alienating, he probably wouldn’t be half the ape that he acts like.

But I digress. Back to the story.

Now, while Stanley is telling Stella about Blanche’s lies about only ever being kissed by men, as she’s told Mitch (page 70), and about quitting teaching merely because of her nerves, rather than being fired for sexual misconduct with a minor, Blanche is in the tub singing about such phony things as paper moons, cardboard seas, the Barnum and Bailey circus, honky-tonk parades, and melodies from penny arcades–things that wouldn’t be make-believe if she had a man who believed in her (pages 70-71). Just as I said above: she wouldn’t need to indulge in all the fakery if she had a man to love her…as she once had.

We can’t expect any compassion from merciless Stanley, though, of course. He’s found fault in her, and he has all the reasons he needs to hate her.

Stella tries to reason with Stanley, to get him to understand the misfortunes her sister has gone through to bring her to her current situation. She brings up Blanche’s “degenerate” husband (page 73). Stanley is deaf to all of this: he’d rather hate Blanche than pity her.

In fact, Stanley has told Mitch all about Blanche’s scandalous past, and though he’s infuriated with Stanley for blackening her reputation, he’s checked the sources of Stanley’s stories and has confirmed them. He’s been invited to Blanche’s birthday party, but he won’t show up (page 74).

Stanley has given her some extraordinary birthday gifts. He’s been most thoughtful to her.

Finally, he gets so furious with her holding up the bathroom and singing endlessly that he shouts at her to get out (page 75). She tries her best to hold herself together against his savagery. Still, she worries about what he’s told Stella about her.

XI: Scene Eight

Forty-five minutes later, the three of them are sitting at a dismal birthday dinner (page 76). Blanche is wearing an artificial smile, trying to hide her disappointment at Mitch’s absence.

She asks Stanley to tell them a joke, something to cheer them up without it being vulgar or indecent. In his disgust with her affectations about being the ‘high-class’ lady from Belle Reve, rather than the whore from the Flamingo, he says he knows no jokes “refined enough for [her] taste.” Therefore, Blanche will tell one…a joke that ends with “God damn…!” She’s as capable of rough language as he is (page 77).

When Stella gripes at him for his bad table manners and tells him to help her clear the table, he has another of his temper tantrums, throwing a plate to the floor. He refuses to let himself come anywhere near being dominated by her or Blanche.

He’s infuriated at being called a “Polack” by Blanche, and judged as “vulgar–greasy,” but he sees no injustice in his own dominance as a man over her and his wife. He twists the socialist meaning of Huey Long‘s “Every man a king” slogan, meant to indicate that all people should have access to the plenty that a king enjoys, and instead he uses it to mean that men should be the kings of their women. In this, we can see what I was saying above, that a lack of solidarity between the sexes, as well as between people of different ethnic groups, is bad for the working class.

Blanche is still worried that Stanley has told Stella some dirt he’s learned from Laurel. Stella denies hearing anything, but of course she’s heard plenty. Blanche wants to call Mitch’s home and find out why he hasn’t shown up for her birthday party. She’ll regret making the call (page 78).

Stanley has another ‘gift’ for Blanche: a ticket back to Laurel. She can hear the Varsouviana music. She runs off, coughing and gagging (page 81).

Stella reprimands Stanley for being so cruel to her sister, and he reminds Stella of how he’d pulled her down from the columns of Belle Reve, and she liked it. He’s now pulled Blanche down from those columns, too, and she hates it…therefore, he hates her.

Overwhelmed by stress, Stella is going to go into labour. He has to take her to the hospital.

XII: Scene Nine

Blanche is alone in the apartment again, and Mitch arrives, dressed in his work clothes. He has no more interest in playing the role of the gentleman for her, having confirmed what Stanley told him about her. His coldness to her, and her realization that she has lost him, just as she lost her husband, reminds her of the Varsouviana music she’d heard when he ran off and put a gun in his mouth (page 84).

Mitch doesn’t like how dark it is in the place. He wants to see her in the light, which of course she never wants to be seen in (page 86). She finds the dark comforting, something she can hide in. Just as it hides her age, the darkness also hides her sinful past–it is her Jungian Shadow.

He insists on seeing her in the light even to the point of tearing off the paper lantern from the light-bulb. He wants to see her “good and plain,” which causes her narcissistic injury, for she finds exposure to the light “insulting.”

He wants realism, but she wants “magic.” She wants to hide in romance, to be worshipped by a gentleman. She wants comforting illusions.

When he sees her in the light, he doesn’t mind that she’s older than he thought; but he’s heartbroken to know that she, of supposedly “old-fashioned” ideals, has serviced men in the Flamingo. He at first dismissed Stanley’s accusations as slander, but then he checked Stanley’s sources and he is no longer able to deny the truth about her (page 87).

Blanche tries her best to deny Mitch’s sources, claiming the stories of the men who knew of her promiscuity are slanders to get revenge on her for rejecting their advances, but Mitch won’t believe her. Knowing she can’t get him to sympathize with her, she ironically exaggerates her sin by claiming the hotel she stayed in was not called The Flamingo, but “The Tarantula,” where she supposedly brought all her victims (page 87).

Again, she tries to explain what drove her to promiscuity–the suicide of her husband, Allan, her hopes of finding a man’s protection but never getting it, and the slow fading away of her looks from aging. She still hopes she can win Mitch’s sympathy by appealing to his need for somebody, as she needs somebody, and noting how gentle he seems (page 88)…but all that matters to him is that she lied to him.

As all of this is being said, a Mexican woman outside can be heard saying, “Flowers, flowers, flowers for the dead” in Spanish…some ominous foreshadowing of Blanche’s fate, metaphorically speaking.

Blanche speaks of “blood-stained pillow slips” that need changing, symbolic of her promiscuity. She imagines that “a coloured girl [could] do it,” suggesting a projection of her sin, what makes Blanche “common,” onto blacks, onto common workers. Blanche would continue to use racial and class prejudice as an ego defence mechanism to protect her against judgement for her sins.

Still, not only does Mitch feel no sympathy for Blanche, but he also no longer feels any obligation to play the role of the gentleman for her (page 89). He takes it to the point of wanting sex from her, imagining that she’s owed it to him “all summer.”

As we can see, his gentleman routine is as much of a phony act as is her ladylike routine. So much in this play is illusion and pretense.

Since Mitch has his hands on her waist, and it’s clear that he doesn’t want to marry her, she has no intention of satisfying him like a ‘cheap’ woman. His intention is to have her whether she’ll consent or not…in other words, he’s prepared to rape her.

She screams “Fire! Fire! Fire!” to make him go away, since screaming fire is considered a much more effective way to get help against a rapist than yelling rape. When we consider what’s going to happen to Blanche in the next scene (just after the end of it, specifically), we can see that Mitch is actually a more moderate version of Stanley, or rather, that Stanley is representative of an extreme version of ‘gentlemen’ like Mitch.

XIII: Scene Ten

It’s later that same night. Blanche is dressed in her prettiest of dresses, wearing her rhinestone tiara, and in front of the dressing table mirror. Since Mitch left, she’s been drinking steadily. She imagines she has a number of “spectral admirers” around her (page 90).

As I said above, her loss of Mitch is a loss of the mirror of her grandiose self, one of the two poles that are holding her together. So the group of “spectral admirers” is there in a desperate attempt by her to avoid the psychological fragmentation that is her fate via Stanley.

She’s talking to these imagined admirers: she’s hallucinating their presence. She’s holding a hand mirror to look at herself more closely, the hand holding it trembling. The chasm between who she knows she really is and the Lacanian ideal-I she wants to see in the specular image must be so vast that she smashes the mirror down hard to crack the glass.

Stanley returns from the hospital, and he’s in an uncharacteristically good mood. He is even, for the moment, kind to Blanche. He’s happy because he’s soon to be a father and hoping for a son (page 92).

Blanche has hopes of her own, only hers are completely imaginary. Just as she’s been seeing make-believe admirers in the mirror, for the sake of her grandiose self, she’s also imagining that Mr. Shep Huntleigh, her personified ideal, will take her on a cruise of the Caribbean (page 91).

Only through an escape into fantasy can she hope to keep her bipolar self intact, with Shep at one pole (idealization), and the admirers in the mirror reflection at the other pole (grandiosity). Yet Stanley is about to smash both poles for her, to rid her of her illusions, and traumatize her so severely that her psychotic break from reality will be complete.

Still, though, for the moment, Stanley is being nice to her because of his good mood as an expectant father. He doesn’t believe a word she’s saying about a cruise with Shep, but he’s humouring her all the same, to keep the peace, hence his comment that the rhinestones on her tiara are “Tiffany diamonds” (page 91). In his humouring of her, we can see that he’s as capable of pretense as she is.

Though he’s trying to be generous with her to keep the mood pleasant, she doesn’t want to reciprocate (page 93). She’s annoyed at the continuing lack of privacy, and yearns for her “millionaire from Dallas” to restore it to her. In her swelling narcissism, she boasts of her inner beauty–“beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart”–all of which can replace her fading physical beauty.

This boasting is causing Stanley’s patience to fade, especially when she speaks of “casting [her] pearls before swine!” (page 93) “Swine,” of course, refers not just to Stanley but also to his friend, Mitch, whom she now regards as no less common than Stanley. She lies that Mitch “returned…to beg [her] forgiveness,” which she wouldn’t give.

When Stanley reminds her about the telegram she supposedly got from Shep, and he sees she has briefly forgotten about it, he’s caught her in a lie (page 94). Now his anger comes back in full.

Stanley knows there is no Shep, and he knows that Mitch never came to her asking for forgiveness. It’s all only her “imagination…lies and conceit and tricks!” It was all narcissistic fantasy, which she’s been using to protect her bipolar self from psychological fragmentation.

He is disgusted with her phony charade, but he cannot see the pain she went through that brought her to this. He’s tearing down her fake performance, and he’s about to bring her to that state of fragmentation. But first, he’ll go into the bathroom to change into his pajamas.

Just as before, when she suggested to Stella that their escape from Stanley would be a call to Western Union to contact Shep (Scene Four, page 44), she’s at the phone, trying to do it again for real, to save herself from this beast (pages 94-95).

She hears noises from outside at night. She leaves the phone and, according to the stage directions, she goes to the kitchen. Outside, a drunkard is attacking a prostitute. This is obvious foreshadowing of what’s about to happen to her.

Stanley comes back from the bathroom, having changed into his pajamas, and he’s looking at her lewdly. Part of the problem of being labelled a ‘cheap’ or ‘easy’ woman is, of course, how she becomes prey for lecherous men. Mitch gave Blanche a try; now, Stanley wants to…only he’ll be much more insistent on it.

He hangs up the phone on her, and he’s standing in a place where he can stop her from getting away. She knows what that look in his eyes means, and she needs to protect herself, so she smashes a bottle and points the jagged end at him (page 96).

She tries to fight the good fight, “some rough-house,” but he overpowers her, of course. Now that they’re going to have “this date” (an interesting choice of words on Stanley’s part, reminding us of how her dating Mitch ended), he picks her up and takes her to the bed (page 97). She moans and yields to him in all hopelessness.

XIV: Scene Eleven

A few weeks later, Stella is home with the baby, and she’s packing Blanche’s things. Eunice also comes by.

Stanley is playing poker with Steve, Mitch, and Pablo again at the kitchen table. The atmosphere of this game is the same as the last one (page 98).

Pablo curses at Stanley in Spanish, making the latter call the former a “greaseball.” Once again, the use of ethnic slurs demonstrates the lack of solidarity among the working class.

Blanche has told Stella that Stanley raped her, but Stella refuses to believe it (page 99). Eunice agrees that Stella should never believe it, since she’d never be able to carry on with Stanley. This understanding brings us back to the theme of illusions that keep the pain away, that protect us from fragmentation.

Blanche has finished bathing and is ready to come out of the bathroom. She’s full of anxiety and insecurity, wondering if the coast is clear (i.e., no men to see her), and if she’s failed to rinse all of the soap out of her hair (page 100). Stella and Eunice try to comfort and humour her by telling her how good she looks.

Blanche is still hoping for Shep Huntleigh to call her and take her on that cruise. Again, Stella and Eunice are humouring her with this fantasy, knowing full well that it’s a psychiatrist who is about to take her away. Again, they have to keep her illusions intact, for reality will destroy her.

Blanche imagines she’s going to spend the rest of her life on the sea (page 102). She thinks she’ll die holding “the hand of some nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one…” How ironic that it’s actually going to be a doctor who takes her away…and not a young or handsome one.

The doctor and nurse, or matron, arrive at the door and ring the doorbell. Blanche, of course, is full of hope that it’s Shep who has come to her rescue. How disappointed she’ll be.

As Blanche looks in shock at these two unexpected and unwanted visitors, she can hear the Varsouviana again. This was the music she heard just before her husband’s suicide, which in turn led to the events that have been corroding her whole sense of self. She’s hearing the music again in her mind; it’s a trigger leading to her destruction.

She’s trying to escape from the two visitors, claiming she forgot something (page 104). The nurse goes in after her and calls out to her, her voice echoing in Blanche’s mind, a threatening echo that suggests a recurring pain, a returning trauma.

Stanley, impatient to get rid of her, asks if it’s the paper lantern she wants. He tears it off the light-bulb and gestures to give it to her. According to the stage directions, “She cries out as if the lantern was herself.” (page 105) Of course she’d see it that way: all that Blanche has been, to keep her sanity, is a covering-up of the light, a comforting dimness, her narcissistic False Self. Revealing the light’s brightness exposes her True Self and all the ugliness she perceives it to be.

This is her succumbing to psychological fragmentation.

As the nurse is restraining her, Mitch gets up and tries to hit Stanley for his cruelty to Blanche. Mitch would seem to have a modicum of gallantry after all. Stanley’s denial of guilt shows he’s as fake about his commonality as she is about hers.

It is the Doctor, however, whose gentlemanly act of removing his hat and greeting her, that calms her down, restoring her comforting illusions. Stanley’s raping of her means that he has put his filth and commonality inside her, something she cannot expel. For her, kindness comes from strangers, not from people close to her.

The 1951 film changed the ending by having Stella refuse to be with Stanley anymore, since the old Motion Picture Production Code would never tolerate his rape going unpunished. No divorce, of course, but no easy forgiveness of him, either. Among social conservatives, there can be no acceptance of such violence against women as rape, however much the law may allow guilty men to slip through its cracks.

Williams’s play, however, exposes the ugly side of society by granting no justice or satisfaction to the long-suffering marginalized: ‘fallen’ women, ‘degenerate’ gays, ‘mama’s boys,’ ‘Polacks,’ ‘Chinamen,’ and ‘greaseballs.’ Williams would not whitewash cruel reality.

XV: Conclusion

You see, the cruel irony of “depend[ing] on the kindness of strangers” is twofold for Blanche. On the one hand, those strangers who were ‘kind’ to her were the Johns who solicited prostitution from her in exchange for money so she could survive–in other words, total exploitation. On the other hand, those she’s known well have hurt her the most: her husband, whose suicide was an abandoning of her; Mitch, who abandoned her out of a refusal to forgive her for her shady past; Stanley, for obvious reasons; and even Stella, for refusing to believe her accusation of Stanley (her relationship to her oaf of a husband being more important to her than her loyalty to her sister), and for allowing Blanche to be taken to a mental institution, her final humiliation.

In a world of alienation, only strangers can be kind.

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, London, Penguin Books, 1947

	Mawr Gorshin on What Is Feared of Communism Is…
	D. Jay on What Is Feared of Communism Is…
	delicioustree190bd43… on Underwear
	delicioustree190bd43… on Placards
	The Tanah–The Preach… on The Tanah–The Preaching,…