Tag: capitalism

Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

I wrote up an analysis of the Stephen King novel years ago; if you’re interested, Dear Reader, you can find it here. In that analysis, I made only one or two brief references to Kubrick’s film adaptation, which everyone ought to know by now is wildly different from the novel (much to King‘s annoyance).

I also felt, when I wrote that analysis, that an in-depth analysis of Kubrick’s film would be unnecessary, as others had already done so. I’ve since changed my mind about that, since I feel that an analysis of the themes of Kubrick’s adaptation will put the spotlight on a lot of issues most relevant to our world today.

I’ll discuss changes from the novel to the movie only as pertinent to these issues as Kubrick’s version addresses them. The story is no longer merely about an aspiring writer battling with alcoholism (a semi-autobiographical issue that King had been dealing with at the time of writing his novel), but rather about how issues of settler-colonialism in the US intersect with capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse.

Given the troubled state the US is in now (and how that affects the rest of the world), Kubrick’s film seems to be gifted with “the shining” in how it, 46 years ago as of the publication of this blog article, predicted the intersecting of those above-mentioned problems, leading to today’s nightmare as I see it allegorized in this film.

Anyway, the 1980 film was produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and written by him and Diane Johnson. It stars Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, and Danny Lloyd, with Scatman Crothers, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone, Joe Turkel, and Tony Burton.

The non-original music used in the film includes a synthesizer adaptation that Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind did of Dies Irae, as Hector Berlioz had used it in his Symphonie fantastique. We also hear excerpts from “Lontano,” by György Ligeti, and the first half of the third movement (“Adagio“) of Béla Bartók‘s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. From Krzysztof Penderecki, there are excerpts from “Ewangelia” and “Kanon Paschalny II” from Utrenja, as well as his “Awakening of Jacob” and “De Natura Sonoris” Nos. 1 and 2, his “Kanon,” and his “Polymorphia.” These are all either modern adaptations of classical music (Carlos/Elkind), classical modernism (Bartók), or post-war avant-garde classical (Penderecki/Ligeti), music originally intended just as expressive in itself or as experiments with sound…and yet here presented as ‘scary music.’

Contrasted with these are a few old-fashioned tunes, such as “Midnight, the Stars and You,” by Harry M Woods, Jimmy Campbell, and Reg Connelly, and “Home,” performed by Henry Hall and Gleneagles Hotel Band, among others. This music gives off a sense of…’Life just isn’t as it was back in the good old days,’ a nostalgic attachment to the past that hides, behind a superficial charm, a reactionary hatred of progressive social change.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The movie begins with a shot of a lake and an island in the middle of it, and forest and Colorado Rocky Mountains in the background, with Carlos’s and Elkind’s synthesizer rendition of Dies Irae. Next is a bird’s eye view of the car driven by Jack Torrance (Nicholson) going on a road between forests of trees, then up a mountain to the Overlook Hotel.

Such scenery is beautiful to behold, but the eerie, portentous music is at odds with such a picturesque charm. We feel, instead, a sense of the loneliness and isolation Jack and his family will feel when they’re in the hotel through the winter. This juxtaposition of superficial pleasantness and underlying nastiness will be a recurring theme in the movie.

The significance of the eerie feeling accompanying the pretty natural scenery will be known when we learn that the Overlook Hotel was built on an old Indian burial ground (a trope that would become a cliché in many 1980s horror films), where during construction of the hotel, the builders had to fight off Native American attacks. What is being established here is a confronting of the issue of the white man’s colonizing of aboriginal land, killing off any resistance to it. This issue will be the foundation of the other issues, as I’ll elaborate on later.

The synthesizer music alone is dark and haunting. If one knew that it is Dies Irae, the “Day of Wrath,” about the Day of Judgement, one would see far greater significance in how settler-colonialism, the genocide of the North American aboriginals, the other issues of social injustice I’ll go into later, and a final day of reckoning are all interconnected. We see the land of the aboriginals, land taken from them by the white man, whose descendants will do far more evil over the ensuing centuries; and if one were to read the text of Dies Irae, one would sense the depth of these men’s guilt.

In the Overlook Hotel, Jack meets Stuart Ullman (Nelson) for his job interview to be the hotel’s new caretaker for the coming winter. The Ullman of the film is not the “Officious little prick” of King’s novel; here, he’s quite a gentle, smiling, genial fellow.

As Jack’s employer, though, Ullman personifies capitalism, and with not only the juxtaposition of this job interview with the preceding scene of Jack’s drive through the formerly aboriginal landscape, but also Ullman’s soon-to-come comments about the Indian burial ground and fighting off the aboriginal attacks, we see the connection between colonialism and capitalism (for a contemporary example of this connection, recall the current ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the wish to convert the area into a set of resorts for vacationers…a whole beach of Overlook Hotels.

Ullman’s, as well as Jack’s, smiling throughout the job interview reflect that superficial pleasantness masking nastiness. Ullman is the easy-going boss explaining to Jack how the job is not physically demanding: he just has to do some repairs here and there, keep the boiler room running, and heat different parts of the hotel on a rotational, daily basis. Jack is smiling away and insisting that the job will be perfectly suited to him and his family, partly because, as with anyone trying to get a job, he wants to reassure the boss that he’s the right man to hire, and such reassuring involves some ass-kissing; it’s part of how a powerless worker has to deal with a capitalist.

Under this pleasant veneer, though, is the nasty reality about the job that Ullman has to be frank about with Jack. There’s a terrible feeling of loneliness and isolation that one can feel doing the caretaker job over the long winter months, and this led to a caretaker named Grady (Stone) killing his family back in 1970.

Under capitalism, there’s this idea that supporters of it promote: the taking-on of a job is a voluntary agreement between employer and employee rather than something the employee must do to live–it amounts to wage slavery. That a worker can just quit if he doesn’t like his job fails to grasp the fact that, if he even finds a new job to replace it, will it even be any better, or all it be (much) worse? The worker, always needing to sell his labour to live, isn’t the free agent the pro-capitalist claims he is. This issue is the unpleasant underbelly of the pleasant outer skin of the job one hopes to get.

The isolation and loneliness of the caretaker job, the underbelly Jack will confront soon enough, are representative of what Marx discussed as worker alienation. And alienation, as has been seen especially in the US over the past few decades, has led to many gun killings, rather like Jack’s violence at the climax of the movie.

So we see how a number of issues intersect already. The construction of a hotel, a business to make a profit, on an Indian burial ground, which includes the need to fight off and kill aboriginals trying to preserve and protect a sacred space, shows how settler-colonialism and capitalism intersect. That the job of maintaining this for-profit building involves a long spell of maddening loneliness, in which the caretaker would be haunted by ghosts (many, I suspect, being of murdered Native Americans), shows how worker alienation intersects with settler-colonialism and capitalism…if only symbolically.

Next, we have to deal with Jack’s alcoholism and abuse of little Danny (Lloyd). A doctor (played by Anne Jackson) is curious about an injury Danny had, one mentioned in passing by his mother, Wendy Torrance (Duvall), in her conversation with the doctor. Wendy says, with more of that saccharine smiling, that one night five months prior to this discussion, Jack had been drinking, came home late, and saw that Danny had scattered some important papers of Jack’s all over the room. The official explanation is that Jack ‘accidentally’ dislocated Danny’s arm by yanking the boy away from the papers with too much force. The doctor is not smiling after hearing this story.

We’ll notice here that this is yet another example of the attempt to hide nastiness behind a veil of pleasantness. Wendy, in trivializing Jack’s alcoholism and brutishness, is also demonstrating her subservience to him.

This leads to the next issue to intersect with those previously mentioned: the patriarchal family as represented here with the Torrances. We see in them the usual sex roles: Jack is the breadwinner, and Wendy is the housewife…though, oddly (or, perhaps not?), during their time in the Overlook, we see that it is Wendy who is checking over the hotel. Jack, who should be doing this, is instead bouncing a ball against a wall, kind-of-sort-of writing his novel, and slowly going insane.

We ought to look at the word patriarchy a little more carefully than usual, especially as it applies to Jack’s relationship with his family. We all know the word is used to refer to a male-dominated society, of course, but technically, it means “father-rule.” Danny is as male as Jack is, of course, but as a kid, he’s hardly dominant in any way over anyone, including Wendy, even with his “shining” power. It’s Jack, the father–just as did Grady, the father–who has the power, and who wields it so brutally.

This “father-rule” can be symbolic of which men in particular dominate society: the rich and politically powerful, those in leadership positions, not the ordinary, working-class men of the world. Of course, none of this is to deny, trivialize, or invalidate the painful experiences of powerlessness that all women and girls around the world suffer because of sexism, sex roles, and the patriarchal family. It’s just that we need to focus on which men in particular to blame, the powerful ones, when we work for solutions to these problems. Women’s liberation will come through socialism, not through the divisiveness of idpol.

As far as blaming working-class men like Jack is concerned when they help to perpetuate sexism, it would be more useful to focus on their dysfunctional solution of ‘punching down,’ rather than ‘punching up.’ Jack should be raising his fist in anger at the system that’s made him and his family so powerless, rather than raising an axe to kill Wendy and Danny with.

Wendy’s role in the film as submissive, weak, and frail (as opposed to her much stronger and more resourceful portrayal in King’s novel) demonstrates not only the issue of the patriarchal family, but also how this issue intersects with that of the white man’s genocide of the Native Americans. It has been noted by film critics that Duvall, through her clothing and long, thin black hair, is made to resemble a Native American. She dresses this way while in the hotel, as opposed to how she and Danny look in their home at the beginning of the film, in their red-white-and-blue clothing. We go from the pleasant, American-as-apple-pie look to the nasty look of one oppressed by the white man.

The hotel interior significantly has a lot of North American indigenous art on display, as well as other art that can be associated with aboriginals. I mentioned Jack’s bouncing of a ball against a wall: a Native American tapestry is on it. This, of course, is symbolic of the white man beating the aboriginals.

A nation built on the genocide of those who lived there before (as symbolized by building a hotel on an Indian burial ground) is hardly one that will grow into one based on freedom, justice, and equality, in spite of the myths of ‘American democracy’ that many have been brainwashed into believing. That is what Kubrick’s Shining is all about: hence, the intersecting of the aboriginal issue with those of capitalism, sexism, and racism…this last of which we must go into now.

As with the others, things start off superficially pleasant, as Dick Hallorann (Crothers) shows the Torrances–Wendy and Danny in particular–around such areas of the Overlook as the kitchen and the pantry. Hallorann is all smiles as he lists off all the delicious foods the Torrances will enjoy eating. He, also gifted with “the shining,” immediately senses Danny’s telepathic abilities, knowing the boy will be sensitive to the presence of all the ghosts in the hotel.

As a black man, Hallorann of course represents how his people have been victimized by American racism. He is the only one we see murdered by Jack, with an axe in the chest. He is referred to as a “nigger” by the ghost of Grady and Jack in the bathroom scene, where the latter wipes off a spill off the former’s jacket and warns him of his son’s interfering in the hotel’s affairs.

In all of this we can easily see how racism against blacks intersects with racism against the Native Americans. White supremacism, as we know, is used to justify not only the genocide of the aboriginals, but also the slavery of blacks. Such an attitude is clearly expressed when Jack says to Lloyd, the ghost bartender (Turkel), “White man’s burden,” as he is about to play for a drink.

Note also the significance of how the two killing fathers, Grady and Jack, are not only two white men, but also, the first is British, and the second is American. The order of the two men’s appearances and murder sprees in the hotel is particularly significant, as they represent the brutality first of British colonialism, then of American colonialism. And just as with Jack’s smiling first appearance in the film, so is ghost-Grady’s first appearance one of a gentle, polite, affable chap…until he shows his true colours in the bathroom scene, as he, frowning, would “be so bold” as to tell Jack about the need to ‘correct’ Danny.

The hotel is on an Indian burial ground, yet oddly, we never see any Native American ghosts. There’s all that aboriginal art everywhere in the hotel, though, as I mentioned above; it’s as if the hotel ate the remains of the natives, whose digested remains are all of that art, a cannibalism like the kind (which included the eating of two Miwok guides) Jack and Danny talk about in the car ride up the mountain to the hotel.

We don’t ever see aboriginal ghosts–only white ones–because the whole point is that the aboriginals are all gone. Even the memory of them is all but erased. The collective guilt of the white man has been repressed into the unconscious…and yet the repressed returns to consciousness, albeit in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight (aboriginal art, white ghosts, Wendy’s clothing and hair in the hotel).

Many Americans–conservatives in particular, like Michael Medved in his book, The 10 Big Lies About America (Medved, pages 11-45)–are in denial about the genocide of the Native Americans as a basis for the beginnings of the country. They’ll make claims that the spread of diseases from whites to aboriginals, the massacres, and the forced displacements (clearly ethnic cleansing) did not intentionally or systematically cause most of the deaths, but such claims are nonsense. Violence was encouraged through payment. The government enacted laws, such as Andrew Jackson‘s Indian Removal Act of 1830, to displace aboriginals by the tens of thousands, causing many deaths among them from the hardships of the journey from where the whites wanted to settle to where the aboriginals were required to go.

Such denials can be said to be symbolized in The Shining by this ‘repression,’ as I described it above, in the replacement of the indigenous dead with the hotel’s aboriginal art and white ghosts. Being as sensitive as Danny is with his “shining,” he can sense the ghosts, particularly in the forms of Grady’s daughters and in his being lured by ghosts to room 237.

Jack’s seeing of the ghosts coincides with his slowly going mad, of course, for it is the contemplation of the white man’s guilt that is maddening, the confronting of it, as opposed to denying the genocide. Wendy doesn’t see the ghosts and other supernatural phenomena until the climax of the movie, when affairs have gotten so extreme in their violence that the consequences of genocide can no longer be denied by white people.

The guilt may be denied, but it keeps coming back to haunt the guilty. That’s what the motifs of recurrence can be said to represent. Think of the recurring patterns on the rugs and walls, the back-and-forth alteration of the sound of the wheels of Danny’s Big Wheel rolling on the hard floor vs their silence on the rugs, or “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” over and over again on the pages of his ‘manuscript.’ Similarly, Jack’s reincarnation as the hotel’s eternal caretaker, his having been in the Overlook back in 1921, and his resulting feelings of déjà vu.

The cyclical nature of events in the Overlook–the killing of aboriginals when building the hotel, the murders of the past, culminating in Grady’s and Jack’s, represent how a nation founded on genocide will return to murder again and again throughout its history. We see this in the history of the US, where apart from the Native American genocide, there is the great majority of the country’s history involving either waging or at least being somehow involved in wars; we see it in how Manifest Destiny inspired Hitler; and we see it in Israel’s taking of Palestinian land and continued ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians (backed by the US).

We get repetition in my favourite scene in the movie, when Danny confronts the Grady sister ghosts, who invite him to play with them…”forever, and ever, and ever”…a line Jack repeats to Danny: “I wish we could stay here forever, and ever, and ever.”

It’s been said that the spatial layout of the hotel makes no physical sense. One might try to attribute the inconsistencies of the layout to continuity errors, but that doesn’t make sense either, given Kubrick’s obsessive perfectionism. There are windows and doors that shouldn’t be there, rooms in one place at one time and in another place at another time, and furniture that appears and disappears from scene to scene.

In this sense, the hotel interior (which Wendy calls a maze) is rather like that labyrinthine hedge arrangement, in miniature on that table where Jack looks at the model of it, and the real one outside that the model dissolves into. (The hedge maze, incidentally, replaced the animal topiary hedges of the novel, those that come to life, because of limitations with the special effects of the time.)

The point is that the hotel is a trap from which one (usually) cannot escape. As a symbol of the US (which both dominates in its overseeing the affairs of everyone everywhere, and which overlooks its guilt and responsibility for all the wrongs it’s done), the Overlook is a place irrationally constructed, and a labyrinthine trap, because so is the country it represents.

Some may complain that the pacing of the plot is too slow. Such complaining misses the point. It’s slow because the growing evil is meant to be felt as insidious. Jack’s descent into madness is slow, and the tension of the music accordingly grows slowly, from the eeriness of the music of Carlos/Elkind in the beginning and the eeriness of that of Bartók early on and in the middle, to the extreme dissonance of Penderecki’s music leading up to and during the climax.

If we see The Shining as an allegory of the history of the US (or just about any nation founded on settler-colonialism), then it makes sense to see, from white people’s point of view, how the horrors only gradually build until the end. Sensitive Danny and Hallorann can see it from the beginning, like so many of us on the left and black activists, those powerless to do much about it; but many white Americans, like Wendy, are only now seeing the horrors of state-sanctioned violence.

Yet another thing that intersects with the issues of settler-colonialism, capitalism, racism, sexism, and family abuse is narcissism, and we can see Jack indulging in that, symbolically and literally. Though most people would dread the sense of isolation in being the caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, Jack welcomes the job, for he enjoys his solipsism there. He doesn’t want society to be all around him. He wants other people to exist only as reflections and extensions of himself.

He gets irritable with Wendy, even if she just enters his writing room to talk about…anything. He flies into rages if she talks about leaving the hotel with Danny to get him to a doctor. The Overlook is like a Bower of Bliss for him: superficially pleasing, but trapping him in it and slowly eating him up.

There’s evidence of him being frustrated with his family right from the beginning. We see it in his face when he grins in exasperation at Danny ‘s saying he knows about cannibalism from the TV, and this is before the family has even reached the Overlook Hotel. He’s frustrated with his family because it’s a triadic relationship, so–to use Lacanian language–this puts him in a situation of dealing with the Other, where being with at least two other people means dealing with them on their own terms, rather than dealing with the other, where only one other is a reflection of oneself.

It is significant that whenever Jack has a conversation or interaction with a ghost, there’s a mirror behind the ghost. This is true of his interactions with Lloyd, Grady, or the naked woman he embraces and kisses in the bathroom. He enjoys these interactions because he’s in a dyadic relationship with each of them–they are each a reflection and extension of himself.

To use Lacanian language again, Jack is retreating from the sociocultural/linguistic world of the Symbolic, to reenter the dyadic, narcissistic world of the Imaginary. Such a retreat is extraordinary given his ambition to write a novel, yet it is explicable as soon as we realize the entire ‘novel’ is just the repetition of a single sentence–his writer’s block.

Jack’s seeing the ghosts in front of mirrors has him fuse the two sights together each time in his mind. As a result, each ghost becomes the narcissistic ideal-I before his eyes. Each ghost feeds his ego and represents an ideal either to be fused with sexually (the naked young woman ghost), to legitimize his alcoholism (Lloyd), or to be emulated as a perpetrator of uxoricide and filicide (Grady).

Narcissism is used as a defence against psychological fragmentation, and Jack’s belief in his ‘calling’ as the caretaker of the Overlook is an example of such a defence: hence, the firing-up of his rage at the mere thought of leaving the hotel. The Overlook as a sanctuary for his narcissism cannot last forever, though, and this is not solely because of the urgent need to get Danny out of there to see a doctor. His experience with the naked woman also shows this impermanence.

As I said above, the specular image in the mirror is an ideal-I, which one strives all one’s life to attain, ultimately failing. Jack would…attain, to use the word euphemistically, the naked young woman in front of the bathroom mirror because man’s desire is the desire of the Other, the wish to be what the Other wants, so Jack’s wanting her to want him is to see, narcissistically, his desire as idealized in her, to see her as an extension of himself, to see himself as her.

Her youth, beauty, and thinness are also the ideals of femininity in modern, career-woman society, supplanting the old ‘pleasantly plump’ ideal for the ‘barefoot-and-pregnant mothers’ of the past. These issues, of course, are also tied in with the values of the patriarchal family, and so we see how Jack’s narcissism in this manifestation intersects with the other issues mentioned above. The impermanence of the Overlook as a sanctuary for Jack’s narcissism is also seen in the girl’s sudden transformation into a cackling old woman with the mouldy skin of a decomposing body.

The switch from the young to the old nude woman, and the switch from Jack’s aroused to horrified reaction, are also a comment on society’s attitude toward prevailing norms of feminine beauty, as well as on the male addiction to that beauty. This addiction can also be seen in Dick Hallorann when in his Florida home, on the walls of which we see pictures of nude or seminude black women.

Jack rejects the Symbolic–that is, he rejects society (any people other than those as mirrors of his narcissistic self) and language (not only can’t he type any more than the one repeated sentence, but as he freezes in the hedge maze searching for Danny, his speech becomes unintelligible babbling and moaning). He also finds the dyadic Imaginary to be unreliable (the Overlook is a sanctuary of his narcissism that cannot last as such). The lack of the Symbolic and the Imaginary means that all he is left with is the Real, an undifferentiated state of being that cannot be symbolized or expressed through language…a traumatic, chaotic mess.

This messy Chaos is vividly expressed in that iconic deluge of blood splashing out from the elevator and filling up the room so much that it even hits and soaks the camera lens. It’s a redrum running amok. The Real is what results when there are no others, no ability to express oneself or make sense of a world of non-differentiation, and not even another person to reflect oneself against. It’s the trauma of total loneliness.

Danny has a sense of that inability to express and verbalize the Real when, in Tony’s voice, he tries to warn sleeping Wendy of Jack’s imminent attack with the axe by chanting “redrum” over and over. His use of her lipstick to write “REDRUM” on the door, with the second R backwards, represents the Real’s inability to be articulated, as does the word’s being intelligible only in the mirror reflection as “MURDER,” with the E and the second R backwards, too.

The patriarchal dominance of Jack is seen not just in his abusive treatment of Danny and his maniacal yelling at Wendy as noted above, but also in how, after hacking open the door to the room his wife and son are in, he says, “Wendy, I’m home.” We’re reminded of the husband of the 1950s coming in the house after finishing his day at work and calling out to his stay-at-home wife, “Honey, I’m home,” implying that he expects dinner to be ready for him.

Jack’s famous line, “Here’s Johnny!”–with that iconic shot of his maniacally smiling face through the hacked-out hole in the bathroom door, on his way to try to kill Wendy–was improvised by Nicholson. The black humour allusion to Ed McMahon introducing Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show (as well as that of the Big Bad Wolf calling out to the Three Little Pigs) is not only jarring in the context of the terror of the scene, but it’s also unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with the show, including even Kubrick, who’d been living in England at the time. The line thus could be heard as yet another example of the Real’s inability to be expressed.

Now, Jack’s attempt on his wife’s and son’s lives, as well as Wendy’s discovery of all the ghosts and supernatural activity in the hotel, can be seen to represent the imperial boomerang, what happens eventually to the people of the imperial core, or to colonialists, when their repressive measures against the resisting colonized come back to harm them–a kind of colonial karma. This boomerang is happening in the US right now, where ICE has been trained by the IDF to use the very violence, originally used on the Palestinians, which is now being used on American citizens. Wendy sees white ghosts, but they’re really Native American ones, repressed into the unconscious and returning to consciousness in an unrecognizable form; that torrent of blood she sees from the elevator would be aboriginal red.

Jack, of course, dies with no redemption the way he does in King’s novel, this being one of the many reasons that King dislikes Kubrick’s adaptation of it. The Jack of the novel is flawed, of course, but sympathetic–not so for Kubrick’s Jack.

We must understand, though, that while Kubrick’s Shining is based on King’s novel, it’s a fundamentally different story (hence this being my second analysis of it), which explores almost totally different ideas and themes. Kubrick’s Jack shouldn’t be sympathetic or redeemed because he personifies so much of what is fundamentally wrong with a nation built on the genocide of aboriginals.

The perpetrating of mass murder doesn’t just change the killers; it also changes the descendants of those killers as they enjoy the privileges of living on stolen land. We see this mentality among conservative Americans who enthusiastically support open carry, yet who also defend ICE murdering Alex Pretti, who legally owned a gun that was holstered at the time, making him no threat at all to his murderers. We also see this mentality among Israelis who cheer on the continuing genocide in Gaza.

So King’s complaint that Kubrick’s “cold” ending is fine from the point of view of his novel, yet that cold ending is perfectly fitting for the film. The kind of people that Kubrick’s Jack represent do leave us cold: they keep coming back, as Jack did in his reincarnation from 1921, in that photo, aptly dated July 4th, from the Gold Room, a place where the wealthy American elite can enjoy ‘the good old days,’ dancing and trampling on an aboriginal grave.

Analysis of ‘Friday the 13th’

I’m going to focus on the first two films of the franchise, since I’m primarily concerned with the relationship between Pamela Voorhees (Betsy Palmer) and her son, Jason, as well as the implications I see in it. Also, by the third film, the format for all of them has been established, and has thus become too redundant to go over the storyline of every movie.

We all know the format: either Jason or his mother (or copycat killer Roy Burns), violently kills off a number of young adults at or near Camp Crystal Lake, or at Chris Higgins‘s local homestead, or in a halfway house where Tommy Jarvis is, or in Manhattan, or in a spacecraft in the future, or in the Springwood, Ohio setting of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. Where the killings happen doesn’t really matter, as it’s all just an indulgent blood-fest, typically with the final girl trope.

Let’s be frank: the films are good mindless fun and entertainment (emphasis on mindless), but the critics are right to deride them. They’re schlocky slasher films, intended only to capitalize on the success of far superior slasher films like Halloween, Black Christmas, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, or Psycho, the sequels even more so meant to capitalize on the success of the first Friday the 13th.

Still, however, there must be a way to explain how popular these films are with the masses so that one doesn’t insult the intelligence of Friday‘s fans. I’d like to attempt such an explanation, with an understanding that the basic elements are there, if so unconsciously, to make a good premise…if only the execution, as well as the development of the themes I’m about to discuss, was done better, without such an emphasis on just kill, kill, kill…ma, ma, ma.

I’m a strong believer in the power of the unconscious mind, and while I’m sure the screenwriters of these movies only consciously meant to create simple stories of a killer on a bloody rampage, with the intent of gaining maximum box office success, I believe there are archetypal elements deep inside the collective psyche that got put into these films (especially the first few, before things got too self-indulgent) regardless of conscious intent.

To uncover what these elements are, we first need to examine the motives behind Pamela’s and Jason’s bloodlust. In dialectical contrast to their murderous hatred of anyone they meet, they have the deepest, most intense mother/son love you could imagine…and mother/son love has already been traditionally idealized as the greatest love of all.

The evil comes in, however, when we consider how the love of this mother/son dyad is a narcissistic one, based on a feeling that each of them is just an extension and mirror-reflection of the other. The two are trapped in Lacan‘s Imaginary, incapable of and unwilling to go out into the healthier social and cultural world of the Symbolic. Hence, anybody else out there, the Other rather than the other, is just to be killed.

Other rationalizations for the killings include a moral abomination of the ‘sinfulness’ of the camp counsellors–enjoying premarital sex, smoking weed, the public indecency of playing strip Monopoly or wandering around outside in one’s panties. Tied to this sinfulness is a belief that the children at summer camp won’t be adequately watched–hence, Jason’s drowning.

Thus, Camp Crystal Lake must never be reopened, and any attempt to do so by these sinful camp counsellors will necessitate their deaths. OK, apart from the Lacanian stuff I mentioned above, we all know this–I’m just reviewing the basics here…but what does it all mean?

Here’s where my interpretation comes in. Now, since art, properly understood, is a dialogue between the artist and the audience–not just an artist saying his or her ‘only meaning’ for the creation, but a meaning evolved and developed between the artist and audience through a back-and-forth of creation and interpretation–I feel free to interpret the meaning of these movies in my way. (I also hope my interpretation can elevate the movies a bit…if at all possible.) Here goes…

Ever notice how Jason could be heard as a pun on Jesu (as in “Joy of Man’s Desiring”)? You should see where I’m going with this, Dear Reader.

Note how the superstition behind Friday the 13th is associated with the Last Supper, in which Judas Iscariot is often considered the 13th guest, and the day after was Good Friday, when Christ was killed. Judas betrayed Jesus, as the camp counsellors betrayed Jason (in his mother’s opinion, at least).

Camp Crystal Lake (the name being a pun on Christ) can be associated with the Garden of Eden, where sin lost us paradise. Naked Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit has been seen as symbolic of sex, just like the camp counsellors taking off their clothes and going about publicly in their underwear (think of Genesis 2:25), or having sex. If Adam and Eve eat of that fruit, on that day they shall surely die (Genesis 2:17); they die metaphorically on that day, losing their innocence; the counsellors die literally on that day for publicly undressing, having sex, and smoking pot. Steven Christy (Peter Brouwer), who would suffer the little children to come unto him (Mark 10:14), that is, to come to his summer camp, has a surname that is another pun on Christ.

The point I’m trying to make here, which should be obvious to you by now, Dear Reader, is that Mrs. Voorhees and her son are a perverse Madonna and Child. That deep love between a mother and her son is epitomized in all of that old Christian iconography.

By seeing Jason as an evil Jesus, I’m not calling him the Antichrist of the Book of Revelation (Go to this horror movie for that.). I mean instead that Jason and his mother, in murdering sinners rather than preaching repentance and forgiving them, represent the oppressive, authoritarian aspects of the Church. Jesus saves, but Jason slays. Some call Mary the Co-redeemer, but Pamela Voorhees is, if you will, the Co-reddener.

If Camp Crystal Lake is the Garden of Eden, then she and her son also represent the cherubim, their knives, axes, and machetes representing the flaming sword to keep the sinners out of paradise (Genesis 3:24). The purity and innocence of the place must be protected from fornicators and pot-heads, for the sake of children like Jason.

The rationalization for the Voorhees terror, therefore, is to protect children from danger and death, yet this ‘protection’ hypocritically involves danger and death. The Voorhees’s ‘Church’ is really just a front for the most reactionary of conservative thinking. The camp counsellors aren’t even moderate leftists: they’re just liberals who want to be able to relax and have a good time every now and then. Pamela, like any far right-winger, expects the staff of Camp Crystal Lake to be working non-stop to ensure the safety of the kids. If the staff slacks off at all, then like Amon Göth, she’ll pick them off one by one, but with a knife or axe instead of a rifle.

When I speak of a ‘perverse Madonna and Child,” I don’t mean it as a comment on religion and spirituality per se, but as representative of reactionary, conservative authoritarian thinking, how religion is used (if only symbolically in these movies) to justify power and control over others. The year the first film came out, in 1980, as well that of as its first sequel, 1981, is fitting given these were the first of the reactionary Reagan/Thatcher years.

Going into the mid-1980s, there was a debate on CNN’s Crossfire about whether or not PMRC censorship of popular music’s racier lyrics was valid; opposed to it, Frank Zappa also warned of the US moving in the direction of what he called a “fascist theocracy.” The two conservatives he was debating scoffed at him, but he didn’t say the US was already a fascist theocracy at the time: he said that “the Reagan administration…[was] steering us right down that pipe.” (Reagan, incidentally, had fundamentalist Christian beliefs and supported the religious right.)

Well, look at the US today, under Trump, with Roe vs Wade overturned (to protect the unborn child, ostensibly, but actually to curb ‘fornication’ and to control women’s reproductive systems), and with masked ICE men violently removing people from the ‘Camp Crystal Lake,’ if you will, of the US, and shooting in the face anyone who resists. How like Jason’s violence, with his goalie mask and murder weapons.

The notion of the deep love and connection between Mary and the Christ child is not, of course, limited to Christianity. Pagan notions of a mother-goddess and her son/consort abounded in the ancient world, in such forms as Isis and Horus. The relationship is archetypal…and narcissistic. Robert Graves dealt with the idea in The White Goddess when he said, “Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man’s dependence on her for life.” Pamela’s undying love for Jason, which involved an unending quest to find new victims in whom to avenge his death, is an extension of her own narcissism.

Similarly, Jason in the sequels saw in his mother a metaphorical mirror of himself. He endlessly avenges her death, with new victims, as she did his. She and he are spiritually inseparable, just as the authoritarian leader and his mindless, jackbooted soldiers are, as ICE are for the US government. Properly understood, the son is virtually indistinguishable from the mother (at least in terms of will and motivation, if not in terms of other things, which I’ll go into soon enough), just as the mindless ICE agents do only the will of their fascist government, with no individual will of their own, obeying orders uncritically.

So indistinguishable is Mrs. Voorhees from Jason that at the beginning of Scream, Casey Becker (Drew Barrymore) confuses mother with son, incorrectly naming Jason as the killer in the first Friday movie and forgetting that he didn’t show up until the sequels. The same “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” echoed, reverberated whispering is heard in most of the films, regardless of whether mother or son is the killer.

That whispering–so often misheard as “chi, chi, chi, ha, ha, ha” because of the heavy echo, reverb, and distortion resulting from the whispering of “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” by film composer Harry Manfredini into a microphone, then running it through an Echoplex machine–is short for “Kill her, Mommy.” Pamela hears Jason saying this over and over in her head, her imitating the child’s high-pitched voice as she chases Alice Hardy (Adrienne King) during the climax of the first film. There are variations on the whispering in the sequels: in Part Two, for example, one usually hears only “ki, ki, ki,” and only occasionally “ma, ma, ma.”

The sameness or variation in the whispering doesn’t ultimately matter: the continuity underlines how Jason and his mother are spiritually, if not materially, one and the same person. The same is true of the ruling class and their thuggish soldiers (as I see them represented by the murderous mother and son), who often use religion and its priggish morality to justify their authoritarian grip on power.

So, when Mrs. Voorhees dies, Jason is to take over the killing duties. Accordingly, two months after her decapitation by Alice, Jason kills her in her kitchen with an ice pick in her temple after she sees the severed head of his mother in her fridge. Just as his mother avenged his death, he avenges hers.

Here’s the problem, though: if Jason never drowned, but she only thought he did (as the story was ret-conned), wouldn’t she have learned he never died soon enough? She had over twenty years to learn. If she knew the whole time, or much of or most of the time, wouldn’t that have deflated her rage enough not to kill (so many)? Also, how was adult Jason able to find where Alice was living?

I propose a different explanation, one that takes into account the Mary/Jesus symbolism discussed above, and which allows for the unavoidable supernatural element in these movies. He was resurrected, given an adult body, and had the clairvoyance to find where Alice was.

Why not resurrected? He was certainly resurrected in a number of the other sequels, and his ability to keep on living after other injuries, ones that should have been fatal, strongly implies supernatural abilities. I’d say Mom raised Jason from the dead, just as God raised Jesus from the dead (Romans 10:9). Similarly, just as the resurrected Christ had a spiritual body (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), one “imperishable” and “raised in power,” not weakness, so does Jason have an imperishable, powerful body, one whose growth to adulthood seems even to have been accelerated.

To get back to “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma…”, who is saying it, really? Does Jason’s ghost say it to his mother in the first film, her imitating his voice as I described it above? In the sequels, does her ghost chant it in Jason’s mind, implying not only a psychic link between the two killers, but also that her chanting “ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” in his mind’s ear means she’s calling him “Mommy,” thus further cementing my idea that the identity of the two is of only one spiritual presence?

In any case, as we know, Jason doesn’t talk at all: his voice is in his murder weapons (recall that amusing guest appearance he made on the Arsenio Hall Show to promote Jason Takes Manhattan).

His muteness, from a psychoanalytic viewpoint, is linked to his social isolation. Recall what I said above about his dyadic relationship with his mother, as a reflection of his being stuck in the narcissism of the Imaginary Order. To enter the social and cultural world of the Symbolic, one must use language. The Symbolic is the healthy world of human relationships.

That a deformed, mentally disabled child would have extreme difficulties being a part of the Symbolic and joining normal society would be an understatement. His drowning in the lake complicates matters further: it’s representative of not only never leaving the Imaginary, but also of being trapped in the traumatic, undifferentiated, inexpressible Chaos of Lacan’s Real Order.

The non-differentiated, formlessness of the lake is symbolic of the cosmic ocean, where all begins and ends (i.e., the Great Flood; consider also the rain storm in the first film as associated with the Deluge, after which the ‘sons of God’ lay with the ‘daughters of men’…that is, fornicated). Jason died in the lake, and Alice’s Carrie-like nightmare of him coming up at her in the boat and pulling her down in the water is also to be associated with the cosmic ocean as bringing us all back to death at the end of the world.

Just as Jason has supernatural abilities as I described above, and just as his mother is intolerant of sexual indulgence, so were Carrie and her religious fanatic mother respectively, hence how fitting it was to add Alice’s Carrie-like nightmare to the end of the first movie. As for Part III‘s ending, it’s fitting for Chris Higgins (Dana Kimmell) to have a similar nightmare of Mrs. Voorhees coming up from the water and dragging her from her boat into it, even though Chris doesn’t seem to know (oddly, considering how close she is to Camp Crystal Lake) who Jason or his mother are. The point is that it further reinforces how Jason and his mother are one, especially in the undifferentiated, traumatizing Chaos-Real of the water.

At the climax of Part II, Ginny Field (Amy Steel) discovers Jason’s shrine of his mother (how like one of these, if you will!), with her severed head. Knowing the ‘legend’ of him seeing Alice decapitate his mother and him seeking revenge (as she had for him), Ginny stands before Pamela’s head to block its view from Jason, her wearing Pamela’s old sweater. Using her wits and knowledge of child psychology, Ginny takes a gamble impersonating Mrs. Voorhees, appealing to his sense of filial duty and obedience to his mother (“Jason, Mother is talking to you!”). The only human relationship he can understand is one of power and authority. The only reason he’ll listen to her, and not kill her, is that she, as his mother (and also as a reflection/extension of himself), has absolute power over him.

Mindless killers like him (police, the military, ICE, etc.) similarly see human relationships only in this hierarchical sense. If you’re ‘beneath’ me, I can beat and kill you; if you’re ‘above’ me, you can beat and kill me. There is no sense of reciprocity, no mutuality, no connection, no communication.

Within my framework of Jason and his mother as a perverse version of Jesus and Mary, it’s ironic that ‘the Word made flesh’ speaks no words in these movies. (“Ki, ki, ki, ma, ma, ma” would just be the voice of a ghost ringing in his head, not him talking.) Instead, Jason, in his Oedipal relationship with Mrs. Voorhees, speaks only in the primitive, pre-verbal form of communication–as Wilfred Bion conceptualized it–of projective identification and negative containment (as symbolized by all the stabbings and slashing).

Normally, a mother contains her baby’s agitations and distress through a soothing process Bion called maternal reverie. The container, ♀︎, is yonic in symbolism; the contained, ♂︎, is phallic. This is a calming, positive containment. In pathological parent/child relationships, though, as in the case with Pamela and Jason, the containment of the child’s agitations and distress is the opposite of soothing and calming. Traumas aren’t processed–they’re aggravated, intensified, leading to what Bion called a nameless dread…negative containment.

Jason, thus, unable to develop a normal ability to think, to process external stimuli, and to grow in K (knowledge), he cannot speak and express himself verbally. He can only communicate in that primitive, non-verbal way, which involves projecting onto other people. And since all he can communicate is projections of pain, he does so through negative containment, in which the phallic contained is a knife, machete, axe, or pitchfork, and the yonic container is a stab or slash wound.

This kind of mindless, violent communication is also typical of the hired thugs of a fascist state. The bloody, brutal way in which we see the victims killed in these movies (as demonstrated by the special makeup effects of people like Tom Savini) also leads, disturbingly, to a desensitization to violence. As I said above, it’s an interesting coincidence how this franchise began in the 1980s, with the rise of Reagan/Thatcher neoliberalism and Zappa’s fears of a movement in the direction of a fascist theocracy, and yet here we are, with at best minimal outrage from politicians at the ongoing Gaza genocide, the murder of Renee Good, the state of perpetual war around the world ever since 9/11, and the kidnapping (on baseless charges) of the president of Venezuela and his wife. Atrocities in the real world have been reduced to mere entertainment.

As the sequels of the franchise go on, we notice that the setting shifts farther and farther away from the Eden of Camp Crystal Lake: first, to places nearby (in the novelization of Part II, Alice has returned to the town of Crystal Lake, where Jason kills her–page 6), then to Tommy Jarvis’s halfway home, then to Manhattan, to a spaceship in the future, to Freddy Krueger’s Springwood…and like Jesus, Jason even harrows hell! By analogy, the American settler-colonial state massacred the Native Americans, then engaged in imperialist war and plunder…often, and to a significant extent at least, killing in the name of Christ.

And just as Jason’s mindless, pointless killings seem to go on and on forever, in all their perpetual brutality, so do those of the US empire, to this day, both locally and internationally.

As I said at the beginning of this analysis, I’m not saying that the writers of the films of this franchise intended the allegory that I’m formulating here; that’s all my invention. They were just dragging out a gore-fest to make a maximum amount of money, which by the way is what capitalism and imperialism by extension are all about. The associations I’m making reflect unconscious ideas we all have floating around in our minds, for such is the heritage of our collective unconscious: religious iconography representing our lofty moral ideals, lashing out violently when those ideals aren’t lived up to, violence as a form of control, self-righteous narcissism, parental authoritarianism expanding into state authoritarianism.

As a result, every day feels like an unlucky day.

Redacted

******************those************
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****girls***************************
**********************did**********
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**********nothing******************
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**************************wrong***
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What Is Feared of Communism Is Here in Capitalism

I: Introduction

Several weeks before I started writing this post, I shared a meme on Facebook, one whose pro-Soviet content I don’t remember (and which isn’t all that relevant, anyway), but which also got me a troll reaction from some liberal who said, “No Gulags.” This comment is what has inspired the current article.

I’ve already written a number of defenses of communism in such articles as these, as well as a number of criticisms of capitalism, from both my former anarchist and my current ‘tankie’ perspectives, as can be found here. In this article, though, I feel I need to address something different.

There’s always this fear among many in the West, including many on the left: what if we ‘tankies’ are in denial about how the dictatorship of the proletariat will inevitably become totalitarian and oppressive? My answer in this article is that capitalism has already become so. We’d might as well try socialism. What else have we to lose, but our chains?

II: The Forms of Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism, tyranny, an oppressive state–whatever you want to call it–takes on many forms. I’ll list off pretty much the main forms here. First, and most obviously, totalitarianism discards these:

–a free press
–freedom of speech, and
–democracy

Then, with its intrusive government, we start to go into totalitarianism’s harsher forms:

–cults of personality
–surveillance, and
–police brutality

Finally, we come to the most horrifying forms:

–concentration camps, and
–mass murder, or genocides

Communism, of course, has been accused of perpetrating all of the above. Fascism, even more obviously (or, at least it should be more obvious), has been genuinely guilty of all of these. The horseshit horseshoe theory would have you believe that the extreme left and extreme right are similar in having supposedly led to the same outcomes, leaving liberal democracy as the only viable alternative.

A far more accurate representation of the relationship between the left, centre, and right, however, would be the fishhook theory, in which we can see liberal centrism backsliding into fascism. Recall Stalin’s words on the subject: “Social-democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.” Note in this connection that social democracy is as left-leaning as liberals get; the rest of liberalism moves only further rightward.

A casual observation of Western politics, especially from the dissolution of the USSR to the present day, should demonstrate the truth of Stalin’s words. First, liberals demonized communism in lockstep with conservatives. Then, declaring an “end of history” with communism’s demise and the “free market” as the only viable system, liberals helped to chip away at social welfare, since there was no longer any fear of socialist revolution. Finally, as leftist agitation revives, they’ve used fascism to thwart it.

And here we are.

One must take seriously the notion of a fear of communism, through its association with the atrocities listed above, to understand the great lengths to which right-wingers will go to defend capitalism. Note that these right-wingers are usually of the petite bourgeoisie, the useful idiots of the ruling class, whose real reason for fearing communism is the loss of their wealth; so they fear monger in the media they own to tell the middle and lower classes about communist ‘atrocities.’

As a result, the conservative and liberal masses will tolerate any horrors that go on in our society today so as to prevent a resurgence of socialism. If the poor are so bad off, it’s because they’re lazy, talentless, incompetent ‘losers,’ or they waste money that they should be saving. Never mind that class mobility is a myth. People generally stay in the class they were born in.

When one tries to tell these bootlickers of the rich that the root of the problem of the poor is systemic, the inevitable result of capitalism, they claim that our political problems stem from ‘corporatism,’ because apparently, ‘real capitalism’ and the government are mutually-exclusive antitheses of each other. Never mind that capitalists have always used the state to protect their private property interests: that’s what the cops are for.

Even today’s boot-lickers of the rich cannot deny that the political system, especially that of the past twenty-five years or so, has been nothing less than an unmitigated disaster, one that continues to get worse and worse. What they cannot bring themselves to admit is that this disaster has been the result of the neoliberal experiment, which is a subordination of everything, the government in particular, to the Almighty Market. Hence the need to describe our growing totalitarianism as ‘socialist,’ even when it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that the current system is anything but socialist.

Politicians on both sides of the political fence accuse each other of being ‘communist.’ Trump and his administration spew constant verbal flatulence about the dangers of ‘radical Marxist extremists,’ when if anything, even among today’s progressives, Western Marxism is practically moribund. Liberals are similar, with Kamala Harris bizarrely calling Trump a ‘communist.’ At first, this comment just seems to be yet another air-headed one from her; yet on closer inspection, we can see how its purpose was really to associate today’s totalitarianism with communism rather than with its true source–fascism.

Her Democratic Party has also joined Republicans in issuing a blanket condemnation of socialism just before Trump’s meeting with ‘socialist’ Zohran Mamdani. This bipartisan fear of socialist ‘totalitarianism’ is bogus given their recent embrace of fascist totalitarianism, as I’ll attempt to prove below. Their real fear, as I mentioned above, is the plan to have workers take control of the means of production, and therefore to take the excess wealth of the billionaire class and redistribute it among the masses. Such a taking of wealth is a taking of power from the ruling class.

But let’s now look at all of the ways that capitalism has turned totalitarian.

III: No More Free Press

This loss didn’t come about in one fell swoop (i.e., with Trump). It started decades ago, and gradually got worse before we came to where we are today. While the mainstream Western media has always been bourgeois in ideology, we can see the beginnings of this particular problem with the abolition of the fairness doctrine in 1987. Introduced in 1949, the fairness doctrine was a policy requiring the media to present controversial issues of importance from differing points of view. Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demise of the Eastern Bloc would come not too many years since the abolition of this policy, it’s easy to see how the already anti-communist stance of the media during the Cold War would become even more insistently pro-capitalist after that.

Next came the Telecommunications Act that Clinton signed into law in 1996, which allowed mergers and acquisitions in the American media, leading to today’s control of about 90% of the US media by only six corporations. This change thus means that most of Americans’ access to information is decided by the ruling class, and therefore reflecting their agenda and interests. There’s an international networking of media to tell essentially the same stories from largely the same political points of view, so this problem is not limited to the US.

The situation got worse in 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. Just so there’s no misunderstanding that the centibillionaire supposedly has no interest in the political content in his newspaper, in 2025 he announced that the WaPo would essentially promote right-wing views only, euphemistically worded as defending “personal liberties and free markets.” Well, we all know what conservatives mean when they say that.

Additionally, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, idiotically renaming it “X.” The social media website has also become a haven for right-wing views, which should not be surprising, given its owner’s Nazi salute during Trump’s inauguration and other manifestations of Musk’s far-right leanings.

Indeed, Mint Press News (MPN) published an article in late November of 2025 about how seven oligarchs, including of course Bezos and Musk, are now controlling key elements of the mainstream media. Remember in this connection Mark Zuckerberg’s ownership of Facebook. Larry Ellison is to purchase CNN as of the writing of my article, and CNN has already been partisan to the Democratic Party/liberal wing of the ruling class.

When you have oligarchs like these controlling the average person’s access to information, who needs a state-owned media to brainwash them into compliance (and, incidentally, the presence of ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officials, ex-generals, and former security state operatives in the news–all of whom work for imperialist capitalism, in case there was any misunderstanding–is enough to make one wonder if American media is anything other than state-owned)? The attendance of elites like Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk at Trump’s inauguration should have been sufficiently and disturbingly portentous of things soon to come.

Now, there are still left-wing voices like mine and those in alternative media, like MPN or ChatNews Net, to give the people a dissenting voice, but firstly, our voices get nowhere near the circulation of the establishment ones, and we also get trolled a lot by reactionary types, either the useful idiots of that establishment, or paid trolls whose job is to discourage us from being those necessary ones shouting in the wilderness.

The point is that a stifled free press marks the beginning of totalitarianism, because no free press means no freedom of speech, which brings me to my next topic.

IV: No More Freedom of Speech

The one crowning example of a lack of freedom of speech in recent years has been the suppression of pro-Palestinian protestors on the campsites of American universities. This suppression is of crucial importance, for it is about preventing the one basic thing anyone in a truly democratic society should be given the freedom to do: protest injustice.

Injustice has always been a part of human experience, and overcoming it has sadly never been easy. We should, however, at least be able to talk openly about injustice and make demands that it stop. This is especially true if the injustice is as extreme as an ongoing genocide. If the powers-that-be can suppress the protesting of ethnic cleansing, it will become all the easier to suppress the protests of smaller injustices, which leads to…

V: No More Democracy

Let’s start by defining what democracy actually is. At the risk of sounding pedantic and condescending, I’ll use an etymology you should already know: the word comes from Greek words meaning “people rule.” Now, what does the rule of the people actually entail? Mindless voting for a particular political party, with little thought as to what the real issues are (i.e., “Vote blue, no matter who”)? Or does it mean ensuring that the policies enacted serve the will and interests of regular, working-class people?

I’ll put my money on the latter definition.

Let’s compare, for example, Libya under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi, as contrasted with the years of revolving-door voting for different leaders, say, every four to eight years or so in the US, the UK, Canada, etc. Neoliberalism has, over the past forty to fifty years, eroded economic democracy by crushing unions; it has cut welfare funding and regulations to allow the rich to gain more profit at the expense of the people and the environment; and it has generally immiserated the poor, leading to an epidemic of homelessness. How is any of this power for the people? How is it democratic?

Contrast that with the ‘despotic’ rule of Gaddafi. His Jamahiriya, or Third International Theory, was a kind of Islamic socialism that provided for the basic needs of Libyans throughout the years of his rule of the country. The benefits that his government provided included guaranteed universal housing, education, and health care, as well as free electricity and the free starting of farming businesses, bursaries given to mothers with newborn babies, cheap gas, and the raising of Libyan literacy from 25% to 87%.

How is ‘Western democracy’ better than that?

The notion that Gaddafi was a ‘brutal dictator’ would be based on the idea of his suppressing of anyone opposed to his system of government; but who would have opposed such a system? Anyone opposed to the kind of thing his government was providing, of course–that is, opposed to giving the benefits described above to his people (such opposition would have included Islamic fundamentalists, who were often imprisoned during his rule). I don’t know about you, Dear Reader, but I don’t have much sympathy for those opposed to giving the Libyan people the aforementioned benefits.

My point is that Gaddafi may have been a dictator, but whatever actual objective flaws he may have had, he was by any reasonable standard a benevolent dictator. Why is his having stayed in power for over forty years a problem if he had provided those benefits to his people; whereas having an assembly line–as it were–of presidents or prime ministers who change every half- or full decade or so, but largely serve the rich instead of the ordinary people, is considered more democratic?

Another important point must be considered: are the candidates available to be voted for truly representative of the wishes and interests of ordinary people in Western elections, or are they people chosen–directly or indirectly–by the ruling class, while more truly representative candidates are deliberately marginalized, and therefore unavailable?

As anyone who has read enough of my articles should already know, I am no supporter of Bernie Sanders, but note how not only does he not have a snowball’s chance in hell of ever being elected (let alone of being allowed to tax the rich to gain the revenue needed to pay for the FDR-New-Deal kind of social programs that are so popular among working-class Americans), but he is correctly understood to be a sheepdog for the left. The establishment uses people like him and AOC to sell hope to the masses, then at the last minute, he bows down and tells his crestfallen supporters to vote instead for the newest corporate whore of the Democratic Party. This is by design.

Similarly, because of their left-wing political positions, the Green Party of the United States stands no chance of even being in a position to challenge the corrupt and morally bankrupt two-party system of the US, let alone to win elections and implement their policies.

Anyone with any sense knows that the Democrats and the Republicans are, at best, mere variations on each other, and at worst, two wings of the same party, the Capitalist Party, with virtually identical, imperialist policies. While generally less extreme than in the US, the bourgeois political parties of any country under capitalism are of essentially the same nature.

This sad state of affairs is actually worse than having a one-party state (and contrary to bourgeois propaganda, there was and is far more democracy in the Soviet and Chinese systems than is assumed in the West), because in multi-party bourgeois politics, there is the illusion of choice that fools the public into thinking they needn’t change the system. The ruling class will never allow any party to challenge the capitalist system; they’ll never allow anyone to legislate them out of their wealth. Recall Goethe’s words.

Voting does not work. I haven’t even gotten into the corruption of the US electoral college or gerrymandering. Revolution is the solution.

VI: Intrusive Government

Thanks to anti-Soviet propaganda like George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-four, as well as Leon Trotsky‘s description of the USSR as “totalitarian” and his description of their labour camps as “concentration camps,” we in the West have come to associate big, intrusive government with socialism and communism, when associating them with right-wing and fascist governments is far more apt, as I’ll try to demonstrate.

The association of intrusive government with communism is so consummate in the minds of so many in the West that whenever one sees examples of such intrusiveness in the US, it’s assumed that the country has become ‘communist.’ This is especially true when the Democrats are in power, since they are assumed by the politically illiterate to be ‘left-wing.’

Recall in this connection the conservative reaction to Obama becoming president, and how they idiotically said “there’s a communist living in the White House,” and he would enact socialist policies, when in reality he did nothing of the sort. He extended George W Bush’s Patriot Act, ordered more drone strikes than Dubya, was the Deporter-In-Chief, helped oust the actually socialist Gaddafi, and helped the capitalist class do particularly well during the economic crisis of the late 2000s and early 2010s, including bailing out the banks. He was in fact groomed by the ruling class to do things like these. The colour of his skin is completely irrelevant.

The problem of NSA surveillance was exposed by Edward Snowden back in 2013, during Obama’s very capitalist administration. AI is only going to make this surveillance worse, as I’ll demonstrate in its section below.

Obama’s continuation of Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as his administration’s involvement in the regime change operations in Libya and Syria, are clear, blatant examples of capitalist imperialism in those countries, not of socialism. When people speak of ‘human rights violations’ in Cuba, I have two words to say to them: Guantanamo Bay, something Obama allowed to continue from Bush’s administration, and which continues to this day, though with fewer people imprisoned.

The point is that the US government, like any capitalist, imperialist government, is so intrusive that it insinuates itself into the affairs of other countries, places it doesn’t belong, either through military invasions or coups d’état. Right-wingers think of intrusive government as being an essentially socialist affair (welfare, single-payer healthcare, etc.), while ignoring the military, NSA, and CIA as branches of the government, which are totally bloated.

The libertarian notion of ‘small government’ is a con game, anyway. It’s not about whether government is ‘big’ or ‘small’; it’s about who the government serves–the people, or the wealthy elite. Similarly, the validity or invalidity of taxation depends on two things, as I see it–who is being taxed the most, and how the tax revenue is being spent. If the rich pay the most taxes, and the revenue is spent on social programs for the poor, taxation is valid; if the middle and lower classes are being taxed up the kazoo, while the rich pay little if any taxes, and if the tax money is being spent mostly on the imperial war machine and to bail out the banks, taxation is invalid.

So, intrusive government can be totally capitalist; socialism has no monopoly on the problem.

Since I’ve been criticizing the Obama administration a lot, and since liberals are always fawning over him and finding no fault in him at all, this brings me to my next point.

VII: Cults of Personality

Anti-communists love to quack about how we tankies supposedly revere men like Stalin and Mao as if they were gods. We do no such thing. It must also be understood that Stalin and Mao rejected the idea of being raised up on such pedestals, contrary to bourgeois propaganda. We Marxist-Leninists are also thoroughly willing to acknowledge their faults as leaders.

Their achievements in helping to modernize Russia and China are enough to explain that their people simply loved them rather than ‘worshipped’ them. Indeed, decades after it was ‘necessary’ to love Stalin, huge numbers of Russians still love him, and it shouldn’t be difficult to see why: over a mere two and a half decades or so, he transformed the USSR from being a backward, agrarian state into an industrialized, nuclear-armed superpower, while also having defeated the Nazis.

Mao’s attempts to modernize China went on a rockier road, admittedly (with the deaths from the Great Leap Forward wildly exaggerated), but the foundation he built was essential to the glorious success of China today. Again, the Western painting of Stalin and Mao as cruel tyrants has far more to do with bourgeois, Cold War propaganda than it does with reality.

Still, all of that is secondary to the point I want to make, which is that the political right has its cults of personality no less, if not much more, than the left has. Hitler and Mussolini had cults of personality, and contrary to the delusions of many right-wing libertarians, fascism is a capitalist ideology, not a socialist one. The whole purpose of fascism is to crush leftist uprisings (which, by the way, should explain the recent rise in fascist totalitarianism); Hitler’s big business donors ensured that he’d never take seriously the S in NSDAP.

But even more to my point is how we can see a cult of personality in recent, capitalist presidents like Obama and Trump, in each of whom one could write up an epic catalogue of awful things both have done. Still, their worshippers refuse to find fault in them, or they at least minimize their faults.

How many times have we seen nauseating praise of Obama has having led the US for eight years without any scandals, and how he was all grace, style, and class? Let’s just conveniently ignore his drone killings, his prosecuting of (and, based on political and social status, double-standards on) whistle-blowers, his expansion of all of the evils of his predecessor’s administration, and everything else I mentioned above? Eight years of grace, style, and class war…there, I fixed it.

Then, there’s Trump’s even more obvious cult of personality. Many among the religious right have imagined that God sent Orange-face to take on the “deep state” and to “drain the swamp” of corruption. If that isn’t a cult of personality, I don’t know what is.

Not only will the MAGA crowd believe such nonsense about Trump, they’ll also do all kinds of mental gymnastics to do away with their cognitive dissonance upon facing the truth. They claim, for example, that as with King David (who committed adultery with Bathsheba and had her cuckolded husband, Uriah the Hittite, killed so he could marry her), God chose a sinner in Trump to do His will. This is so even in light of how it’s pretty much settled that Trump is guilty of having joined in on the sexual exploitation and abuse of underage girls with Epstein et al.

And the ‘president of peace’? Apart from his failure to end the Russia/Ukraine war (which I figured he wouldn’t have been able to do even if he’d sincerely wanted to), his banging of the war drums against Venezuela–not to stop a drug cartel, but to steal their oil, a motive freely admitted to–proves that he’s no less of a warmonger than any other US president. The MAGA crowd still won’t admit that they were conned…that their Lord and Saviour is as much a sheepdog for the right as Bernie Sanders is a sheepdog for the left.

VIII: Surveillance

Now, if there’s any one thing that we associate with totalitarianism, it’s surveillance. We can thank Orwell for that: BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, telescreens that, as you watch them, people on the other side are watching you, the Thought Police, etc. Furthermore, also thanks to the snitch, totalitarian surveillance is also associated with socialism. So, if people today feel themselves to be surveilled, they all too often tend to think theirs is a socialist government.

Well, we’re far beyond what Snowden discovered over a decade ago as of this writing, and as I’ve endeavoured to demonstrate to you, Dear Reader, ours is a capitalist world. Only a small handful of countries today are of the Marxist-Leninist ideology (and some leftists dispute whether a few of those even are truly socialist). People are going to have to confront the reality that it’s our capitalist government that is oppressing us.

To start with a relatively minor example, you must have noticed by now that whenever you show an interest in this or that product online, you tend to see ads for similar products, or ones associated in one way or another with that product. Obviously, capitalists are surveilling you, and trying to get you to part with your money to buy their product and line their pockets. BIG BUSINESS IS WATCHING YOU.

There are surveillance cameras on streets, ready to catch proof of drivers violating traffic laws (including relatively trivial ones) as an excuse to pass out fines and take more money out of your pockets. There seems to be less of an interest in driver safety than there is in controlling people.

Of course, surveillance has recently been enhanced through the use of AI in the forms of smart homes, smart TVs, smart cars, and smart cities. Orwell’s telescreens had nothing on this. Keep in mind also how this AI is linked with some of the richest men in the world: Jensen Huang, cofounder of Nvidia, as well as Musk, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. There has been growing concern that tech bros like these are further eroding democracy (News flash: they’re all capitalists!)

This surveillance can, of course, be used to help the ruling class track any and all revolutionary activity, on- or offline. Remember how a number of those tech bros are buddying up with Trump. Palantir is another big tech company using AI in aid of government surveillance, helping to enable such things as Trump’s deportations.

Two of Palantir’s founders, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, have publicly shown themselves to be particularly problematic in their attitudes to human rights, democracy, and warmongering. Thiel has been described as both an Ayn Rand libertarian and a ‘skeptic’ about democracy–something many might find contradictory, but not me, for the reasons I’ve given above and in other posts. As for Karp, one need only watch him ranting in YouTube videos to get a clear sense of how unhinged (and/or addled by narcotics, most likely) he is, fanatically defending imperialist war, Zionism, Western chauvinism, and ICE.

Seriously, do we want loose cannons like these in charge of AI and surveillance? Now ICE, among other things, brings me to my next topic.

IX: Police Brutality and ICE

Now, let’s start going into the truly nasty and violent aspects of our growing totalitarian world, in case what I mentioned above wasn’t enough to convince you, Dear Reader. I know I’ve been focusing a lot on the US, the belly of the beast to which ICE is specific, but manifestations of the militarization of police can be found in many countries around the world–not just in the US, but also in Brazil, Canada, Colombia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, and the UK, as well as in Africa. I should hardly need to go into great detail about the harm police militarization does to democracy, to public trust, to marginalized communities in particular, and to civilians perceived as enemies. The Thought Police, NKVD, and Stasi had nothing on these cops.

A lot of white people in the US and elsewhere in the West show little, if any, sensitivity to how these cops brutalize blacks, Latin Americans, and LGBTQ+ people. If such white and conservative people had ever had the experience of being disproportionately targeted by militarized police, though, they’d not only realize what a totalitarian world we’ve been living in, they might also realize that those marginalized groups…are…actually…people, too, no less so than the straight white crowd.

We always hear stories of how the secret police of socialist states would round up dissidents in the middle of the night, using torture and intimidation to crush political dissent. What we don’t hear is how these dissidents were, or were at least perceived to be, the kind of capitalist sympathizers who, if left to do whatever they wanted, would have all the sooner and surer brought back capitalism, leading in turn to the capitalist totalitarian nightmare we’re in now…which includes having the same kind of cops doing the same kind of thing to the anticapitalist dissidents of today.

We’ve already seen the extent to which ICE will terrorize people in the Latin American community on the pretext that they’re illegals, kidnapping them, separating children from their parents in cages, then deporting them. Venezuelans have been sent to CECOT in El Salvador; others have been sent to “Alligator Alcatraz,” places that are actually concentration camps (more on that below), where they’ve suffered all kinds of abuses. These cops often nab them at night, too.

We’ve known for ages about police brutality and the killing of blacks, often with impunity. Note that none of this started under Trump, whom liberals like to blame for everything while ignoring the sins of their favoured presidents: the Obama and Biden administrations presided over a lot of this kind of brutality, as well as the ICE deportations. Fascism has been building and growing in the West for a long time.

Things have taken a recent turn for the worse under the second Trump administration, with Pam Bondi announcing that law enforcement officials are to investigate Antifa and other supposed domestic terrorist groups. This will be nothing less than a crackdown on leftist groups perceived as a threat to the American capitalist government. Note that ‘Antifa’ just means antifascist, which should be deemed a perfectly reasonable stance to have, especially in our increasingly fascist world. So criminalizing an ‘organization’ not clearly defined as such should tell you what kind of a government the US really has. Now, let’s talk about those…

X: Concentration Camps and Prisons

Before I get into the current situation, it might be fitting to point out that, contrary to anti-Soviet propaganda that came from such groups as the CIA during the Cold War, the CIA themselves knew that being in the Gulag labour camps was nowhere near as bad as we’ve been led to believe. Among the many facts given in the link above, the Soviet archives reveal that 20 to 40 percent of Gulag inmates were released every year, and the vast majority of inmates were charged with nonpolitical offences: murder, assault, theft, and any of the other usual crimes punishable in any society.

The Nazi concentration camps, on the other hand, were genuine death camps, in which up to 11 million inmates were victims of murder for being Jews, Roma, gay men, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally ill and mentally or physically disabled, political and religious opposition to the regime, etc. And fascists were and are allied with capitalism, not socialism…in case you forgot.

As for today’s capitalist concentration camps, I’ve already mentioned those in El Salvador and in Florida, where many have been held without charge or due process, and where many are being subject to beatings, psychological and sexual abuse, inhumane living conditions, denial of medical care, incommunicado detention, overcrowding, inadequate food rations, etc.

Let’s now do a comparison of the characteristic detainees: in CECOT and Alligator Alcatraz, the great majority of inmates are Latin Americans; in the Nazi concentration camps, the inmates were mostly “Untermenschen“–Jews, Roma, gay men, the mentally ill and disabled, and political prisoners; in the Gulag, they were mostly criminals. Seriously, which political stance is far, far guiltier of using labour camps as places for abuse and injustice–the far left, or the far right?

Next, we can look at the for-profit prison system, which uses inmates to do labour for corporations and typically pays them wages far below the minimum wage, making the work hardly distinguishable from slavery. Prisons for profit are perhaps most notorious in the US, but they also exist in countries around the world, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, France, South Africa, South Korea, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Jamaica, Peru, etc., to varying extents.

Note how capitalistic such prisons are (i.e., the motive is maximizing profits for the corporations). The near-slave status of the prisoner-labourers is easily comparable to that of the slaves in the Nazi concentration camps, who generally worked for nothing. In the US, the 13th amendment permits prison slavery. In contrast, in the Gulag, inmates were paid or given food, given more or less of it depending on how productive their work was.

Of course, the very worst concentration camp in the world–and it can legitimately, if metaphorically, be called one, for its victims (innocent men, women, and children) are trapped in the place and murdered and brutalized every day–is the open-air concentration camp that is Gaza. The totalitarian mass murder going on there and elsewhere is my next topic.

XI: Mass Murder

Before I go into the capitalist mass murder of today (and of so many years and decades before that), we need to take a brief look at the nonsense that bourgeois propaganda has said about the deaths blamed on communism, or more accurately, how many deaths there supposedly were due to communism, as opposed to how many deaths there actually were.

The spurious sources of the ‘100 million killed by communists’ idea are such books as The Black Book of Communism, the lies of Robert Conquest, and the like. Please click on the links if you want more detail on that, since I don’t wish to waste time and space going into that. Suffice it to say that the 100 million figure is wildly exaggerated and deliberately contrived for maximum propagandistic effect. Bourgeois paranoia about the spread of communism during the Cold War necessitated, from the ruling class’s point of view, exaggerated numbers meant to shock, not to inform. You know the old cliché: in war, the first casualty is the truth.

In any case, even if one accepts the absurdly high number of 100 million deaths as accurate, this otherwise bloated figure is dwarfed by the millions of people who have died, and who continue to die annually, under capitalism. We’ve been able to feed the entire world for a long time, but we don’t because there’s no profit in doing so. The combined wealth of oligarchs like Musk, Ellison, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Buffett, Thiel, Karp, and others could feed the world, build hospitals and schools, provide affordable (if not free) housing, and the like. The deaths resulting from starvation, disease, homelessness, and war are largely preventable: only the ruling class’s greed and psychopathy prevent it.

The endless imperialist wars cause constant, needless deaths. The Iraq War alone resulted in at least a million deaths. Contrary to what right-wing libertarians think, war is not just ‘government stuff.’ War is a business. Weapons manufacturers like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, and others are laughing all the way to the bank with all the glorious profits they’re making off of human suffering and death. The stealing of natural resources, like the oil in Iraq and Syria and the oil to be stolen from Venezuela, is a crucial aspect of capitalist imperialism and the obvious motive for these wars.

The recent genocides in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan are the most egregious recent examples of capitalist mass murder, though. Again, weapons from many countries around the world have been sold to the killers in these genocides: the Saudi-led coalition killing Yemenis, the IDF killing Gazans and those in the West Bank, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) killing the Sudanese.

Special attention ought to be given to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, though. The real reason for the support of so many countries around the world, especially the Anglo-American NATO-allied empire, for Israel–apart from the obvious business interests (i.e., the buying and selling of weapons)–is how crucial the Jewish state is as an ally in maintaining imperial control of the region. There’s a lot of oil there, and so a lot of money is to be made. Israel is needed to kick ass in the region to secure those capitalist imperialist interests.

The official number killed in Gaza since October 7th, 2023, as of this writing, and excluding the thousands estimated to be buried under the rubble, is over 70,000 people. The ‘ceasefire’ is of course complete bullshit, since the IDF has still been killing Gazans without interruption, and of course we can see no end to the killing any time soon, for the whole point of the killing is not to stop Hamas, but total extermination.

What should be particularly chilling about all of this is that not only are the people with the power and authority to do so aren’t lifting a finger to stop the killing, but also that these genocides can be seen as a template for possibly wiping out any other group of people who try to stand up to imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism in general. With AI surveillance, any of us in the resistance can be fingered and hit with a drone strike, if not a balls-out genocide like in Yemen, Palestine, and Sudan. The psychopaths in power simply have no respect for human life.

XII: Utopian Thinking

Critics of communism like to claim that we leftists all dream of a perfect world with no pain, and that we’ll force our vision on everybody with a globe-spanning government. It is especially amusing to get this charge of utopianism from the supposedly anti-government right-wing libertarians, who imagine that the “free market” is naturally self-regulating and efficient (easily seen as total bullshit when we consider wasted food and starving people, as well as empty houses and homelessness, to give just two examples), and that the “invisible hand” will magically make everything right.

This “free market” ideology has been increasingly the dominant one in our world since the Reagan/Thatcher years, of course. It would be far more correctly called neoliberalism, since this new liberalizing of the market (translation: let the capitalist class be “free” to be as selfish, greedy, and hoarding as they like) really involves a subordinating of the government (and everything and everyone else) to the whims of the market, not an eliminating of the government.

Just as right-wingers imagine there’s no such thing as governments eradicating poverty (even though many governments have at least made impressive progress in doing so), so do we on the left (as well as anyone with a modicum of common sense) know there’s no such thing as allowing “rational” selfishness to run rampant and magically provide for everyone’s needs, while also not needing a government to protect capitalists’ private property.

For people so supposedly anti-government, many right-wing libertarians sure like getting into it. Look at the ‘libertarian’ Koch brothers, who pumped so much of their wealth into the Republican Party. Look at libertarians Ron Paul and Rand Paul, who work in the government. And look at Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho”-capitalist, who is set to receive $40 billion from the Trump administration in exchange for forcing Argentinians to vote for Milei, whose policies ruined the country’s economy. I thought it was bad to let the government intervene in the economy, and to force its will on the people.

Apparently not.

XIII: Cold War Fears of Nuclear War

Now, as if all of the above wasn’t bad enough, the one peace dividend we were supposed to enjoy from the end of the Cold War–no more fears of the two great superpowers, the US and the USSR, going into a hot war and killing everybody all over the world through nuclear annihilation–is no longer to be had. The US/NATO provocation of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as the looming war with China over Taiwan, has killed even that one peace dividend.

That nut-job I mentioned above, Alex Karp, envisions a three-way war between the West on one side, and Russia, China, and Iran on the other. With the connections between the tech bros (and their AI in the US military) and Trump’s right-wing government, such fears of the world’s annihilation are well-founded.

XIV: Conclusion

So, even if socialist revolution leads to the totalitarian nightmare that the right-wingers are so scared of…so what? What’s the difference between that kind of totalitarianism and the right-wing kind we’re currently living in?

I’ll tell you what the real difference is…and yes, the capitalists are terrified of it. Ordinary people will gain access to free healthcare, housing, and education up to university, full employment, food security, a social safety net, etc…all of their basic needs met, and recipients will include people in the Third World. Getting all those things, however, will also mean that the ruling class will lose all their excess wealth–that’s the real reason they’re so scared of socialist revolution.

Let’s scare them.

Analysis of ‘Brazil’

Brazil is a 1985 satirical dystopian film directed by Terry Gilliam, and written by him, Tom Stoppard, and Charles McKeown. It stars Jonathan Pryce, with Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Katherine Helmond, Kim Greist, Bob Hoskins, Robert De Niro, Ian Richardson, Peter Vaughan, and Jim Broadbent.

The film was successful in Europe, but not in its initial North American release. It has since become a cult film, though, and in 1999, it was voted to be the 54th greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute, and in 2017, 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics in a poll for Time Out magazine ranked Brazil as the 24th best British film ever.

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

The title of the film is an odd choice, since the story is neither about nor set in Brazil; music from an English translation of the Ary Barroso song, “Aquarela do Brasil,” or simply “Brazil” to British audiences, is heard recurrently throughout the film. The English version of the song is sung by Geoff Muldaur.

Gilliam was originally going to name his film 1984 ½, since the story is about a technocratic, bureaucratic, state capitalist, totalitarian future. There was also, in the original title, the influence of Federico Fellini‘s 8½, since that director had a defining influence on Gilliam’s visual style. Michael Radford‘s film adaptation of George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-four (which Gilliam hadn’t read) had just been released, though, so a different title for Gilliam’s film would be needed. Other working titles included The Ministry, The Ministry of Torture, How I learned to Live with the System–So Far, and So That’s Why the Bourgeoisie Sucks, before finally deciding on Brazil, an ironic reference to romantic escapism from the miserable world of the film’s story.

There are other meanings that can be gleaned from the title Brazil, as regards the dystopian society depicted in the film. Consider how Brazil’s government had been a right-wing dictatorship from 1964-1985, this last year being the same as that of the release of the film. Brazil was also one of the South American countries victimized by Operation Condor, which involved the kidnapping and disappearing of anyone the right-wing authorities deemed a leftist, Marxist, terrorist, or communist. Note in this connection how, in the film, people suspected rightly or wrongly of terrorism are rounded up and disappeared by the film’s equivalent of Orwell’s Thought Police.

The setting of the dystopia is left unclear (“somewhere in the 20th century”), though our hearing of English accents among almost all of the cast (except for Americans De Niro and Greist) makes us assume it’s probably somewhere in the UK. The time of the story seems a mishmash of the past and future, with desktop computers that have keyboards like those of old-style typewriters, and with 1940s fashions (i.e., men in suits, overcoats, and hats). The result is a kind of fantasy world, which is fitting, given Brazil is the second of Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination” films (the others being 1981’s Time Bandits and 1988’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). Brazil thus might as well be set in an Anglophone version of the country it’s named after. In any case, this mishmash of times and places suggests that the story is one of all times, since the oppression in it is quite universal.

After hearing a bit of the “Brazil” song, we see a TV ad from “Central Services” about…ducts. Ducts will appear in the background in interiors here and there throughout the film as a motif. In this ad, they appear as an exchange-value commodity, sold in various pleasing colours. Towards the end of the film, we’ll see the protagonist, Sam Lowry (Pryce), climb up a pile of ducts to escape the government agents chasing him–he’s using ducts as a use-value.

An important point should be noted in this contrast of commodities. While Brazil is presented as a kind of comic version of the Orwellian totalitarian state, it should be emphasized that Gilliam’s dystopia is a capitalist one, not a “Stalinist” one. The consumerism satirized in an ad for..aesthetically pleasing…ducts as exchange-values for money (and therefore for profit)–as opposed to ducts as use values, to help Lowry escape to freedom (or so he imagines) from that very totalitarian state–is one of many examples of such consumerism (including botched cosmetic surgery) that show that this dystopia is the diametric opposite of socialism.

So many on the political right suffer from a delusion that the left has a monopoly on totalitarian, tyrannical governments (while we on the left insist that socialist states, apart from the anarchists and Trotskyists, are nothing of the sort), so much so that they turn a blind eye to how the “free market” has led to billionaires buying governments and political parties, leading in turn to the very “corporatism” they say they oppose…and I haven’t even gotten into MAGA-style fascism!

The TV ad is shown on a number of TV sets put in a shop display window; we see window shoppers walking by as the ad comes to an end. As soon as it does, there’s a huge explosion, destroying the TVs and the whole shop. It is understood to be an act of terrorism, aptly happening immediately after the commercial, a demonstration of capitalist consumerism. Other terrorist explosions will occur later, also juxtaposed with consumerist scenes such as dining in a fancy restaurant, and shopping in a department store. In the mid-1980s, one would have been reminded of the IRA.

After this first terrorist bombing, we see a TV news interview with Mr. Eugene Helpmann (Vaughan), the Deputy Minister of Information, who says that these acts of terrorism are motivated by resentment over “seeing the other fellow win,” because they don’t want to “play the game,” which is conforming with the capitalist system. And as we know, this capitalist system makes “the other fellow win” by exploiting the rest of us.

It’s understood that a man named Archibald Tuttle (De Niro) is responsible for the terrorist acts, and so an arrest warrant is printed out for him; but an insect gets jammed in the teleprinter making a copy of the warrant, causing a misprint of his name, changing it to that of cobbler Archibald Buttle (played by Brian Miller), who will be wrongfully arrested and killed instead.

At Buttle’s home just before his arrest, which is also just before Christmas, his wife (played by Sheila Reid) is reading the ending of Charles Dickens‘s A Christmas Carol to their daughter, in which we learn of how Scrooge has proven himself to be a fully redeemed, good man. If you’ll recall my analysis of Dickens’s novella, I noted that the author’s proposed solution to the problem of poverty–the rich being generously charitable, as opposed to a transformation of society into one that produces commodities to provide for everyone’s needs, not for profit–is “peak liberalism.”

The problem with a social-democratic way of dealing with poverty is that when the tendency of the rate of profit to fall puts pressure on capitalists to replace welfare capitalism with neoliberalism, as happened in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, this in turn leads to a fascist tightening of control on things to protect the interests of the ruling class, as we’ve seen in the 2020s, and as we see in the bureaucratic dystopia of Brazil.

Indeed, a mere bureaucratic error is what leads to the ruin of the Buttle family, whose flat is barged into by government agents, who cut a circular hole into the floor of the flat of Jill Layton (Greist) and ceiling of the Buttle family’s flat (i.e., Jill lives in the flat above the Buttles’). These agents surprise and terrorize the family as they slide down poles like firemen through the circular hole, then arrest Mr. Buttle. Other agents break through his flat’s window and door; he’s put in a bag-like jacket, as if he were a commodity sold and packaged, and his wife and children are traumatized by the experience. Today, we’d be reminded of immigration raids on apartments in Chicago.

To add insult to injury, Mrs. Buttle is made to sign the paperwork for her husband’s arrest, and those found guilty of breaking any laws will have to pay for their periods of detention, as will be the case with Buttle. The next scene starts with shots of the office where Lowry works: an endless maze of desks, paperwork, and bureaucrats–the Ministry of Information, with his boss, Mr. Kurtzmann (Holm). Buttle is just one of possibly many whose lives have been ruined…and all we see is the paperwork being pushed around.

Another reason to emphasize that the totalitarian dystopia in Brazil is anything but socialist is that it has a capitalist government mired in bureaucracy. If there’s one thing that anti-communists and Trotskyists love to condemn about socialist states like the USSR, it’s the bureaucracy in them, as if such a problem has never existed under other political systems. In Lenin’s later writings, as well as in some of Stalin’s, there is a vehement complaint about the Russian bureaucracy that the Bolsheviks inherited after the Revolution, and that something had to be done about it. The problem with bureaucracy is that it’s so difficult to get rid of, and it’s so easy for it to creep back into political life so soon after being rid of it. It doesn’t exist merely because power-hungry people want it there to help keep them in power.

Anyway, as soon as Kurtzmann stops watching his workers and returns to his office, they stop their pretense of diligence and switch their computer screens to watch a movie. Kurtzmann sees the paperwork on Buttle, realizes it’s an error, and calls on Lowry to come to his office…though Lowry isn’t at work. Kurtzmann can also hear the music of the movie his staff is watching, though as soon as he opens his office door and looks out, he sees no watchers of movies, but just diligent workers again.

He calls out to the workers to find Lowry, but no one replies. Lowry is actually at home in bed, dreaming about being a winged hero in armour flying among the clouds and seeking out a beautiful maiden, often appearing in his dreams as a damsel in distress, and always with the face of Jill Layton. His dream, of course, is a classic case of Freudian wish-fulfillment.

Just as the staff in the office use movies as a form of escapism from the same mind-numbing job that Lowry has, so does he use his dreams as escapism. He’s no dashing hero: he’s a dork doing a relatively pointless job. He isn’t particularly desirable to even the real Jill (at least not at first…apparently); how much less desirable would he be to some idealized beauty!

As we go through the dream with him, we hear a lush orchestral arrangement of the “Brazil” song, reinforcing the contrast between the ideal world that the song represents and the dull reality that Lowry and the other bureaucrats have to live in. He sees her, resplendent in the light among the clouds, and they kiss, though her veil is between their lips, symbolic of how there will always be something between him and her.

The Jill of his dreams is properly understood as a projection of himself; she is symbolically a mirror reflection of his own narcissism. In this state, Lowry is in the world of what Jacques Lacan called the Imaginary, the dyadic experience of the other as an extension of oneself. Lowry isn’t fully, properly invested in the sociocultural world of the Symbolic; this is why he doesn’t want the promotion to Information Retrieval that his mother, Ida Lowry (Helmond), has pulled strings for to get for him, because such a promotion would mean more responsibility and social involvement for him. He wants to keep his low-level job so he can stay minimally involved with the real world and be more involved with his Imaginary world…his dreams.

He’s late for work because his alarm clock didn’t wake him, just as his coffee maker doesn’t work, spilling coffee on his toast, and later, his air-conditioning won’t work. Machinery frequently doesn’t work in Brazil; it’s as inefficient as the bureaucracy.

In the main lobby of the Ministry of Information building, we see a huge, Art Deco statue of a winged man and a woman under him, indicating the obvious inspiration of Lowry’s dreams. This statue, along with the cityscapes in the movie, is influenced by the visual style of Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, thus reinforcing the retro-futuristic dystopia we see in Brazil.

Lowry finally shows up at work there in that lobby, where he sees, for the first time in a while, Jack Lint (Palin), who in his success in and conformity with the system is the diametric opposite of Lowry. Indeed, Lowry, in his reluctance to be promoted to Information Retrieval and thus “play the game,” is a case of Lacan’s notion that “les non-dupes errent.” Lint, however, is ‘duped’ enough to think that bureaucratic errors aren’t errors (at 1:19 here), and so he ‘never errs’ in his upwardly-mobile life.

As Lowry is chatting with Lint, though, he sees Jill on the surveillance camera screens behind Lint. For the first time in Lowry’s life, the girl of his dreams has been manifested in the real world. She’s no longer the little-o-other as a mirrored extension of his narcissistic self: she is the big-O-Other of radical alterity, an individual in her own right, separate from him. Accordingly, she’s no damsel in distress needing a man to save her; in fact, she’s in the lobby trying to rescue a man, Mr. Buttle, from the clutches of the fascist government, though the bureaucratic red tape is proving to be a real source of frustration for her.

Visually corresponding to this contrast between the fantasy Jill and the real, independent, go-getter Jill is how the former is a long-haired beauty queen, while the latter has short hair in a 1980s style (somewhat similar to this, but shorter), differing sharply from the traditional lady look of the 1940s fashions that all the other women have. Further adding to her tough look is the fact that Jill is a truck driver wearing a kind of jumpsuit rather than a dress. She thus adds a touch of realism to the film’s fantasy world.

When Lowry is in Kurtzmann’s office and is using the computer there, he realizes the error of having arrested Buttle instead of Tuttle. Kurtzmann is relieved to know the error isn’t the fault of his department, but of Information Retrieval. Kurtzmann would feel helpless without Lowry’s help if he’d lost Lowry through a promotion to Information Retrieval, which Lowry of course doesn’t want…yet.

Lowry later meets with his mother, Ida, who is with her plastic surgeon, Dr. Louis Jaffe (Broadbent). He wraps a sheet of plastic around her face so tightly that her looks are grotesquely distorted, yet he says “she’s twice as beautiful as before.” The scene satirizes the disappointment one often has upon receiving plastic surgery (more because of psychological issues like body dysmorphia and unrealistically high expectations than of complications or incompetence on the part of the doctor), as well as the fact that it reflects Ida’s preoccupation with social status and that she’s rich enough to afford the surgery.

As she and Lowry go to a high-class French restaurant to meet with some of her friends, he tries to tell her he doesn’t want the promotion to Information Retrieval that she’s pulling strings to get for him. She wants him promoted to improve her social status by association with him, not to improve the quality of his life. His narcissistic dreams about Jill stem from Ida’s own narcissism, a point made clear near the end of the film, when he sees Jill’s face on his mother’s body, an obvious Oedipal transference.

At a table in the restaurant, Lowry, Ida, and her two friends are served dishes that, though the photos set over the food are of normal and appetizing food, are actually just scoops of monochromatic…rice? Though this is supposed to be a fancy restaurant, the presentation of the dishes in this way seems to be a satirical comment on the uniform-looking, processed food found in fast-food restaurants, a vulgarization of commodities that we see in a hyper-consumerist society.

The satire on the futility of expecting plastic surgery to turn an aged woman into an Aphrodite continues when one of Ida’s lady friends, Mrs. Terrain (played by Barbara Hicks) prefers another plastic surgeon over Dr. Jaffe, only to discover, over the course of the film, that increasing complications with her surgery will result in her being covered in bandages, and even dying towards the end of the movie.

As the four eat and discuss plastic surgery (and Lowry continues in all futility to dissuade his mother from pushing for his promotion), there’s another terrorist attack, an explosion off in the corner of the dining area. Apart from the initial scare, everyone carries on as normal, as if the bombing were a mere annoyance. The string quartet, for example, promptly resumes playing their music. Such an upper-class world is so insulated from the horrors of reality that they can regard the horrors as mere inconveniences.

When asked if he’ll do anything about the terrorists, Lowry says it’s his lunch hour; furthermore, dealing with terrorism is not his department. This is why he likes his low-level job: in it, he doesn’t have to get too involved with the social world, as I described above in Lacanian terms. When he meets Jill and gets emotionally involved with her life, he’ll be thrown into the social world of the Symbolic, and he’ll find himself caring about someone other than himself. Unlike his current, complacent self, he’ll be overwhelmed with anxiety over what could happen to Jill when the government associates her with Tuttle and terrorism via her probing into what has happened to Buttle.

He has another of his dreams as the winged hero about to meet with long-haired, veiled Jill, but their meeting is interrupted by skyscrapers ripping up from the grassy ground in a rural area and shooting up into the sky. The ideal, wish-fulfillment of his dream is being invaded by the harsh, urban reality of his waking life. These sprouting skyscrapers come between him and his love, and he soon wakes up in bed in his flat, realizing that his air conditioner isn’t working, and ducts are spewing smoke all over one of his rooms. He has to call Central Services for urgent help, but they won’t come any time soon.

He has to keep cool by sitting with his head in the fridge. Tuttle, of all people, arrives in his flat to fix the air conditioning as a freelancer, which is illegal. In his kindness in helping Lowry, Tuttle is demonstrating that “terrorists” aren’t necessarily bad people, something a lot of people today still don’t know about such Palestinian resistance as Hamas, for example.

Nelson Mandela is today honored as a hero in the fight against South African apartheid. It isn’t all that well remembered, though, that he was once called a terrorist (by such charming people as Reagan and Thatcher back in the 1980s) and imprisoned for having resorted to violence as a necessary tactic in the struggle against apartheid. Revolution is not a dinner party. Tuttle should be understood in this context.

Two employees of Central Services at long last arrive at Lowry’s flat to repair his air conditioning (they’re played by Hoskins [Spoor] and Derrick O’Connor [Dowser]), but being grateful to Tuttle and recognizing he’s a good man, Lowry stalls Spoor and Dowser so Tuttle can escape. Lowry mentions the need to have the proper paperwork–a 27B stroke 6–to make Spoor and Dowser leave to get it. For once, the bureaucracy has been of good use.

Tuttle leaves Lowry’s flat by going outside and hooking himself to a cable, sliding down off the building and disappearing into the night darkness of the city, as if he were Batman or Spiderman. Tuttle is an actual hero, unlike the fantasy hero Lowry imagines himself to be in his dreams.

In Tuttle’s freelance repairing of Lowry’s air conditioning, he exposes the ducts behind the wall in the room; ducts can be seen to represent breathing, the circulation of air to remove carbon dioxide (symbolized by the smoke that filled Lowry’s room) and supply oxygen (as represented by the desired air conditioning). This breathing, in turn, represents the ability to express oneself and to give and receive communication freely, as opposed to a bureaucratic, dystopian society that stifles real communication. Tuttle’s repairs–in conjunction with his role as “terrorist”–show him to be a true hero, restoring free communication.

Later, Lowry discovers more problems with the Tuttle/Buttle mistake when he finds that the wrong bank account has been debited for the arrest. He offers to go to the Buttle residence in person and give Buttle’s widow a refund cheque for the debit. On his way there, in an absurdly tiny car, he’s listening to the “Brazil” song (which Tuttle in the repairs scene was humming) on the car radio. The music is interrupted by a news report about another terrorist bombing, but he switches the radio back to the song. He’d still rather continue living in the escapist world of his dreams, as represented by the song, than face the problems of the real world.

This avoidance of the real world is about to end, though: he’s already seen Jill’s face on the surveillance monitor screens in the Ministry of Information lobby, and he’s about to see her in the flesh above the Buttle flat (through that circular hole). He’s met Tuttle and seen that the “terrorist” isn’t as he seems. A convergence between his fantasy life and his real life is about to arrive…like those skyscrapers sprouting up from the grassy ground in his dream. This inciting incident–of seeing Jill–will pull Lowry from the Imaginary and into the Symbolic, making him care, for the first time in his life, about the real world and its problems.

His seeing her–through a reflection in a broken-off piece of mirror, then seeing his own face in it, thus indicating the Lacanian mirror showing her as a narcissistic extension of himself–is in ironic juxtaposition to the anguish felt by Mrs. Buttle and her little boy over Mr. Buttle’s death, which should be pushing Lowry to care about those other than himself…when all he wants to do is deliver the cheque and find Jill. He’s being thrown into society, however reluctantly.

His sense of the horror of the totalitarian society he’s in is awakening, along with his soon-to-come decision to accept the promotion to Information Retrieval (so he can gain access to Jill’s classified records), but this awakening is only with the motive to get to her and protect her, not to be of any help to the broader society (i.e., people like the Buttles) and protect them from the fascist government. He has one foot in the Symbolic and the other firmly rooted in the Imaginary. In his narcissistic wish only to have what’s good for himself, we see one of the ways that the common man contributes to the oppression of all of us in a dystopian world.

On the bus and contemplating acceptance of the promotion while looking at printout images of Jill, Lowry has another of his escapist reveries about her. Instead of flying among the clouds or over a grassy rural area, our winged hero is flying between skyscrapers in a surreal version of the city he lives in. Since there’s the fear of her being arrested and charged with terrorism for having asked too many questions about Buttle, in the dream we see her caught in a cage in the air, dragged on ropes by baby-masked grotesques on the ground. He lands and draws a sword to confront them.

Then he snaps out of his reverie, and we see him back on the bus. He arrives at his flat to find the ducts all pulled out from the ceiling and walls, making his home a mess. Spoor and Dowser are doing an “emergency procedure” in response to Lowry’s telephone call to Central Services earlier, having complained about “an emergency” about his air conditioning before Tuttle repaired it. Spoor wants Lowry to sign the 27-B stroke six. When Spoor and Dowser realize someone else fixed the air conditioning…illegally, they leave his flat in a mess. Bureaucracy has failed, again.

He falls asleep, and his dream resumes, with him confronting a giant, armored samurai reminding me of Spoor, and after trying to cut Jill free of the ropes holding her cage, he sees that one of those who were dragging the ropes is Mrs. Buttle, who–as she did in her flat when he gave her the cheque–asks of what’s been done with her dead husband’s body. It’s clear that his dreams are being increasingly disrupted by the dystopian reality of his waking life–they’re getting less and less escapist. He’s also feeling a tinge of guilt over having not done enough for the common people in his bureaucratic job.

He has to fight the giant Spoor-samurai personifying the totalitarian government, but his adversary is too big and strong for him, being able to appear and disappear at will, before Lowry can get a chance to slash hm with his sword. The Spoor-samurai fights with a huge spear, which Lowry manages to get from him and stab him in the torso, with flames instead of blood coming out of the wound. When he removes the dead samurai’s metal mask, though, he sees not Spoor’s face, but his own. Lowry has been as much a part of the evil state-capitalist system as Spoor could ever be.

Lowry is woken up by the doorbell. A singing telegram lady is inviting Lowry to his mother’s party, where he can meet Mr. Helpmann and ask for the promotion to Information Retrieval. Since I’ve maintained that Lowry’s promotion is representative of his entering the Symbolic Order (the world of society, culture, and language, one of many Others, not just the dyadic other of the Oedipal mother/son relationship), and since it’s Mr. Helpmann who is…helping…Lowry get the promotion, then Helpmann–old enough to be Lowry’s father, by the way–is representative of the father who brings an end to a boy’s Oedipal relationship with his mother and, through the Name of the Father, gets the boy into society.

Indeed, Lowry meets Helpmann at a social gathering, his mother’s party, and he helps the crippled old man use the bathroom–like a dutiful son. Towards the end of the film, after he and Jill have been arrested, he is told by Helpmann–dressed as Father Christmas, as the British would call him–that Jill was killed during their arrest. Since Jill, as Lowry’s objet petit a, his unattainable object of desire, his little-o-other (autre in French) that is the remnant of his Oedipal desire for Ida (on whose face he sees Jill’s, in his hallucinatory sequence before the film’s end, recall), Father-Christmas-Helpmann is telling Lowry he can’t have her…this is the Non! du Père.

Another interesting point to keep in mind is that we never know of Lowry’s actual father in the film. Since Lowry loses his mind at the end of the film, we can relate Lacanian psychoanalysis to him further, in how the exclusion of the father from the family structure, the absence of the Symbolic father, via foreclosure, is linked to psychosis. There’s just Lowry and Ida/Jill in a dyadic relationship with him…not one with society.

To get back to the story, when Lowry is to begin work in Information Retrieval, he finds his new boss, Mr. Warrenn (Richardson), going hurriedly up and down the halls with a group of his employees discussing work. Such busy chit-chat among a crowd of hurrying people symbolizes the essence of society, what Lowry has been thrown into, just so he can find Jill.

Mr. Warrenn shows Lowry his new office. Lowry goes into the small, confining room, only to realize he has to share a desk that slides in and out of his office through a wall into the neighbouring office, where Harvey Lime (played by co-screenwriter McKeown) works. Lowry would like to use Lime’s computer to find the information he needs on Jill, but Lime insists on only using his computer himself. Lowry’s wish not to have anyone help him find out about Jill reflects his preference not to engage with society.

Still, Lime insists not only on using his computer himself, but also on being left alone in his office to do it, so Lowry reluctantly returns to his office. Bored and waiting at his desk for Lime, Lowry goes back into his reverie as the hero. Jill is in the cage floating up into the air, now that he’s cut the ropes holding it down; he’s lost his wings after the fight with the samurai, so he can’t fly up to her. He has to grab onto a dangling rope and climb up to her. As he starts to, a huge pair of brick hands reach up from the ground, grab his legs, and prevent him from climbing. The face of the brick ground monster is Kurtzmann’s, asking him not to leave for Information Retrieval. Lowry wakes up.

The notion of Kurtzmann holding Lowry back as he does in the dream just represents Lowry’s lack of commitment in leaving the dyadic narcissism of the Imaginary to enter the larger society of the big-O-Other in the Symbolic. It’s this lack of commitment that will be his ultimate downfall. He only cares about Jill as a mirrored extension of himself.

Lime has found information on her from his computer, and Lowry has a look at a printout. It’s only basic information, though, a mere physical description, so Lowry wants to use Lime’s computer himself to get more information, which he’ll get from a room the computer refers him to. He leaves.

The room he goes to is where Lint is, as well as Lint’s little daughter, Holly (whom he confuses with ‘Amy,’ indicating how, in spite of–or because of–his success at work, Lint is alienated from even his own family). When Lint sees the printout on Jill, and hears that the government got the wrong man (Buttle), he denies making any mistake as mentioned above. Lowry also learns that Buttle died in Lint’s custody as his torturer (Lint has blood on his white jacket from having finished torturing someone), for which Lint feels no pangs of conscience whatsoever.

And because Jill has been asking too many questions about Buttle, she is being associated all too closely with the Tuttle affair, and therefore she is in danger of being arrested herself–so Lowry is worried. He gets her file from Lint, claiming he’ll take care of her, when really he’s trying to protect her from the government.

On the way down the elevator and looking in her complete files, Lowry sees Jill at the lobby desk again, still complaining about how the bureaucracy is of no help in finding out what happened to Buttle. She is doing what Lowry should be doing, though: helping others for their sake, not just helping one’s own dyadic other for one’s own sake.

Descending from on high in that elevator, he is like the winged hero of his dreams, yet he’s hardly capable of rescuing her, for the malfunctioning elevator takes him down to the basement instead of the ground floor, where she is. We hear the romantic orchestration of the “Brazil” song again, yet he is in the sobering real world, the Symbolic, not that of his dreams, the Imaginary.

He manages to get up to the ground floor, where guards are about to arrest her, but he uses his authority as an employee of Information Retrieval to get her away from them, out of the building, and into her truck. She’s gotten into the truck by her own agency, though–she’s no damsel in distress. He isn’t the hero of his dreams, either, in spite of his frantic efforts to save her. He’s just a bumbling fool, which is obvious to her.

In meeting her for the first time, he’s encountering her not as a narcissistic mirror of himself, but as a separate individual in her own right–the big-O-Other, not the little-o-other. He isn’t adjusting well to his transition from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. She just finds him a nuisance, and so she kicks him out of her truck.

He won’t give up in his attempts to win her love, though–indeed, he hangs on to the truck as she’s driving off–and over time, she warms up to him…or so it seems. Since some of the images we see in the film seem to be getting more and more surreal, and since we’ve already seen so many of Lowry’s dreams and reveries, we may start to wonder how much of what is happening to him is real, and how much of it is his own imagination, including if she’s really beginning to like him, or if it’s just more wish-fulfillment on his part.

An example of a somewhat surreal moment, just after the beginning of the warming-up to him, is the sight of a charming orange house, complete with a surrounding white picket fence, that is pulled up off the ground by a crane, to reveal behind it an ugly, fiery, smoky factory. This is seen while that orchestration of the “Brazil” song is heard: beauty, love, and happiness are illusory escapism in the dystopian nightmare of Brazil.

When she stops to pick up a package and he is paranoid about the government agents arresting her, she says he has “no sense of reality.” This is not only true, but a foreshadowing of the film’s ending, in which we realize he’s been fantasizing about having escaped with her from the government agents to a rural, grassy, Edenic world, all the while as he’s really still in the torture room with Lint, strapped to a chair and having fully lost his mind.

He tells Jill they should drive the truck far away, to somewhere safe, but she knows there isn’t any such safe place. She has the grip on reality that he lacks.

She tells him that the package she has picked up is a Christmas present, but he suspects it’s a bomb, and that she is thus associated with the likes of Tuttle. Annoyed both at his working for Information Retrieval and his disdain for the needed revolutionary resistance of the “terrorists,” she asks if he’s ever met any actual terrorists, if he knows any of them, i.e., as opposed to having only prejudicial, preconceived notions of “terrorists” as a result of government propaganda.

They arrive at a shopping mall, where a Santa (or Father Christmas, whichever) is asking kids what they want for Christmas. A girl answers that she’d like her own credit card. Indeed, this is the consumerist reality that a once religious holiday has been degraded into…and forty years since the release of Brazil (as of the publication of this analysis), the consumerism has only gotten worse.

In the mall, Lowry and Jill openly admit that neither of them trusts the other, and he tries to get the package from her. She has it behind a mirror, where she can’t be seen, and on the other side he meets and chats with the ever-more bandaged Mrs. Terrain while his hidden hand is still holding onto the package. Another terrorist bombing interrupts their brief chat. Lowry rushes off to find Jill, whose package he so judgementally assumes caused the explosion, yet she proves it really was just a gift, a bribe for the bureaucrats. Jill’s helping of the injured people shows the difference between his fake morality and her real morality.

Further proof of Lowry’s mental drifting away from reality is his hallucination of the giant samurai among the police who enter the mall just after the explosion. He briefly fantasizes that he’s in the role of the dashing hero about to confront the samurai, but after Jill warns him not to (in sharp contradistinction to her role as the damsel in distress of his dreams and reveries), he’s knocked out and temporarily taken into custody.

His hallucination demonstrates how he’d still rather stay in his escapist, narcissistic world of the Imaginary than be in the real, social world of the Symbolic and help those injured in the bombing. Other people are still just reflections of himself, rather than actual other people, and so in his narcissistic mental state, Lowry cannot be of any meaningful help in ridding his world of the bureaucratic, totalitarian nightmare that it’s in.

While taken away in the police truck, Lowry wants to find Jill among all those arrested in those bag-suits. He only cares about her-as-mirror-of-himself. None of the other ones arrested are of any concern to him, though they’ll surely suffer no less than Jill would. In any case, she isn’t even among them.

Back at his desk in Information Retrieval, Lowry is bawled out by Mr. Warrenn not only for having neglected the paperwork on his desk, but also for a number of bureaucratic misdeeds starting from back when he was introduced in the film, up to the present, misdeeds that will lead to his arrest. His negligence in Information Retrieval also symbolically indicates his lack of involvement in the greater society (even though his work in Information Retrieval isn’t anything more that the usual bureaucracy); this lack of involvement in the Symbolic Order, favouring instead the narcissism of the Imaginary, will lead to his eventual downfall.

Lowry hopes to get help from Lint about what’s happened to Jill, which of course is useless, since Lint is clearly on the side of the totalitarian system…after all, Lint is a torturer of those arrested. Recall the blood on Lint’s clothes during Lowry’s previous visit, when Lint was with his daughter, as well as his disregard for Buttle’s health condition when he died under Lint’s torture. When Lowry insists on Jill’s innocence of any involvement in terrorism, he’s only further endangering himself by his sympathetic association with her. Accordingly, Lint doesn’t want to be associated with Lowry anymore, in any way.

Lowry is so furious with the bureaucratic system that won’t help him save her that he tosses his backlog of desk paperwork all about his office, and he uses one of the ducts there to redirect any new paperwork back out from his office into the halls, where it makes a mess everywhere. The ducts can thus be seen also to symbolize intestines, so that the bureaucratic shit is sent in the opposite direction…an interesting point to be made when we see the soon-to-come scene of Tuttle filling up Spoor’s and Dowser’s environment suits with raw sewage back at Lowry’s flat.

Indeed, Lowry returns to his flat to find out that it isn’t his flat anymore. Spoor and Dowser, in those suits, show him the paperwork authorizing their repossession of his home; they’ve done this in revenge for his having allowed Tuttle, a “scab,” to do his illegal freelance repairs of Lowry’s air conditioning instead of letting Central Services do it.

Now, a right-wing libertarian might look at Tuttle’s illegal freelance repairs as a case of the superiority of the “free market” over the “corporatist” Central Services, which is an arm of the totalitarian government. Remember, though, that Gilliam is careful to emphasize the consumerism and class differences–that is, the capitalism–of the society Lowry lives in (remember also the poverty of the community Buttle lives in, as opposed to the opulence of plastic-surgery-seeking Ida and Mrs. Terrain). The totalitarian dystopia of Brazil is in no way socialist. It may be state-capitalist, but it’s capitalist all the same.

Those ducts, as I mentioned above, are as exchange-values a case of the capitalist profit motive, but also as connected with the government (via Central Services), the ducts represent the state’s intrusive tendrils, as it were, or as I also said above, the filthy intestines of the body of the state. So, fittingly, Tuttle appears outside Lowry’s flat and helps him exact revenge on Spoor and Dowser by making those duct intestines…so to speak…fill up the two men’s environment suits with shit until they explode. Tuttle’s heroism isn’t pro-laissez-faire, it’s anti-state-capitalism.

Jill appears by the flat, much to Lowry’s relief, and just as they’re about to kiss, Tuttle goes off on a cord, like Spiderman, away among the other city skyscrapers of the night, as he did the last time. Recall that he’s the true hero of the story, not Lowry…and Tuttle is only a “terrorist” insofar as he’s a headache to those in power. The “terrorist” explosions, for all we know, could really just be the result of the many machinery malfunctions that occur throughout the movie.

Lowry knows he and Jill have to hide from all the government agents, and without a flat anymore, he’ll have to hide with her in the home of his mother, who’s away for Christmas at the plastic surgeon’s, or so Lowry understands. Apart from the beautiful interior decor of Ida’s home, indicating further her upper-class status, we can see a number of ducts up by the ceiling. After a few awkward seconds, Lowry and Jill finally kiss, and we hear the “Brazil” music again.

Before they can make love, though, Lowry has to leave for the Information Retrieval building, for he’s thought of a way to save her: fabricate her death in the records. In doing so, of course, he’s putting himself in ever greater danger of being arrested. He hopes to find Mr. Helpmann (his father-figure, recall), yet he sees on Helpmann’s desk a photo of Ida, which may make us wonder with whom she’s really spending Christmas…or is Lowry just imagining seeing the photo?

Lowry returns to Ida’s home to tell Jill that he’s deleted her existence in the government records. By the bed, she looks like the Jill of his dreams: with flowing long blonde hair, and in a white dress. Once again, the line between his sense of reality and fantasy is being blurred. Since Jill is now “dead,” she says the famous line, “Care for a little necrophilia?” They make love.

It’s fitting that we should see the final fulfillment of Lowry’s fantasy here, complete with another reverie of him with her in his winged getup, preceding his imminent nightmarish descent into torture and madness. The next morning, they’re in bed, naked except for a gift bow tied around her chest, since she’d offer herself to him as a Christmas present. The scene still has this fantastic quality that makes us suspect that little, if any, of this moment is real. Lowry’s grip on reality is slipping further and further.

And just as they’re about to make love again, the Brazil equivalent of the Thought Police break into the room, just as they did in the Buttles’ flat. And since Lowry and Jill are naked after having just made love, this surprise arrest is just like that of Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-four (note also in this connection that Jill’s name is practically a pun on Julia).

Jill is shot and killed during this arrest (Lowry is no dashing hero to rescue her, recall), and his oddly-late realization of her death–from Mr. Helpmann, dressed as Father Christmas, telling him while in custody–means that he’s lost the one person who ever mattered to him. She mirrored back his grandiose self to him. Without engagement in either the Symbolic or the Imaginary, Lowry now has only the madness of Lacan’s Real Order–an undifferentiated, traumatic world.

In his psychotic break from reality, something he’s been lapsing into for some time now but has fully come into, Lowry no longer sees any differentiation between fantasy and reality. The trauma of having lost Jill is too great for him to bear. To use Lacanian language, Lowry’s madness is the traumatic non-differentiation of the Real.

To describe his madness in different psychoanalytic language, that of Heinz Kohut, both sides of Lowry’s bipolar self–the idealized parental imago, and the aforementioned grandiose self–have been compromised, which leads to psychological fragmentation and psychosis. The absence of a father in Lowry’s life–the foreclosure I referred to above, and now even Helpmann as father figure has proven to be of no compensation–means he has no parental ideal to hang onto, since Ida’s superficial beauty-seeking is hardly an ideal to admire. Jill’s death means he no longer has a metaphorical mirror for his grandiose self. His sense of psychological structure has thus been shattered, leaving only madness for him now.

Lowry’s refusal to “play the game,” as Helpmann would put it–that is, participate in the game of society, to be a “dupe” of society’s phony charades, and therefore not to “err”–means the Symbolic is out for Lowry, and the death of Jill means the Imaginary is out for him, too. He has only the Real now, and its accompanying madness.

He is taken into a huge, empty cylindrical room, reminding us of Room 101 in Nineteen Eighty-four. Lowry even has a cage-like cap on his head to remind us of the cage with the rats on Winston Smith‘s head. Lint will be his torturer.

That Lowry will be tortured by his ‘friend’ is if anything a redundant horror, since his psychosis is already torture enough. Accordingly, now Lowry experiences a series of non-stop hallucinations: to begin, he imagines Tuttle and his band of “terrorists” breaking into the room, shooting Lint in the forehead, and helping Lowry to escape.

He even fantasizes that he’s become a fellow revolutionary and terrorist, being given a rifle to shoot the police with, and helping Tuttle blow up the Information Retrieval building. He can be the dashing hero after all…but not in reality or even daydreams now–in his endless hallucinations. Remember that he only imagines Tuttle to be a terrorist–we’ve never seen Tuttle blow anything up in the real world.

Elements of reality creep into Lowry’s hallucinatory world, if only symbolically so. Once escaped and among the regular citizens, Lowry sees Tuttle increasingly covered in scraps of paperwork from the blown-up building. The bureaucracy has devoured Tuttle. He later comes to Mrs. Terrain’s funeral (her having been killed by “complications” from her excessive plastic surgery), and as I mentioned above, he sees Jill’s face on Ida’s head.

Gilliam has apparently denied that this fusion of Jill and Ida represents Lowry’s Oedipus complex, that instead it’s one’s ultimate nightmare to see one’s own mother appearing as one’s lover. Frankly, I fail to see this latter idea as negating or contradicting the former. An unresolved Oedipus complex, properly understood as a universal, narcissistic trauma, is repressed precisely because consciously confronting it would seriously screw you up. Gilliam has also denied the totalitarian dystopia of Brazil, insisting only on the insanity and incompetence of government bureaucracy as the satirical target; yet the totalitarianism is way too obvious to ignore. In any case, I find it helpful to take a creator’s denials of this or that interpretation with a grain of salt.

The police barge into the funeral, blasting their guns away, and Lowry falls into Terrain’s coffin, falling into a black abyss. It’s his own symbolic death from having avoided reality, as Terrain died from avoiding the reality that plastic surgery would never have helped her attain the Aphrodite ideal of physical beauty.

The police keep chasing Lowry through the night darkness of the city. As described above, he climbs that pile of ducts, now no longer symbolic of the ubiquitous filthy intestines of government reach, but of wind pipes for breathing and freely expressing oneself, use-values rather than the exchange-values of state-owned Central Services. He ends up ultimately in Jill’s truck, which takes him to an idyllic, rural, grassy setting…a supposed happy ending.

Of course, it’s all just been a delusion: Lowry’s been in that torture chair the whole time. Lint and Helpmann look at the dazed expression on Lowry’s face and know the truth about his mental state. They leave him to dream on in his madness, him humming the “Brazil” tune.

Some say that Lowry’s escape into dreamland is a better fate than Winston’s utter mental defeat–loving Big Brother–but the point is that one doesn’t escape from oppression by dreaming it away. Way too many people today attempt such an escape by sharing memes on social media about rising up in revolution instead of really planning it. The whole message of Brazil, from the beginning, is that escapism into fantasy is self-defeating. Dystopia must be directly resisted.

Analysis of ‘The Game’

The Game is a 1997 thriller film directed by David Fincher. It was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, and it stars Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, and Deborah Kara Unger, with James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

The Game was well-received by Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and others, but it didn’t do all that well at the box office, as compared to Fincher’s Se7en; since then, though, The Game has gained a cult following among Fincher’s fans, and it’s now considered among some of them to be one of his most underrated films.

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

Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) is a wealthy San Francisco investment banker. The film begins with sad piano music as a soundtrack to old, grainy home movies of his childhood and his rich father. Naturally, little Nicholas would have identified with his successful father, so when–as we later learn–his father has committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the family mansion, with little Nicholas seeing it, the traumatic scene is not only emotionally shattering for him, it’s incomprehensible that his father would have done such a thing…in a Richard Cory sense.

His father would have been the little boy’s idealized parental imago, one pole of Nicholas’s bipolar self, to use Heinz Kohut‘s psychoanalytic terminology. Not only the death, but also the witnessed suicide, of Nicholas’s parental ideal would have almost irreparably damaged that pole, necessitating compensation from the other pole, that of the mirroring of Nicholas’s grandiose self, given in the form of his status as a wealthy man, with his power to hire and fire employees, his wearing of good-looking and expensive clothes, and many opportunities to be icy and condescending to everyone around him.

Van Orton’s defence against psychological fragmentation, which would result from damage to his remaining pole, is thus covert narcissism, which is manifested in his deep insecurity, anxiety, and depression, all hidden behind a False Self of outward confidence and control.

Other manifestations of his covert narcissism include his victim mentality, which exists in spite of his wealth and power, and which is aggravated by the Consumer Recreation Services (CRS) game played on him, which feels increasingly like persecution; the real source of his victim mentality, though, is of course his childhood trauma from having seen his father kill himself. That he’s reached his 48th birthday–his father’s age when he killed himself–and that his birthday gift from his kid brother, Conrad “Connie” Van Orton (Penn), is the paranoia-inducing CRS game, don’t make Nicholas’s associations with his father any less unsettling.

More covert narcissist traits in Nicholas include his social withdrawal, to avoid being compared unfavourably with others and thus to maintain his illusory sense of superiority, and his difficulties in relationships–he’s divorced and lonely, clearly a result of his lack of empathy for others, yet another narcissistic trait.

Now, he should be able to go through life adequately, despite his faults…except that the CRS game is going to tear his whole life apart, and smash the other pole of his already fragile self.

Now, while it is true that birth order has very little impact on one’s personality development (contrary to popular belief), Nicholas and Conrad respectively embody the stereotypes of the high-achieving, organized, mature, and responsible eldest sibling, and the fun-loving, free-spirited, immature, and risk-taking youngest sibling. These stereotypes are evident not only in Conrad’s referring to himself as “Seymour Butts” in his invitation to lunch to Nicholas, but also in Nicholas’s cool, humourless response of yes to the invitation of “Mr. Butts.”

The elder/young sibling stereotypes are also evident later on in the film, when Conrad, flipping out over how the CRS people “just fuck you and they fuck you and they fuck you,” then when Nicholas, equally upset about CRS’s manipulations of his life, nonetheless keeps his cool as best he can and tells Conrad to stop being emotional; now, Conrad complains of having never lived up to the family’s expectations.

Furthermore, at the restaurant where the brothers meet so Conrad can give Nicholas his CRS gift, Nicholas tells Conrad he’s not allowed to smoke there, but Conrad lights up in defiance, anyway. Also, when Nicholas in his uptight nature is skeptical of the CRS “game,” Conrad–insisting it will be the best experience ever for Nicholas–tells him it will make his life fun…implying that Nicholas hardly knows what having fun even is.

Nicholas goes to the CRS building, where he meets Jim Feingold (Rebhorn), who explains that the CRS experience is a game, which will fill in what’s empty in Nicholas’s life. He’s still skeptical, but he does all the psychological and physical tests necessary to tailor the game exactly to his personality. When he asks someone who’s done the game before, he’s answered with a quote from John 9:25, “Whereas once I was blind, now I see.”

In a way, The Game is a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol, with Nicholas as Scrooge, with the game’s wild disrupting of his life comparable to the terrors of the three Christmas ghosts, shocking Nicholas into his final redemption. The naming of the protagonist sounds ironic, a glum receiver of a disruptive gift with a name that’s evocative of a cheerful giver of gifts to children.

There’s yet another association of Nicholas with Scrooge that is important: both men are rich. The CRS game is expensive, so much so that at the end, Nicholas offers to help Conrad pay for it, something the younger brother deeply appreciates. That this “game” is something only rich people can afford to play is significant, for the upsetting things that happen to Nicholas are things that, if one is of the lower or middle classes, one would not be able to walk away from, whereas “a bloated millionaire fat cat” like Nicholas can walk away from them, since none of them are real–just a game. If only they could just be a game for the poor.

The game begins for Nicholas in a surprising way, since after his psychological and physical testing, he’s been contacted by CRS by phone, and they tell him his application for the game has been rejected. So when he drives home at night and sees a wooden clown lying on the ground before his mansion, put there deliberately to look like his father’s dead body after his suicide, Nicholas is soon to realize he’s been thrown into the game, willy-nilly.

With the wooden clown in his living room now, he doesn’t yet know what to make of it, so he has his TV on with the business news, as reported by Daniel Schorr (playing himself). Schorr discusses the bad economy and how “a staggering 57% of American workers believe there is a very real chance they will be unemployed in the next five to seven years.” The image on the TV twitches from time to time, causing a normal news broadcast suddenly to be Schorr directly talking to Nicholas on behalf of CRS.

Soon enough, Nicholas clues in on this oddity, and he starts paying proper attention to Schorr. That CRS, which clearly represents the omniscient, all-controlling powers-that-be, would do this to Nicholas in turn represents how a fascist, totalitarian government would surveil and thus terrorize ordinary people. Nicholas is rich, so in the end, it’s all just a game. Not so for the lower and middle classes.

Now, while smart TVs hadn’t come into their own as of the making of The Game, it’s interesting in hindsight now, as of the 2020s, to make an association of them with the film. Furthermore, one might recall the “telescreens” in Nineteen Eighty-four. And since The Game came out long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, describing the symbolic totalitarianism of CRS in terms of communism, rather than of capitalism, would be sheer nonsense.

On top of this TVs-that-watch-us surveillance is also a commentary on the manipulative nature of the corporate media, which as of the making of The Game was already two years into the enacting of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which would result in mergers and acquisitions in American media, so that by now, 90% of it is controlled by only six corporations. These super-rich capitalists thus control most of Americans’ access to information. The totalitarianism of today is capitalist and fascist, not in any way socialist.

Nicholas learns from Schorr that the wooden clown’s head has a camera in it, and thus it is what is surveilling Nicholas. Big Bozo is watching you.

Later, Nicholas takes a plane for a business trip, but while waiting for the plane at the gate, he is informed by another man there (a CRS employee, as it eventually turns out) that the pen in his shirt pocket has exploded, staining his shirt with ink. This moment is a mild, early instance of narcissistic injury for him, the beginning of the eating away of his grandiose self, the only pole left of his bipolar self for him to hang onto.

In the nearby men’s room, he tries to remove the ink stain to the best of his ability, and a man in a toilet stall (presumably another CRS employee) asks him to give him a roll of toilet paper from a neighbouring stall. Nicholas leaves the restroom without helping the man, this being an example of Nicholas’s narcissistic lack of empathy, a Scrooge-like moment.

Nicholas meets with an employee of his, Anton Baer (Mueller-Stahl), to fire him and give him a severance package, but he cannot open his suitcase due to more CRS meddling; this is a problem whose significance will be understood later. When we see him outside, smashing his suitcase against a bench in a futile attempt to open it, his manic frustration shows that his personality is already unraveling.

I’ve used the psychoanalysis of Kohut to describe this unravelling; now I’ll use that of Jacques Lacan. The suicide of Nicholas’s father has deprived him of the man who, traditionally speaking, would have pulled him as a boy out of his narcissistic, dyadic, Oedipal relationship with his mother (the realm of the Imaginary), and brought him into the larger society of the Symbolic (hence his inability to relate with others), from the dyadic other to the Other of relating with many people. As his parental ideal, his father was also the object of inverted Oedipal feelings, so losing his father has jeopardized and compromised the stability of both the Symbolic and the Imaginary for him.

The agitations of the CRS game are therefore plunging Nicholas into the traumatic, undifferentiated Chaos of the Real, where one may experience a psychotic break from reality, the fragmentation I mentioned above. Nicholas doesn’t literally succumb to psychosis in the movie, of course, but the disruptions of the normal structure of his life, and the growing paranoia that he feels as a result of these disruptions, are certainly symbolic of such a psychotic break. Now, in Lacanian terms, foreclosure explains how the exclusion of Nicholas’s father from his family life has already set the stage for such psychosis.

Later, he goes to a restaurant where a waitress (actually another CRS employee–Unger) spills drinks all over his suit, to which he reacts with his usual lack of graciousness, in spite of her apologizing. His annoyance is a continuation of the narcissistic injury he felt when his pen exploded, and it will continue when he loses his thousand-dollar shoe from climbing a fire escape ladder as he’s been fleeing CRS agents with her.

He’s not even sure of her actual name: Christine, or Claire, as he learns by the end of the film. CRS has made his grip on reality so slippery that we can reasonably understand CRS to be a pun on curse.

Though she’s initially unfriendly to him as a result of his ungracious response to her apologies over messing up his shirt, she–an attractive young woman–later speaks and behaves in ways to suggest a sexual interest in him: displaying herself in a bright red bra to him (they both need to change clothes and shower in his shower-equipped office after a fall into a dumpster during the chase with the CRS agents), and telling him she was paid to spill drinks on “the attractive guy in the gray flannel suit”; earlier, trapped with him in an elevator, she tells him that she, in a skirt, isn’t wearing underwear when he wants to give her a boost to get out at the top. All of this sexual innuendo, of course, is part of her job as a CRS employee to keep him interested in and hooked on the game.

In the middle of this chase from the CRS agents, Nicholas has lost his impossible-to-open suitcase. What’s more, his American Express card has unaccountably been found at a hotel lobby desk. After retrieving it there, he is directed to a room he has…supposedly…booked, and there he finds his battered suitcase in a trashed room he’s apparently to spend time with a prostitute…and with lines of cocaine.

Now, the danger of a man of his socioeconomic status and reputation being exposed in a sexual scandal of this sort will cause him to feel intolerable narcissistic rage, even after he successfully removes all the evidence of his supposed naughtiness: photos of what looks like him with a prostitute indulging in various forms of kink, the lines of cocaine, video of a moaning pornographic actress, etc. A hotel maid wanting to come in the room to clean it only intensifies the urgency of burying the evidence; as he nervously tries to get rid of the cocaine, he cuts his thumb–symbolic of his narcissistic injury.

Assuming incorrectly that Anson Baer is responsible for the set-up of this potential sexual scandal (the motive supposedly being wanting revenge for Nicholas’s firing him), Nicholas goes over to the hotel he knows Baer to be in and angrily confronts him, throwing the embarrassing pile of photos on a coffee table before Baer, his wife, and their daughter. When it becomes clear that Baer had nothing to do with the photos, cocaine, etc. (he discussed the severance package with Nicholas’s lawyer, Samuel Sutherland [Donat], and he’s quite pleased with it), Nicholas leaves, apologetic and embarrassed, and he knows that the set-up was CRS’s doing.

From the photos, he’s recognized the red bra on the girl, and so assuming it was “Christine,” he knows he must find her again. Before that, though, he goes back to his mansion and finds it broken into. It’s been vandalized, and a loud recording of Jefferson Airplane‘s song “White Rabbit” is playing at top volume. This choice of song is fitting, for its lyric uses the imagery of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to describe the experience of doing drugs. The CRS disruption of Nicholas’s sense of reality is as surreal as an LSD trip (“When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead“), and like Alice, he feels as though he’s falling down a rabbit hole.

And again, where Nicholas, through his wealth and power, can find his way out of a mess like the potential sex scandal (as he’s angrily told Baer, investors won’t care about his reputation, but “whether the stock was up or down”), anyone of lower socioeconomic status would be destroyed. Similarly, Nicholas can handle a break-in far better than a poor man could. After all, for him, it’s all just a game–not so for the poor.

Nicholas meets with Conrad, who is acting (yes, acting) hysterically after apparently having been screwed over by CRS countless and seemingly unending times. The hysterical state we see him in, a display of the psychological fragmentation I described above, is a foreshadowing of what is going to happen to the more-together Nicholas. When Conrad sees a bunch of CRS keys in the glove compartment of Nicholas’s car, the younger brother acts all the more paranoid, as if Nicholas is in on the persecution of Conrad, when if anything it’s the other way around–Conrad is being like a CRS employee.

And of course, in the midst of Conrad’s emotional breakdown in front of his older brother is a revisiting of their family’s old emotional baggage as I’d mentioned above: how the younger sibling feels resentful over seeming ‘inferior’ to the far more successful eldest sibling. Such complaining is a kind of regression to a time of simpler gripes, to help Conrad forget the far more serious…or so it would seem…persecution from CRS. Conrad runs away from Nicholas in his supposedly growing paranoia, and Nicholas–with a flat tire–has to get a taxi.

He soon learns that his cabbie is another CRS employee. The driver jumps out of the cab just before having it go into San Francisco Bay. Again, because Nicholas is a rich man, this is all just a game, from which he’ll be able to escape; whereas a poor man with the bad luck of being in a cab–or any other kind of vehicle, for that matter–in which the driver is a maniac who crashes it is far less likely to get out of the predicament in one piece.

He involves the police and Sutherland, but there’s very little they can do at the moment, since the CRS building has been abandoned. Again, if one were poor, one would get virtually zero help from the police in a situation like this, since we all know who they really serve and protect; in fat cat Nicholas’s case, it will all end up just being a game.

He finally gets together with “Christine” again. At her home, he realizes she’s a CRS employee, for she tells him there’s a hidden camera in the room, with CRS doing their Orwellian spying on him. Such spying in a house anticipates the anxieties and fears many today are getting from the idea of smart home surveillance. Remember also that when I say ‘Orwellian spying,’ it’s within the context of a capitalist society, not a ‘Stalinist’ one. Nicholas will eventually get out of the game, but poorer people are far less likely to escape.

He, of course, doesn’t yet know this is all just a game (unlike the poor, who never have been nor ever will be in just a game), so he gets angry and shows that he knows he’s being surveilled. This provokes armed CRS personnel to swarm the house and fire in its windows. Nicholas and “Christine” flee.

This scene could make viewers of the film today think of what’s happened during Trump’s second term, with such incidents as the immigration raid on Chicago apartments. Or one might be reminded of the 1985 MOVE bombing. Rich Nicholas will learn it’s all just a game soon enough. The real-life victims I’ve just described will never find themselves in a mere game, though.

As Nicholas is fleeing with “Christine,” he comes to understand that CRS has apparently drained his bank accounts by guessing his passwords using the psychological tests he did, though Sutherland reassures him that none of his money has been touched. She says he’s in on the scam. How many poor-to-middle-class people have been conned out of their money, with no comfort of learning in the end that it was all just a game?

Finally, in another house, she gives him a drink, but it is drugged. As he’s getting dizzy and losing consciousness, she admits she’s part of the ‘scam,’ and that CRS is finished taking all of his possessions, since he’s given his card security code over the phone. At the risk of sounding redundant, I must say again: such a scam played on people of modest means would not end up to be a mere game.

He wakes up in a Mexican cemetery, buried there in a filthy white suit. Symbolically, it’s like a death, a harrowing of hell, and a resurrection; but instead of him experiencing a kind of ‘apotheosis’ or ‘deification’ in a ‘spiritual body,’ if you will, he’s been reduced to nothing. Not only is he materially annihilated, but he’s also been humiliated–it’s a Lear-like drop from the royalty of wealth to destitution. This is the greatest narcissistic injury he’s endured yet.

The only thing he has left of any value is a watch, a sentimental gift from his mother that he’ll have to hawk to get some money for a bus ride back to the US. He’ll also have to beg a ride back to San Francisco from a driver in a diner; none of the people asked wants to give a ride to such a filthy-looking ‘bum.’ Nicholas now knows what it’s like to be poor and despised for it.

This is the point where both poles of his bipolar self have been compromised: his birthday has made him the same age when his father, his idealized parental imago, killed himself and thus became an eliminated pole (all the more eliminated with the losing of his mother’s watch); and his grandiose self has been smashed from this financial ruin and abasement of his social status. This means that the other pole has been all but eliminated. He gets back to his (foreclosed!) mansion, takes a cold shower, puts on some respectable-looking clothes, and gets a pistol. Naturally, he wants revenge on CRS. When a carjacker tries to take his car, he points the gun at the guy and tells him he’s “extremely fragile right now”: with his bipolar self so compromised, he certainly is fragile.

He also learns of how fragile Conrad apparently is from the manager of a hotel Conrad was staying in: he’s had a nervous breakdown, it seems, and been taken to a mental institution. The younger brother’s apparent psychological instability is a double of Nicholas’s actual growing instability.

One redemptive moment for him is when he gets together with his ex-wife, Elizabeth (played by Anna Katarina), and he asks her forgiveness for his having been an emotionally neglectful husband. He’s gone through the extreme of hell and come out finding heaven, in this sense: recall the previous player of the game and his quote of John 9:25. I’ve discussed the dialectical relationship of such opposites as heaven and hell in other posts.

While with Elizabeth in a restaurant, Nicholas sees Jim Feingold on TV in a commercial–he’s an actor. He remembers the Chinese restaurant Feingold had gotten food from when they’d met before he did his tests. Nicholas manages to trace Feingold to a local zoo, where he is with his kids. Unbeknownst to Nicholas, this is all CRS just bringing him back into the game.

He forces Feingold at gunpoint to take him to the real CRS office, where he sees all the employees who were involved in his game…including, of course, “Christine.” Nicholas speaks of pulling back the curtain, so he can see, so to speak, the Wizard of Oz.

Such a rising up against the conspiratorial powers-that-be is a fantasy many have had, in their wish to believe that the world is run by some secret, Satanic cabal (run by ‘the globalists,’ ‘the NWO,’ ‘the Freemasons,’ ‘the Jews,’ etc.), since so many like to see the world as a kind of cosmic melodrama than as the banality that it really is. Seeing the world in such a melodramatic manner seems easier, since one can avoid seeing it simply as run by capitalists and see doing something about it as an impossibility; otherwise, one might have to take responsibility and plan a revolution.

Anyway, Nicholas has “Christine” on the roof of the CRS building; she speaks frantically of his gun not being a prop and that the whole thing has really just been a game, which of course he doesn’t believe. Doors open to the roof, and he assumes it’s CRS guards, so he fires…but the bullet goes in Conrad, who’s holding a bottle of champagne while the others with him are there to wish Nicholas a happy birthday.

Devastated, Nicholas has truly reached the lowest point, a low that makes the Mexican cemetery seem mild in comparison. Both poles of his bipolar self have been utterly shattered: he walks off the roof in imitation of his father’s suicide. He lands, however, on a giant air cushion in a banquet hall, where he is to celebrate his birthday.

The CRS employees predicted that he’d be pushed to a suicide like his father’s. Feingold later tells him that if he hadn’t jumped, Feingold would have had to push him off the roof. This all gives us a sense of how disturbingly omniscient CRS seems to be. As representative of a surveilling, totalitarian government, Godlike CRS comes across, in spite of having just played a game, as being just a little too powerful for our comfort.

In this would-be suicide leading to his entry to his birthday party, Nicholas’s ‘death and resurrection’ has truly seen him go through hell and into heaven in the dialectical sense I described above about the Mexican cemetery. Now his character arc is complete, like Scrooge after experiencing the horrors of future Christmases. He is transformed into a good man, willing to give and receive love.

But as I’ve related so many times, he as a wealthy man can afford (literally) to be put through all of this hell and come back okay. Some people might be put off by this ‘happy ending,’ but the point is that the wealthy can experience this kind of thing as a fun adventure, whereas if any of these things happened to the poor, they would never experience it as a game…except in the sense that it is a ‘game’ that the ruling class–the real CRS curse of the world–plays on the common people all the time. The poor would hit a hard ground in such situations; they wouldn’t hit an air cushion.

Analysis of ‘MASH’

I: Introduction

MASH: A Novel about Three Army Doctors was written by Richard Hooker (with the help of WC Heinz) and published in 1968. It was adapted into the 1970 feature film by Robert Altman (with a screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr.), which starred Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould, and Tom Skerritt, with Robert Duvall, Sally Kellerman, René Auberjonois, Roger Bowen, Fred Williamson, and Gary Burghoff.

From these came the long-running hit TV series (1972-1983) whose original cast included Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, Larry Linville, Loretta Swit, William Christopher (except for the pilot episode, which had George Morgan as Father Mulcahy), Timothy Brown, and Burghoff. Both the film and TV series use the story’s setting, a US Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in the Korean War, as an allegory for the Vietnam War.

Neither Hooker nor Altman liked the TV series, feeling it took the story in the opposite direction of its original purpose. In contrast to the liberal, anti-war stance of the series, with its tendency to advocate progressive causes (e.g., opposition to discrimination against blacks, tolerance of gays, equality of the sexes), Hooker was politically conservative. In fact, the novel uses a number of racial slurs (particularly against Asians, as opposed to Alda’s Hawkeye calling out US troops for referring to Koreans as “gooks”; only bigotry against blacks is judged by Hawkeye as wrong), and its protagonists tend to refer to women as “broads.” In the film, the MASH unit’s dentist wants to commit suicide because a moment of erectile dysfunction has made him worry he’s become a “fairy.”

Here‘s a link to a PDF of the novel, a link to an audiobook of it, and a link to quotes from the film.

II: Political Background

As for the contrast between the liberal TV series and the conservative/apolitical novel and film, though, I’d place these contrasting stances at the centre-left and right of a continuum. For as noble as it may be to talk about ending war, as is often wished for on the TV show (as opposed to the novel’s doctors’ indifference to the issue, and instead just wanting to finish their time in the army and return home), the real left-wing stance, the one that is truly to be contrasted with the general stance of the entire MASH franchise, is that the US Army should never have meddled in Korea in the first place, as was the case with Vietnam, too, the aforementioned allegory of the story.

Conventional wisdom would have us believe that, during the Cold War, the capitalist ‘free world’ had to contain and stop the spread of communism, therefore both North Korea and North Vietnam had to be stopped by American military intervention. Actually, as had been revealed years later, the Gulf of Tonkin incident that was used to justify greater American involvement in Vietnam was a lie. Similarly, the conventional narrative that a North Korean invasion of South Korea, which would involve Soviet and Maoist Chinese involvement, started the war was also based on dishonest accounts from hawks like MacArthur, as is related in IF Stone‘s Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951. These wars were just exercises in, and excuses for, US imperialism.

It is further assumed that South Korea is the free, liberal democracy, and that North Korea is the brutal, totalitarian dictatorship. Actually, South Korea has been occupied by the US ever since just after the end of WWII, hardly giving the people a breather after the Japanese occupation of the land, with its exploitation of Korean ‘comfort women.’ US troops soon would also use Korean women as prostitutes to satisfy the men’s lust.

As for the ‘totalitarian DPRK,’ while it’s surely difficult living there because of Western economic sanctions placed on the country, living in a place that provides (or at least strives to provide…sanctions notwithstanding) free or affordable housing, healthcare, education, and other basic needs is far better than living in a country of cutthroat capitalism, the kind that causes the poverty dramatized in films like Parasite. People in the West might also want to reconsider how ‘free’ they are in a world drowning in neoliberal capitalism.

So when we contrast the TV series of MASH, on the one side, against the novel and film, what we’re really dealing with is a culture war of liberal vs conservative, not left vs right. Everyone knows that conservatives are on the right, of course. Liberals, though, are properly understood to be swaying whichever way the political wind happens to be blowing at the time. During the decade that the TV series was on the air, that political wind blew in a relatively leftward direction. Anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear should be able to understand which direction liberals have been blowing under leaders like Clinton, Obama, Biden, Tony Blair, Justin Trudeau, etc.

Seen in a broader political context, conservatism vs liberalism is just moderate-to-extreme right-wing infighting. This context will help us understand the MASH franchise as a whole.

III: Foreword, Chapters One and Two

After a brief foreword–in which Hooker explains how the paradoxical combination of stress from overwork and nothing-to-do boredom, from living and working in a MASH unit during the Korean War, made some of the staff into insubordinate, scruffy, badly-behaved alcoholics (i.e., the Swampmen)–the book goes into a description of Corporal “Radar” O’Reilly (Burghoff), and where he is from–Ottumwa, Iowa. He’s called “Radar” because he has ESP: he can “receive messages and monitor conversations far beyond the usual range of human hearing.”

Radar, sitting at a poker game in the Painless Polish Poker and Dental Clinic of the 4077th MASH, can hear the commanding officer of the unit, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (Bowen; Stevenson), shouting into his phone in his office that he needs two surgeons. In the film, Radar demonstrates his ESP by saying Blake’s words just as Blake is saying them, standing outside, by a chopper with wounded.

The two doctors that the 4077th will get are Captains Benjamin Franklin Pierce, or “Hawkeye” (Sutherland; Alda), and Augustus Bedford Forrest, or “Duke” (Skerritt). Hawkeye got his nickname from his father, who read The Last of the Mohicans; he’s from Crabapple Cove, Maine. Duke is from Georgia; the character never appears in the TV series, though in a season 3 episode, when asked what happened to “that surgeon you had from Georgia”, the answer given is, “He got sent stateside!”

From the physical description given Hawkeye in the novel, Sutherland looked a lot more like him than Alda. He and Duke steal a jeep and drink a bottle of alcohol on their way from Transient Officers’ Quarters at the 325th Evacuation Hospital in Yong-Dong-Po to the 4077th. Both men are married and with kids; but that won’t stop them from fooling around.

They come into Ouijongbu, where they drive past The Famous Club Service Whorehouse, which has contributed much to the venereal disease problem faced by the US Army Medical Corps. An American flag is seeing flying from its central edifice. Such signs as these, in combination with the irreverent attitude of Hawkeye, Duke, and the other Swampmen to be introduced later, illustrate the imperialist encroachments on Korea.

Hawkeye’s plan on arriving at the 4077th is for him and Duke to work so hard as surgeons that they outclass the other talent there. They’ll thus be able to get away with their insubordination and other acts of naughtiness.

Arriving at the 4077th, Hawkeye and Duke go into the mess hall and meet Blake, who already thinks they’re “a pair of weirdos.” He tells them they’ll be living with Major Hobson in his tent; Blake would have Radar told of the order, but Radar’s already there to take them, thanks to his ESP.

The film takes Hobson and merges him with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), who is a captain in the novel, but because of this merging, becomes a major in the film and TV series. Hobson’s/Burns’s praying for everybody is comical and annoying to the non-religious Hawkeye and Duke, who insist that Blake get him out of their tent; the two also insist that Blake get a chest surgeon. This will result in the arrival of Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre (Gould; Rogers).

IV: Chapter Three

McIntyre is from Winchester High Medical School, in Boston. His face is hiding inside a parka hood when he meets everybody, and at first he seems aloof, laconic, and introverted. Hawkeye finds him familiar, though.

It’s when Hawkeye offers McIntyre a martini that he finally comes out of his shell, happily accepting the martini but insisting on olives for his, Hawkeye’s, and Duke’s drinks. He has a bottle of olives in his parka pocket, so all three can have one.

Hawkeye is still trying to remember where he’s seen McIntyre before. One day, the latter picks up a football that’s just landed at his feet. He throws a perfect pass to Hawkeye, who’s now racking his brain trying to remember who McIntyre is. Finally, he realizes that McIntyre is “Trapper” John, an old football player from the Boston/Maine area.

He got his nickname after being caught fooling around with a woman in the ladies’ room at the Boston and Maine train. She said to the conductor, who found her with McIntyre, “He trapped me!”

It’s interesting how, when Hawkeye finally remembers, he says, “Jesus to Jesus and eight hands around, Duke!” Trapper is replacing a major who prays to Jesus. Trapper, in Chapter Seven, will dress up as Jesus in a scheme to raise money to help a Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon (played by Kim Atwood in the film, and by Patrick Adiarte on the TV show), go to the US to study in a university there. There’s a lot of Christian imagery in the novel and film, though it’s usually presented in an irreverent way. Chaplin Father Mulcahy (Auberjonois; Christopher) is well-liked, but derogatorily nicknamed “Dago Red” for his mixed Irish-Italian descent and his red hair.

V: Chapter Four

In this chapter, we learn that the tent that Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are sleeping in will be called The Swamp, hence the three are known as the Swampmen. A sign, in big capital letters saying THE SWAMP, is painted in red on the door of the tent.

It’s called The Swamp in part because the tent resembles “the kind of haunt one might come across in a bog”…in other words, the place is a mess. It’s also the centre of social activity in the 4077th, where the three doctors do their boozing.

When one combines the Dionysian messiness of The Swamp with the sloppiness of the three doctors–that is, their often being unshaved and without the short haircuts one would expect of not just army men, but men of pre-Beatles Western society–we see in their sloppy appearance, as well as in the (often mean) pranks they pull on others and their general contempt for authority, a personification of the kind of mess the US army left Korea in by the end of the war.

A certain group of people are mostly marginalized in the novel, film, and TV series–the Koreans, played mostly by Japanese-American and Chinese-American actors. (The situation with Ho-Jon, to be dealt with below, is one of the few exceptions to the rule of marginalization.) As I said above, racial slurs against Asians are used a number of times in the novel, including by our presumably sympathetic Swampmen. As I’ve also mentioned, Ho-Jon is one of many Korean houseboys, there to do menial chores for the American army hospital staff–in other words, their servants. Finally, I’ve mentioned the reality of Korean prostitution for American GIs, something acknowledged in the novel, but never judged.

This marginalization and racism should form the backdrop of what is the biggest issue of the Korean War, but one rarely given scrutiny in the West: how the US military bombed and destroyed pretty much everything in North Korea. 20% of the total population was killed. The US made a messy swamp, if you will, of North Korea. This reality might help Westerners to understand why the DPRK now has nuclear weapons–not to attack other nations, but to defend themselves. The collective trauma the surviving North Koreans suffered from those bombings meant they were determined never to let it happen again.

Audiences are charmed and amused by the Swampmen’s wisecracking, pranks, and general defiance of US military authority. While I am in principle sympathetic to such defiance, one must take into consideration the fact that one shouldn’t just defy authority for its own sake; one should instead look into the evils caused by that authority and direct one’s defiance against it with an aim to stop those evils.

The Swampmen in the novel and film aren’t interested in directing their defiance with such aims. They just want their fun and games (golf, football, drinking, poker, chasing women, etc.) to be uninterrupted by the officious military. Unlike the more progressively-minded Hawkeye and Trapper of the TV show, the novel’s and film’s Swampmen are just self-absorbed hedonists. As such, they fit in well, ironically, with the US empire’s depredations in East Asia.

One example of a victim of the Swampmen’s depredations is a Protestant chaplain named Shaking Sammy. In Chapter Four, we learn that this chaplain has a bad habit of writing overly optimistic letters to the families of wounded soldiers without inquiring into whether or not these soldiers’ wounds could have resulted in lethalities. Shaking Sammy will tell the soldiers’ families that all is well, and the soldiers will be home soon, for example…yet the soldiers in question could be dead, thus cruelly getting the families’ hopes up, only to be crushed when the truth is known to them.

He’s been warned repeatedly not to send such misguidedly optimistic messages, yet he still does it. Furious with Shaking Sammy, Duke and Hawkeye have him see them use their .45s to shoot all four tires of his jeep. Justice has been done, it seems.

Soon after dealing with a particularly difficult patient who, it seems at first, isn’t going to live, yet with the help of Father Mulcahy’s “remarkably effective Cross Action,” the doctors are able to save the wounded soldier after all. Hawkeye and Duke, very drunk, decide to show their gratitude to Mulcahy for his prayers.

They do so in the form of what Hawkeye calls “a human sacrifice”, and for their sacrificial victim, they choose Shaking Sammy, imagining in their total inebriation that Mulcahy will appreciate this ‘gift.’ Tying Sammy to a cross and surrounding him with a pile of hay and assorted inflammable junk on the ground, Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper are lying on mattresses by him. Duke has a Molotov cocktail in his hand, and it looks as if Sammy’s about to be immolated.

Indeed, the contents of a gasoline can are poured on the debris surrounding Sammy as well as on him. Mulcahy watches the scene in horror, hoping to stop the Swampmen. Duke lights the Molotov cocktail and throws it at Sammy, who screams. It turns out, though, that it wasn’t gasoline that’s been poured on him and his “funeral pyre.” The Molotov just sizzles and goes out.

So no, they didn’t kill Sammy, but they gave him one hell of a scare. This is an example of how mean and excessive the Swampmen’s pranks can be. Another example, from the film, is the famous dropping of the shower tent, exposing the nakedness of the beautiful but disliked head nurse before the entire camp, publicly humiliating her.

The Swampmen know they can get away with this kind of scurrilous behaviour because of their skill as surgeons, and because of how needed they are when the wounded come into the 4077th, as will be the case soon after the prank pulled on Shaking Sammy. Three companies of Canadians will be coming in, flooding the 4077th with casualties, as Hawkeye is aware. The surgeons can’t operate while under arrest.

Tying Sammy to a cross and making him into a “human sacrifice,” a chaplain made into a kind of lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, is an example of the novel’s use of Christian imagery to ridicule religion. As I said above, the Swampmen stick their tongues out at authority, including the authority of the Church, not to right any wrongs inflicted by the powers-that-be, but simply to be enfants terribles for the sheer fun of it. However ill-conceived the optimism may be of Sammy’s letters, he has been cruelly and unusually punished for them.

VI: Chapter Five

Captain Walter Koskiusko Waldowski (played by John Schuck) is the dentist of the 4077th. He’s known as “The Painless Pole” because of his amazing skill at doing dentistry without it hurting his patients. His dental clinic is also where poker games are played, so he is the most popular man in the outfit. Apart from poker and dentistry, his greatest hobby is women.

He’s well-endowed, too…so much so that whenever he takes a shower, other men stop by to see his equipment with awe and admiration. I suspect he’s bipolar, though, since according to the novel, he suffers monthly bouts of depression, each one lasting anywhere from twenty-four hours to about three days. On one particular occasion, he tells the Swampmen he wants to commit suicide because of one moment of impotence.

Hence the song, “Suicide Is Painless,” as the MASH theme music, heard in instrumental form on the TV show, and for the film, with a lyric by Mike Altman, the then 14-year-old son of Robert Altman (music by Johnny Mandel). The song is sung twice in the film, first by “The Mash” (John and Tom Bahler, Ron Hicklin, and Ian Freebairn-Smith) during the opening credits, then by Ken Prymus (playing Private Seidman) during the scene of Painless’s suicide attempt.

Duke and Hawkeye suggest that Painless use a “black capsule” to kill himself with. The Swampmen et al have no intention, of course, of letting Painless kill himself; their plan instead is to cure him of his suicide ideation by, ironically, indulging him in it. This plan, along with their helping Ho-Jon to go to an American university, is one of the few genuinely charitable acts of the Swampmen in the novel or film, which in turn makes them even remotely likable.

They plan to put amytal, a barbiturate derivative with sedative-hypnotic properties, into Painless’s “black capsule.” They figure he’ll take it after getting him drunk, then when he wakes up, he’ll be OK.

On the night of the supposed suicide, everyone will have a party for Painless in his dental clinic/poker hangout. The party is called “The Last Supper”; in the film, there’s even a shot of all the men seated at a pair of long tables as a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting.

Painless is more or less at the centre, where Christ is in the painting. So this scene is another example of MASH using Christian imagery and concepts irreverently. Christ, after His Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, accepted His impending death on the Cross; Painless is about to die (or so he thinks). Christ was raised from the dead; Painless will rise from…well…a death-like state, anyway.

The irony here is that Painless’s salvation will come by a suicide attempt, the ultimate loss of faith, whereas we are saved by Christ through faith. In wanting to save one’s life, one will lose it; but in losing one’s life for Christ, one saves it (Luke 9:24). His yoke is easy, and His burden is light (Matthew 11:30). Suicide is painless. ‘Tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wished (Hamlet, Act III, Scene i). Fittingly, Mike Altman’s lyric quotes “to be or not to be.”

Suicide is painless because, of course, life is painful. Part of the ostensible purpose of religion is to provide solace for that pain. One ‘loses’ one’s life, for the sake of Christ, or to attain nirvana, to achieve painlessness…hence the Painless Pole is a kind of Christ figure, if comically so.

Koreans were historically Buddhist and/or Confucian, and such thinking is still quite influential there today, but it has waned somewhat in the modern world, with today’s influence of secular thinking and Christianity. We’ll learn that Ho-Jon is Christian, and with his trip to the US to study there, he’ll be further inculcated with such Western ideas.

The point is that Western imperialism’s encroachment on Korea has its cultural as well as military aspects, so the Christian imagery in MASH is apt, even if presented irreverently. The irreverence is just part of the theme of defiance of authority for its own sake: it never rights wrongs. As long as liberals can enjoy imperialist privileges in the countries the West occupies, they’ll give the finger to authority all they like, and it won’t make a real difference to the occupied.

Anyway, to get back to Painless, in the novel, while he’s sedated from the amytal in the black capsule, a blue ribbon has been tied to his cock (implying the return of his sexual prowess), he’s been hooked to a harness and dropped from a helicopter (Is this to imply that he’s supposed to believe that he died, harrowed heaven, then had a resurrection back on Earth?); all of this has apparently ended his depression and suicide ideation. As for the film, during his sedation, the gorgeous nurse, Lt. “Dish” Schneider (played by Jo Ann Pflug in the film and by Karen Philipp on the TV series), has been asked by Hawkeye to sleep with Painless and thus allay his fear that he’s becoming a “fairy.” She does so, and his depression is cured.

VII: Chapter Six

This chapter deals essentially with Frank Burns (Duvall; Linville), a captain before the film and TV series promoted him to major. Hawkeye hates him more than anyone else. Burns will never admit his faults as a surgeon, blaming any problems or deaths on someone else, or they’re held to be acts of God. He also has a $35,000 home and two cars back in the States; he has no formal training in surgery, having learned from his father.

On one occasion, a patient in Burns’s care dies after a rather simple hospital staff worker, Private Lorenzo Boone (played by Bud Cort) tries to use a non-functioning suction machine on the patient. Burns claims Boone killed the patient. Not being very bright, Boone assumes Burns’s opinion, as a doctor, is of infallible authority, and he is overwhelmed with guilt and weeps over the death.

Duke sees this exchange, and he hits Burns. In the film, it’s Trapper who sees it and hits him; in the novel, Trapper hits him on a later occasion.

Burns will develop a mutual admiration for and romantic interest in the new Chief Nurse, Major Margaret Houlihan (Kellerman; Swit). While in the book and the film, Burns will be kicked out of the 4077th and sent stateside after he physically attacks Hawkeye for taunting him about his (in the novel, only rumoured) sexual relationship with her, in the TV series, both Burns and Houlihan will stay at the MASH and personify the hated army authoritarianism that the Swampmen rebel against. But again, it’s a self-absorbed, American antagonism between the two sides that has little, if anything, to do with leaving the Koreans alone.

VIII: Chapter Seven

This is the chapter in which the Swampmen raise money to help their Korean houseboy, Ho-Jon, go to the US to study in university there. As I said above, this is one of their few charitable acts in the novel. Even with this one, though, there are some qualifying factors to consider.

As I’ve tried to argue from the beginning, the Americans shouldn’t have been in Korea in the first place. A few scruffy American doctors sticking their tongues out at military authoritarians does nothing to compensate for the damage caused to the Koreans by occupying, bombing, prostituting, and forcing capitalism on them.

If the Koreans had wanted to pursue socialism after the end of the Japanese occupation, then that was their prerogative. Imposing starvation sanctions on the DPRK, and then claiming disingenuously that their problems are all because ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ has been a tried-and-true tactic that Western imperialism had used on a number of occasions, including Cuba and Venezuela. If ‘socialism doesn’t work,’ then just let the countries attempting to build it fail on their own, and after a few months, they should be running back crying to the capitalist West for salvation. Instead, consider what Cuba, burdened with an economic embargo from the 1960s, has been able to achieve.

Ho-Jon would be properly described as an Asian Uncle Tom. He thinks his Swampmen masters are “the three greatest people in the world.” Sure, the three doctors are good to him: they allow him to spend time with them in The Swamp when he isn’t shining their shoes, doing their laundry, etc.; they help him with his English. All of this can be seen as simple rewards for the boy’s loyalty to them. Accordingly, they like him as much as he likes them.

Ho-Jon still has to fight in the war, though, despite the attempts of Blake and the Swampmen to intercede with the Korean government…he’s seventeen at the time, and he gets wounded, with a mortar fragment in his chest. He thus returns to the 4077th to be operated on by Hawkeye and Trapper.

After the surgery and Ho-Jon is getting better, the Swampmen are debating which college would be the best one for him to study in. After briefly considering Dartmouth and Georgia (the latter being a place where the KKK won’t take kindly to an Asian being there), the Swampmen agree on Androscoggin College. Hawkeye writes to the dean, who replies, saying Ho-Jon will need a thousand dollars a year. To raise the money, which will probably add up to five or six thousand, including travel and expenses other than the aforementioned tuition, the Swampmen decide to have Trapper, as hairy as he is, dress up like Jesus, and sell photos of ‘Him.’

Mulcahy doesn’t like the idea of religion for money, but the Swampmen know “there are a lot of screwballs in the army” who will buy the photos for laughs and souvenirs, and there doesn’t seem to be any other way to raise money for Ho-Jon. Once again, MASH uses Christianity irreverently, and we see in it more of Western culture imposed on Korea.

By “more of Western culture impose on Korea,” I mean that Trapper’s clowning around in a Jesus outfit in South Korea and making money from the photos is a symbolic presentation of Christian missionary work and capitalism nosing their way around Asia to spread their influence among the locals. Ho-Jon is already a Christian–that is, he’s been indoctrinated with Western values and ethics–and he’s about to be educated in an American university. The Swampmen are content to work to raise money to send their friend there and be further indoctrinated. Consider in this connection how much money the American government has given to South Korea to keep the country under its spell.

IX: Chapters Eight and Nine

A soldier whose father is a US Congressman has been wounded, and the Congressman wants Trapper to fly to Japan with an assistant doctor, Hawkeye, and do emergency surgery on the boy. The doctors’ major motivation in going to Japan, though, is to play golf there. They even bring their golf clubs with them.

When they get there, Hawkeye reconnects with an old friend, “Me Lay” Marston, who is an anesthesiologist and helps a Japanese doctor run a pediatric hospital that doubles as a whorehouse. In fact, the place unabashedly calls itself “Dr. Yamamoto’s Finest Kind Pediatric Hospital and Whorehouse,” or FKPH&W, for short. This openness shouldn’t be all that surprising, for of course, the US military has been known for frequenting such places in East Asia, as I’ve mentioned above.

When the doctors are going to the operating area, an army nurse tries to stop them. During the operation, a colonel shows his disapproval of their barging in to the place. Neither of these people deter the doctors, obviously. Examples of their usual defiance of military authority can be seen in the film. Again, though, this defiance of authority is just about two men who want to get the surgery out of the way as soon as possible so they can play as much golf as they can get in. They don’t want to wait around for the right people to arrive so they can be authorized to operate. They’re not even dressed as doctors: they’re all scruffy and have their golf clubs with them. Military authority isn’t an oppression to be overthrown–it’s just an inconvenience.

Later, while Trapper and Hawkeye are playing golf, some women caddies there get the impression that Trapper is Jesus when Hawkeye says the Lord’s name in vain after Trapper has hit a good shot. Hawkeye still has some old Jesus photos of Trapper on him, so he gives them to the “bimboes…[who] are on a real Christian kick.”

Though it looks as if Trapper and Hawkeye are planning to get laid, and they even hope to hang out in FKPH&W, speaking of which place, Me Lay wants the two doctors to take care of a half-white, half-Japanese baby, the result of an American john and a careless prostitute there. The doctors deal with the baby’s medical problems and talk Me Lay into adopting the orphan.

That officious colonel, who doesn’t approve of the Swampmen’s dealings with the baby, is blackmailed with photos of himself in bed with a prostitute, so the doctors won’t get in trouble. After all of these adventures, though, the doctors must rush back to the 4077th to deal with a huge, seemingly endless deluge of wounded, which is what Chapter Nine is all about.

X: Chapter Ten

This chapter starts with a description of Captain “Ugly John” Black (played by Carl Gottlieb in the film, and by John Orchard in the TV series), the 4077th’s anesthesiologist, how important he is to the hospital, and how his work is never done. He’s called Ugly John in the novel as an ironic joke: he’s actually “the handsomest man in the outfit.” He also hates everyone in the Commonwealth Division: Brits, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.

Later on in the chapter, a new doctor arrives who is christened by Trapper with the nickname of “Jeeter.” He shares some martinis with the Swampmen, and as he’s getting tipsier and tipsier with each drink, Jeeter reveals how horny he is for the women there. He gets advice from Hawkeye on how he can get his hands on a nurse; while Hawkeye offers a few suggestions, he’s not sure which one is the best, so Trapper suggests that Jeeter announce his availability to all the nurses in the mess hall.

By now so drunk that he’s staggering, Jeeter goes to the mess hall with the help of the Swampmen, and standing at the doorway, he announces his availability in the crudest and most aggressive terms possible, shocking everyone there. Trapper can’t resist inspiring him to say he’ll start by screwing “Hot Lips” Houlihan.

Now, “Hot Lips” has been Major Houlihan’s official nickname, much to her chagrin, ever since her sexual relationship with Frank Burns. Trapper is the one who has christened her with the nickname, though in the film, it’s inspired by her telling Burns to “kiss [her] hot lips,” not knowing that a microphone has been surreptitiously placed by her in her tent where she and Burns have been making love.

Another surgeon, Roger the Dodger, arrives at the 4077th, and he’s inspired to shout out “Hot Lips Houlihan,” which will provoke her all the more.

In the novel, she races into Col. Blake’s tent, fresh from the showers and wildly irate. There’s no reference to a prank involving the shower tent dropping and exposing her nakedness to the whole 4077th, as in the movie, but it’s easy to see how the filmmakers took the idea of the prank as implied in the novel.

When she goes into Blake’s tent, the ends of her hair are still wet, and the strap of her shower cap is hanging from an end of her towel. She obviously ran out of the shower tent before she was finished in there, because the Swampmen, “those beasts, those THINGS,” have upset her so severely. She threatens she’ll resign her commission if Blake won’t do anything about them.

Blake couldn’t care less if she does. He never properly disciplines any of the Swampmen. As she says, the 4077th “isn’t a hospital…It’s an insane asylum,” and Blake is to blame for not using his authority to stop men like McIntyre from calling her “Hot Lips.”

This incident, especially as it’s represented in the film, underlines another unsavoury aspect of the original MASH that makes nonsense of the more progressive aspects of the TV series: its sexist attitude towards women. Houlihan may be a major, but she’s given no respect. In the TV series, especially the later seasons, much is made of her as a spokeswoman for sexual equality in the army.

Not so in the novel or film, where women are called “broads,” chased by the men for sex, objectified and exposed as described above, had orders barked at them by the Swampmen to do such things as cook for them, etc. All of this fits in line with the imperialist project of trying to control the entire Korean Peninsula, as well as Japan, where in both US-controlled places, there is prostitution provided for the GIs. A huge part of world domination is in controlling its women, as of the 2020s, just under 50% of the global population.

I never found the film’s shower scene with Houlihan amusing. It always came across to me as a mean, humiliating, demeaning prank devised by the immature Swampmen, all just to find out whether or not she’s a natural blonde. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as charmless as army authoritarianism may be, cheap pranks like these are not the way to deal with it; they’re often not even funny.

Houlihan will try to get Blake in trouble by informing General Hammond (played by G. Wood) of how out of control the staff of the 4077th are. Ultimately, nothing will be done about it. Indeed, the general goes so far as to say, “Screw her.”

XI: Chapter Eleven

Blake has been sent to Japan for temporary duty at the Tokyo Army Hospital. He’s been replaced by Col. Horace DeLong for the three weeks that Blake is gone. DeLong, another regular army guy, will be quite dismayed with the erratic behaviour of the scruffy Swampmen, though he will come to respect Hawkeye for his skills as a surgeon.

Bored during a spell of no wounded, and suffering in the heat, the Swampmen get some amusement by pretending they’ve gone insane. They speak of mermaids as if they were real, and they tell DeLong that when they catch a mermaid, they’ll “screw the ass off her.” They figure that if they can convince DeLong that they’re nuts, they’ll be sent to some psychiatrists in Seoul for a while, then get sent back to the 4077th in time for when more wounded come.

To add to the craziness about mermaids, Hawkeye says he’ll agree to DeLong’s plan–to have the Swampmen go to the 325th Evac for psychiatric observation–if he can get “a shot at the epileptic whore,” an idea inspired by a psychiatrist Hawkeye once knew who had a female epileptic patient; she’d go crazy every time her husband tried to have sex with her. Hawkeye hopes to find such a prostitute in Seoul during the Swampmen’s rest and ‘therapy.’

They go to the 325th Evac, meet a psychiatrist named Maj. Haskell, and do their crazy routine with him. They act as though Hawkeye is the worst case. When Haskell meets Hawkeye, the latter makes a number of incoherent remarks to seem crazy.

The Swampmen also find a place where they can get at the “epileptic whore”–Mrs. Lee’s, whose brothel’s girls are “velly clean.” They visit the place, but don’t end up trying the prostitute with “hysterical convulsion[s].”

XII: Chapter Twelve

Hawkeye gets the idea to have the 4077th set up a football team. He considers certain men in the unit, including one named Vollmer, to be a centre, then Jeeter as a second string halfback, among others, all of whom have had football playing experience, according to Hawkeye. Their new team can play against that of the 325th Evac, a team coached by General Hammond.

Since Hammond’s team is really good, Hawkeye knows someone who can be a ringer to ensure that the 4077th can beat the 325th Evac: Captain Oliver Wendell Jones–“Spearchucker,” (Williams; Timothy Brown in the TV series) an excellent football player who’s become a neurosurgeon. When Duke hears the man’s name, he (correctly) assumes that Jones is black, flaring up Duke’s racial prejudice.

Hawkeye gives Duke a slight chiding for calling Jones a “nigra,” and when Duke meets Jones and taunts him a bit, Jones puts him properly in his place. This is the first time in Hooker’s novel that someone is called out for using racial slurs or otherwise demonstrating racial bigotry. Since the novel was published in 1968, it is safe to assume that, because of the Civil Rights movement, conservative Hooker knew he couldn’t get away with racism against blacks the way he could racism against Asians at the time. Still, calling Jones “Spearchucker,” a nickname he accepts because he “used to throw the javelin,” is plenty racist as it is.

The Swampmen go to Blake to make a twin request that is really one: they need a neurosurgeon, Jones specifically, and they need him also for the 4077th’s new football team. Blake remembers that Hammond coaches the 325th Evac team, and that Hammond’s sense of how to coach a football team is years out of date; Blake also knows that with Jones playing for the 4077th, they can beat Hammond’s team and make a lot of money. After all, people bet on these football games, and so a profit can be made on them.

When Blake agrees to set up the new 4077th football team, insisting that he be their coach, Hawkeye is pleased and tells the other Swampmen, “Henry believes in free enterprise, too.” Note here the combination of capitalism with the liberal concession of having a black man on the football team. Of course, the far more progressive stance of the TV series includes far greater respect for blacks…the dealing with “Spearchucker” early on notwithstanding.

The character had been written out of the TV series by the end of season one because it had been understood that there were no black surgeons in MASH units during the Korean War, and so the sitcom’s creator was concerned, apparently, with maintaining historical accuracy (about something most people probably wouldn’t have known, anyway; and actually, there had been several black surgeons at the time). Hmm: a TV series–one that ran for just over a decade about a war that had lasted for only a little over three years, that was meant as an allegory about the Vietnam War, and which had men in the early 1950s with shaggy 1970s hair instead of short, army haircuts–fired a black actor because of concern about historical accuracy? Speaking of racism…

Then again, continuing to call a black man “Spearchucker” over and over again would have been problematic in itself for a TV show that was to be more politically progressive, anyway. In all of this, we can see how the contrast between the show, the film, and the novel is not a conservative/liberal dichotomy, but rather a continuum between the two supposedly opposing political stances.

XIII: Chapter Thirteen

When the players of the new 4077th football team are practicing, they’re awful, but not hopeless. When the game happens, it turns out that Hammond has a few pro footballers of his own for his team, so the 4077th will have to find ways around such obstacles…including cheating. One of the pros, for example, is surreptitiously given a sedative during a pileup in order to incapacitate him.

One way to think about this football game is to allegorize it as a war, except that instead of it being a war between the capitalist West and the ‘dirty commie’ North Koreans and Chinese, it’s a war between the scruffy anti-authoritarians and the military authority, as personified by Hammond’s team. Such an interpretation seems fitting, since throughout the novel and the film, we get very little of the actual Korean War, apart from all the wounded needing surgery.

This war-allegory ties in with what I’ve been saying on and off throughout this analysis: there’s very little concern with the actual war and the damage that was done to the Koreans at the hands of US imperialism. All the MASH staff care about is themselves. They deal with the horrors of war not by demanding a stop to it or by making fun of anti-communist hysteria (as happens from time to time in the TV series), but instead by indulging in pleasure: boozing, sex, golf, and now, football. They oppose the military not because of its imperialism, but because it gets in the way of their fun.

The football players are profiteering from bets on the game, just as there are profiteers in war. The team opposing that of the 4077th are called, significantly, “the enemy” in the novel. The game is a war, a comically self-absorbed one between Americans and Americans, with the Koreans so marginalized this time that they’re not even present.

One of the major reasons for divergences from the film and the novel (and even Lardner’s script, for that matter) is Altman’s encouragement of his actors to improvise, to allow more creative freedom for them and to have more spontaneous interactions between them, adding more realism. One result of this indulgence in MASH is, during the football game, Schuck as Painless saying, “Alright, bud, your fucking head is coming right off,” making this the first time in a mainstream Hollywood movie that that word was ever said…and allowed.

Another example of the 4077th team cheating is when Radar uses his ESP to listen in on the upcoming plays Hammond’s team is planning. They also use a trick involving Vollmer hiding the football and walking it over to the enemy’s side while everyone else is kept busy and distracted. As a result, the 4077th wins the game 28-24, and they make a huge profit.

This blatant disregard for the rules, as well as the contempt shown for authority, can be seen to represent the real political stance, if there even is one, of the Swampmen–they’re anarchists. Yet their penchant for making profits makes them a most dubious kind of anarchist…’anarcho’-capitalists! I told you this novel/film was far from left-wing or progressive.

XIV: Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen, and Conclusion

The days of the deployment of Hawkeye and Duke in South Korea are numbered, so between now and when they get sent home, Blake is having them teach two new doctors how to do “meatball surgery,” which is a set of surgical short-cuts, since saving the lives of the wounded is the priority, and not daintiness, which can be left to the doctors in, say, Tokyo.

In the final chapter, Hawkeye and Duke finally leave the 4077th and go back to the States. They do a lot of drinking on the way, and they engage in a lot of their usual naughtiness, including at one point shirking certain medical duties by pretending to be chaplains. Finally at home, they rejoin their wives and kids in Maine and Georgia.

In the TV series, though, of course, Hawkeye (as well as Frank Burns) have not gone home, and Hawkeye (played by the ever-so-charismatic Alan Alda) is a bachelor. The show truly was an allegory of the Vietnam War, the last years of which overlapped with the film and the first few seasons of the series. As a result, the TV show, with its eleven seasons, ended up turning a three-year-war into an eleven-year quagmire, if you will, in ironic imitation, it seems, of Nam.

The more progressive liberal stance of the TV show, as I said above, should be seen as on a continuum with the more conservative vision of Hooker and Altman, since the one progressive stance of consequence–that the US army should never have been in Korea in the first place–is never even considered, not in the novel, the film, or the TV show.