Tag: capitalism

Cliffs

Imagine a railroad track that ends where the bridge is out,
over a
steep
cliff
that
no one
would
ever
want to
fall off
to his
death.

People on a train
are going on that railroad track, right to the end of it.
They
don’t
seem
aware
of the
danger
that
they’re
heading
toward.

Marxists, liberals, and right-wingers
are all on that train, racing toward certain doom.
These
last
of the
three
are all
running
to the
front,
as if
wanting
to die.

The liberals are just sitting in their seats,
with a strange faith that the track will go
all
the
way
to
the
other
side
of
the
abyss.

Only the Marxists, the Leninists in particular,
are going to the back, running to jump off,
before
they
go
over
with
all of
those
fools
who
think
the
track
is safe.

Dripping

We can sweat the small stuff, enduring those tiny drops
that don’t upset too much, being so small. Yet, them being
so cold, irregular, and incessant, the irritation slowly builds

’til

you

can

not

take it anymore.

It’s like Chinese water torture: sweat will drip off your chin
as the cold drops slowly fall, tapping on your scalp. Knowing
when they are coming, you’re prepared, and they’d be bearable,

but

you

do

not

know when they will hit, so the anticipation is crazy-making.

Gold was supposed to trickle down decades ago, but it
was pyrite. The decades went by, the trickling was icy cold,
& now we’re mad, getting cut off from reality more and more,

and

no

one

is

helping us, or organizing, or showing us a way out of this mess. Each drip
may just be one drop of water, but these all add up to a lake of fire over time.
Someone, please, turn off the tap, so we can all have peace.

Funnels

There have always been
a concentrated group
of people who
will know
how
one
may
see

the wise way to go, but
how do we get all
the others out
there to
see
the
way
out

of our current trap?
There are those
to the right,
they who
can
not
see
one

thing amiss about
class conflict,
but believe
markets
to be
the
one
way
out.

Then, there are those
on the ultra-left
who are not
satisfied
unless
all
is
set
up

without any faults.
how can one
funnel
such
men
in
so

thin a space to get
us all out of
this mess
that
we
are
in?

Analysis of ‘Burn!’

Burn!, or Queimada, is a 1969 historical film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. It stars Marlon Brando, with Evaristo Márquez and Renato Salvatori. It was written by Franco Solinas and Giorgio Arlorio, who based the fictional story partly on the activities of William Walker, an American filibuster involved in the 1855 invasion of Nicaragua, and whose name was used for Brando’s character. The music was composed by Ennio Morricone, with the beautiful, anthemic “Abolisson” (“abolição,” or “abolition”–i.e., abolition of slavery, or abolition of private property) playing during the film’s opening credits.

Burn! has been critically acclaimed in the US and abroad. Edward Said praised it and Pontecorvo’s film, The Battle of Algiers, saying they “…stand unmatched and unexcelled since they were made in the 60s. Both films together constitute a political and aesthetic standard never again equaled.” The film gives a raw and uncompromising depiction of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery. Of these three evils, David N. Meyer said in The Brooklyn Rail that “…few other films ever address them at all,” something Michael Parenti has also observed. Indeed, anti-imperialist cinema like Burn! typically gets minimal distribution in theaters…for reasons that should be obvious.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie, partly in English and partly in Italian with English subtitles.

Sir William Walker is an agent provocateur, sent to the island of Queimada in 1844 by the British Admiralty, for the purpose of stirring up a slave revolt among the blacks on the island to remove the Portuguese regime, so the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can take over and economically exploit the place. In the Lesser Antilles, Queimada literally means “burnt,” because the Portuguese once had to burn the entire island down to put down the resistance of the indigenous people, after whose deaths blacks were brought to the island to work the cane fields.

The flames of Queimada are the hellfire of imperialism.

It’s interesting how in this film we have an American actor playing a British character based on an American, a casting that suggests the intersection of American and British imperialism. The notion of burning the entire island down, in a film made in 1969, when the Vietnam War was still going on, also invites comparison between the destructiveness of the imperialism of the past with modern imperialism, with its napalm fire and bombings of all those people today who try to defy the US/NATO empire.

Empire rules by a cunning combination of the carrot and the stick. We usually note the stick, but don’t pay enough attention to the carrot. Burn! brings our focus to the carrot in how we see Walker entice José Dolores (Márquez) into leading a slave rebellion to help the British oust the Portuguese.

In all of Walker’s machinations we also see an example of inter-imperialist conflict. As competitors in the production and sale of sugar, the British and Portuguese naturally dislike each other, as we see in the altercations between Walker and Portuguese soldiers at the beginning of the film.

We should wince when we see the stark contrast between the wealthy whites, in their fine clothing, getting off the boat with Walker, on the one hand, and the appalling poverty of the blacks, the children of whom are typically half- or fully naked. José appears, offering to carry Walker’s bags: this offer of service will be a motif repeated in the middle of the film and at the end, with strongly ironic overtones…of the sort of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic.

Walker’s original intention on coming to Queimada has been to meet with a black rebel named Santiago, but the rebel has been caught, and he is to be executed. Walker is informed of the bad news by Teddy Sanchez (Salvatori, in dark makeup), a man of mixed African and European background with revolutionary ideals for the island, but ultimately an ineffectual leader. José is standing by as Walker hears the news, a kind of foreshadowing that he will soon replace Santiago, for Walker’s purposes.

Walker later provokes a Portuguese soldier to get himself arrested, so he can watch Santiago’s brutal execution, which includes the use of the garrote and decapitation, from the window of his prison cell. Being white and wealthy, though, Walker can get a lawyer and be freed promptly.

He follows the widow and children of Santiago as they carry his headless corpse from the prison back up a hill to their home. He gives them a hand in carrying the cart part of the way up the hill; in this act of his, knowing how two-faced he really is, we can see in Walker a personification of the liberal who pretends to care for the downtrodden, but who is really just using these people for his own ends.

We see a similar thing going on today when our movie stars are all simping for Ukraine (Ben Stiller, Sean Penn, Mark Hamill, etc.), pretending they care about the suffering of Ukrainians, when it’s really about promoting the interests of the US/NATO empire, even to the point of defending neo-Nazis (however much the celebrities in question are unaware of, or in denial of, that ugly reality). In this way, it is fitting that a Hollywood actor is playing Walker, a bad guy pretending to be a good guy (though, in Brando‘s defence, he did reject his Godfather Oscar as a protest against Hollywood’s mistreatment of Native Americans; also, Brando considered his performance in Burn! to have been the best of his career).

Alberto Grimaldi, producer of Burn!, wanted Sidney Poitier to play José, but Pontecorvo wanted Márquez for the role. I agree with the director’s choice, not out of disrespect for Poitier, of course, but because an unknown actor is more fitting to play the underdog José.

Since Santiago is dead, Walker needs someone to replace him, someone brave, who takes initiative, someone with nothing to lose. He spots these qualities in José, and tests the black man by abusing him with strikes to the face, calling him a “black ape” who stole his bags when he was arrested, slandering his dead mother, and asking if everything a white man says is correct. At first, José is submissive, suggesting he won’t make a good revolutionary leader…then José tries attacking Walker with a machete.

José is Walker’s man, after all.

What’s ironic in Walker’s provocations of José is that his white supremacism is, of course, genuine, rather than merely posturing as a test to awaken José’s rage. The reality of that white supremacism will be clear to José in good time.

Such dialectical juxtapositions of contraries as these are a theme running throughout the movie. Walker as both “friend” and foe of the blacks, the carrot and stick of imperialism, wealthy whites in their finery among half-naked blacks, and half-white, half-black Sanchez, who lives among the privileged but, sympathetic to the blacks, is ultimately powerless and useless to their cause. Even the band of blacks whom José gathers to commit a bank robbery, meet in a church…and the bank–house of the wealth of the privileged Portuguese–is the Banco Espírito Santo.

The Portuguese soldiers will be distracted by drunk, reveling blacks at night, making the robbery much easier. After informing the Portuguese of where José and his men are, Walker supplies his revolutionaries with weapons and teaches them how to use them. His playing of one side against the other reminds us of how two-faced Walker is.

Since Walker has lied to the Portuguese about a supposedly small number of black thieves, they overconfidently send too few soldiers to retrieve the stolen money, and they are killed by José’s men, an encouragement to his people. Soon they’ll have to fight more Portuguese, of course, and in the process, Walker’s robbery grows into a full-blown revolution.

In making José into a revolutionary leader, Walker has made him into both a blessing and a thorn in the side of the British, as we’ll soon see…another example of the theme of juxtaposed opposites in the film.

While José’s revolution is carrying on, Walker of course has his own, British agenda. In a meeting with a group of wealthy white men, Walker discusses how paid workers will be economically preferable to slaves.

In making his case, he uses a shrewd, if “impertinent,” metaphor: men’s use of wives vs. their use of prostitutes. The wife, in the context of the patriarchal family, is analogous to the slave; she’s her husband’s chattel, but all of her expenses are paid by him, even her burial, if he should survive her. The prostitute, on the other hand, is analogous to the modern-day wage labourer; in belonging to no man (her pimp notwithstanding!), she is “freer,” but her client pays only for her services, and she has to pay for her expenses all out of her own pocket.

This analogy is another example of the film’s dialectical juxtapositions of opposites. The British Empire ended slavery not so much out of humanitarian reasons (though these, as well as slave revolts, were significant factors) as out of the economic reasons Walker has laid out in his women-as-property analogy. Slaves are freed, a good thing; but now they’re wage slaves who are no longer provided for, a bad thing.

So, freeing the black slaves isn’t really freeing them, any more than a prostitute is freed…not if the Antilles Royal Sugar Company can help it. This means that Walker et al cannot allow José Dolores to become another Toussaint L’Ouverture.

For a time, the blacks are happy, celebrating, dancing, and making music. What’s left of the Portuguese regime is allowing them a day of freedoms, the “Dia de Reis,” a kind of Saturnalia. The increasingly demoralized Portuguese soldiers can only stand around in disgust at the sight of the costumed revelers.

Now, just as Walker is using the blacks for his purposes, so is he using Sanchez, whose blackness he sees more than his whiteness. At the same time, presumably because of that whiteness, Walker is more direct with Sanchez about how he is using him–to assassinate the Portuguese governor so Sanchez can head the new provisional government, freeing Britain to exploit the sugar cane industry.

José and his men are to lay down their arms and be workers for the Antilles Royal Sugar Company in exchange for the abolition of slavery in Queimada. We hear Morricone’s “Abolisson” again at this point in the film.

José, wearing the uniform of one of the Portuguese soldiers, doesn’t yet know of Walker’s double-dealing, and he still imagines that “Inglês” is his friend. José still thinks that Queimada belongs to him and his people.

José will soon learn the disillusioning truth, though. He’s already uncomfortable having to negotiate a new Queimada constitution with a provisional government made up of white men. He is cool even when meeting Sanchez, seeing his white skin more than his black; this is all in spite of how Sanchez warmly greets him and sincerely hopes for the best for José’s people. He warns Sanchez to be plain with him during the negotiations.

Over the course of a month of discussions with the whites over how to establish the new constitution, it becomes clear to José that they have no intention of relinquishing control of Queimada. To their obviously self-serving suggestions, he can only say “No.” In frustration, he leaves the room, calling them all “Bastards.”

They rationalize their control over the sugar cane industry by insisting it will be good for the blacks economically, but José can see through these white exploiters. All that matters to them is maintaining a maximization of profit, while he cares about his people. He orders his men to remove all the whites from the building.

Walker carries on with the rationalizing, telling José that his politically inexperienced blacks cannot modernize Queimada without the help of the whites. Walker speaks of who, other than the whites, will handle commerce, teach in Queimada’s schools, and cure the sick among the blacks; but as anyone familiar with colonialism will tell you, those whites will handle commerce, teach in schools, and cure the sick only for the benefit of other wealthy whites. The poor blacks won’t enjoy any of those benefits.

José knows that it’s better, for Queimada to go forward, if the whites go away. The blacks, in their inexperience of modern forms of government, commerce, education, and medicine, will surely stumble many times, but they’ll also learn from their mistakes, and in doing so, they’ll move much farther forward, in due time, than they will as exploited wage slaves, forever mired in poverty, because their white slave masters have never had any intention of giving up their power.

José goes outside at night to reunite with his people. He’s saddened by his disappointments with the whites, but to see his people again, those he loves and who love him, brings a smile back on his face.

Walker finds José in a tent, and with a revolver he is prepared to shoot the revolutionary he’s created; but José finally agrees to his men’s laying down of their arms and returning to the plantations. He can see the pragmatism of going along with the British, to prevent extreme poverty and starvation from engulfing the island; but he warns Walker of who has the machetes, which can cut off heads as well as the cane.

In his warning to the British, who in their selling of the cane that he and his people cut, in their dependence on their black workers, the British are reminded of the slave/master dialectic. This observation should be seen in connection with the following scene the next day, when José offers again to carry Walker’s bags, “for a friend,” as the agent provocateur is going to his ship to leave Queimada. This offer to carry Walker’s bags should be remembered at the end of the film, again in symbolic connection with Hegel’s master/slave dialectic.

Walker is going to Indochina, to do more of his imperialist cajoling there. He shares a pleasant drink with José, the two of them exchanging friendly smiles, before he boards his ship. His fake friendship with José perfectly exemplifies the two-faced nature of liberals towards those oppressed by imperialism, something the oppressed should be ever wary of.

Ten years later, Walker is sought out so he can go back to Queimada and quell an uprising of José’s in response to the British takeover of the island. What must be emphasized here is how imperialism is in the service of wealthy capitalists. It isn’t just governments who are bullying the blacks of Queimada.

A scene at the London Stock Exchange demonstrates clearly how the financial success of the sugar businesses has given them great political power over their plantations. Men from the Antilles Royal Sugar Company look for Walker, so he can do something about José. He is found in a pub, in the middle of a fistfight that he wins; this detail adds to our understanding of Walker’s brutishness, for we even see him hit the two men seeking him out.

When Walker returns to Queimada, we find not only José rebelling against British exploitation, but also Teddy Sanchez is growing to be uncooperative. Paid for by the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, Walker will act as a military advisor to help put down José’s rebellion. In this we can see clearly how imperialism and colonialism are working in the interests of capitalism; this point would normally be so obvious that it wouldn’t need to be said, except that right-wing libertarians generally refuse to admit that their precious “free market” is ever guilty of any wrongdoing. Government acts alone in these forms of wickedness, in their opinion.

Sanchez hopes Walker will be able to negotiate with José as he had before–to offer the blacks equal civil rights, higher wages, and a general amnesty. The other men in power are hoping Walker will simply get rid of him, and Walker is leaning towards their way of solving the problem.

Another example of the carrot/stick tactic of imperialism is having many black men on the island work as soldiers for the British. We see some of them round up a group of insurgents, line them against the side of a building, and shoot them. One can imagine how the other, powerless blacks must look on these uniformed men as traitors to their own people.

Walker saves one of the men to be shot, needing him to mediate between Walker and José. Though he saves the man’s life for this purpose, because the man tries to run away, Walker shoots him in the leg. In this act, we see, in a symbolic sense, how even when Walker does something good in itself, bad always accompanies the good–more juxtaposing of opposites.

In his conversation with Walker, the man repeats what he’s heard José say, which is the reason for this revolt: the plantation workers, toiling away for the most paltry of wages, are still slaves because they have only machetes, but no ownership of the sugar cane business. We Marxists have always understood how the same basic contradiction has existed throughout history, regardless of if it’s in the form of master vs. slave, feudal lord vs. peasant, or bourgeoisie vs. proletariat: those who own the land and means of production have the power, and they will always be at war with their powerless labourers.

Walker tells the man, just before he is to ride off on a horse to tell José of Walker’s intentions, that he will be pleased to see him. Walker even has the man give José an alcoholic drink as a gift. Such acts are yet more examples of the two-faced liberal pretending to be the friend of the man he’s oppressing.

Walker asks a black soldier working for the imperialists why he isn’t fighting on José’s side. The man doesn’t answer, having a look of shame on his face, but the answer is obvious: his work is safer and better paid…hence, Walker’s smile.

Walker’s container of alcohol is returned from José, with a message on it, saying that he doesn’t drink anymore. José is wise to Walker’s lies now. The message has been sent to him on a cart with dead imperialist soldiers tied to it. It’s obvious that José is done with negotiating. This is war.

In preparing for this war, Walker as the military adviser notes how, in spite of how the imperialists have far more men, weapons, money, etc. than José’s men have, the imperialists haven’t been able to defeat José for these six years; apart from the guerrillas’ inaccessible location, the reason for this frustration is that the imperialists fight for their pay and because they have to, whereas the guerrillas fight for an idea, because they have nothing to lose but their lives. They fight for their love of freedom, and this love motivates them in a way that nothing comparable can for the imperialists. Revolutionaries must never forget this edge they have over the powerful, and must use this edge to steel their courage.

The black collaborators manage to find where the guerrillas and the people they’re protecting are, and they round up the people; then, carrying torches, they burn down the forests where the guerrillas have been hiding. As with the Portuguese, the imperialists’ method of victory is total, indiscriminate destruction, with no respect for plant life, just like the “innocents raped with napalm fire” during the Vietnam War.

A dying black collaborator tells his comrades that the guerrillas emerged from the fire, themselves burning, and killed him and his fellow collaborators there at a fort. The dying man describes the guerrillas as inhuman devils, an obvious projection of how inhuman and devilish the torchers of the forest are.

The imperialists find other villages where the rebels’ people are living, and the black collaborators round them up, too, and burn down their homes. Dogs chase a guerrilla through the fields until he comes to a clearing, then he is shot.

Sanchez, ever torn between his wish to help the blacks and his being forced to help the whites (perfectly symbolized in his half-white, half-black skin), tells all the rounded-up people that the war is José’s fault, it will end soon, and they will all go back to work. The frown on his face shows how reluctant he is in telling them this.

Bread is offered on a cart to the hungry people, and while they are expected to sit and wait patiently for it to be distributed, they rush for the cart, and the collaborators have to fire their rifles to bring about order. Sanchez, in his growing frustration, makes an attempt to take control of the government for the sake of the blacks. His unwillingness to cooperate with the Antilles Royal Sugar Company will be his undoing. In his downfall, we see how the government is controlled by the capitalists, not vice versa.

British redcoats arrive on the island to help defeat José. Sanchez is arrested on a trumped-up charge of treason, and he is executed by firing squad. His arrest is “in the name of the people of Queimada,”…but we all know which people are being referred to here.

The redcoats start fighting the guerrillas, and we see them rounding up the blacks, including women and children. We see the trauma in the eyes of a naked black boy when he has rifles pointed at him. Cannon and rifle fire have left a fog of smoke and a sea of flame all over the plantations…Queimada, indeed. Guerrillas are getting shot left, right, and centre, including the one who mediated between Walker and José.

Shelton (played by Norman Hill) complains of the destruction of the sugar cane plants that has resulted from the battle. After explaining that the plants can be grown again for future exploitation by the Antilles Company, Walker tells Shelton why the island is named Queimada, and that the danger of revolutionary fervour passing from here to other exploited islands greatly outweighs any momentary loss of profits.

José is spotted in Walker’s telescope; he is climbing a mountain with his fellow guerrillas. Here he is shot and captured. Just so we have no doubts about Walker’s duplicitous nature, he describes José as “a fine specimen” who started as a water and bag carrier, made into a revolutionary leader for England’s purposes, and then when he is no longer useful, he is eliminated, “a small masterpiece”; Walker says all of this while smiling.

Just as Walker has spoken of new sugar cane crops growing after a burning, so does José speak of a rebirth of revolutionary feeling after the imperialist fire has defeated him. José says this among the black collaborationists, as if to plant the seed in their minds, to move them to redeem themselves. José knows that others with replace him after he’s executed, hence he doesn’t fear death.

Walker comes over to greet José and shake his hand, but the latter of course won’t shake the hand of the man who’s stabbed him in the back so many times. Walker offers José drink, but he remains cool. Walker has a soldier give José his horse; this gift doesn’t make Walker any more his friend by the weight of an atom.

A naked black boy is found in one of the desolate villages; Walker orders a black collaborator to grab the boy and take him with them. We hear the cries and screams of the boy as he’s carried off. As this is happening, Walker rides over to José and angrily blames the victim, calling José a “black ape” again, and accusing him of starting the bloodshed, in true imperialist fashion. José spits in Walker’s face.

When José is to be hanged, Walker hopes to free him, not out of any sense of camaraderie or remorse (as the Wikipedia article spuriously claims), but because Walker fears making a martyr out of him, inspiring future revolutionaries. If Walker can make it seem to the blacks that José has betrayed them, or has fled death like a coward, then the spirit of revolution may die with him…or at least be weakened.

This attitude is what we should see in Walker when he enters José’s tent and tries to cut him loose. He feels no remorse whatsoever for having betrayed José. In offering him a chance to save his life, Walker is making no act of atonement. Earlier, we even see Walker tie the noose to hang José with.

José chooses to be hanged rather than run free, since he knows that staying alive would be convenient to the British. His martyrdom will indeed inspire future revolutionaries among the blacks; a spark of such inspiration is to be seen in the final scene, as Walker approaches the ship to take him off the island.

The frown we see on Walker’s face as he goes there is, as I said above, not a frown of remorse, despite what the liberal editors of Wikipedia would have you believe. His is a frown from having not done the best he could have done at his job, something he earlier said he prides himself on. He’s frowning at José’s martyrdom, a danger to the empire, and a sign that Walker has ultimately failed in his imperial project.

His failure is to be openly displayed when he hears a black man offer to carry his bags again. Hearing the voice from behind, Walker has a brief hope it’s the voice of José. He frowns in disappointment to see it’s a different man, who then sticks a knife in Walker’s gut.

As he lies dead on the ground, we see black workers looking from all around at him, frowning because of all the pain, suffering, and death that his machinations have caused them, but they’re also content to have finally got their revenge. After the burning, the spirit of revolution will be reborn.

This act of service, offering to take his bags, then stabbing him, is once again a symbolic manifestation of the master/slave dialectic. Capitalists will hang themselves on the very rope they make, just as they made José hang, since he so willingly allowed it. We don’t need the capitalists; they need us, the proletariat. It’s their very dependance on our work that will be their undoing, and this is what the taking of Walker’s bags, then the taking of his life, at this final moment of the film, symbolize.

We in today’s world can use Burn! to teach us to beware the carrot as well as the stick of imperialism. When they offer us freedom in manufacturing our consent for their wars, they’re really scheming to cause us to suffer more servitude to the depredations of empire, that juxtaposition of contraries that I mentioned above.

It’s obscene to call the Ukrainian war against Russia a struggle for Ukrainian freedom and democracy (as the European bootlickers of the US assert), when the very Ukrainian authorities being given all the Western money and aid include neo-Nazis who have banned eleven opposition parties and corruptly used much of the money for their own personal use. Indeed, a substantial portion of military hardware sent to Ukraine has ended up sold on the black market.

The war planned against China, using the Taiwanese no less as cannon fodder as the Ukrainians are being used, will also be spuriously presented in the media as a fight for democracy. The real plan is to weaken China and Russia, and to bring about regime change in the two countries, and therefore to ensure a lasting US hegemony. In Burn!, we see the same basic idea: use the blacks as cannon fodder to remove the Portuguese and ensure British hegemony on the island.

We mustn’t allow the Walkers of the world to have their way. We mustn’t be the José Dolores who goes along with such schemes, only to be stabbed in the back, dolorous in the end. Instead, we must be the José who takes up the real fight, and who spits in the face of the Walkers of the world.

If we carry his bags, we must carry a knife, too.

Analysis of ‘The Exterminating Angel’

The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador) is a 1962 Mexican surrealist film written and directed by Luis Buñuel. It stars Silvia Pinal, who also starred in Buñuel’s Viridiana; other actors in the cast include Augusto Benedico, Claudio Brook, Lucy Gallardo, Xavier Loyá, and Enrique Rambal.

The Exterminating Angel was on The New York Times 2004 list of “The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.” It was also made into an opera in 2016. The film received the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. At the 1963 Bodil Awards, it won the award for Best Non-European Film.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, and here is a link to the film with English subtitles.

Since this story is about a group of wealthy bourgeois who, after a night at the opera, go to the lavish home of Edmundo (Rambal) and Lucia Nóbile (Gallardo) for a dinner party, only to find themselves inexplicably unable to leave–it reminds me of the predicament in Sartre‘s 1944 play, No Exit, in which three characters are also unable to leave a room…which is literally Hell. It’s so obvious a comparison to make that I can’t avoid mentioning it, too.

Accordingly, all the bourgeois in The Exterminating Angel will experience their own version of “Hell is other people,” to be condemned to be seen and judged from the perspective of all the others, for as long as they’re trapped in that Hell of a house.

Ironically, the Hell of the Nóbiles’ home is on “Providence Street” (Calle de la Providencia), which is the first of several paradoxes in the film. The last of these, incidentally, is a Catholic Church in which all the clergy and churchgoers (including those bourgeois who have only just been freed from the Nóbiles’ house) are again not allowed to leave…the House of the Lord has been made a Hell.

The very title of the film–inspired from something in the Bible, but also, according to Buñuel, from a Spanish cult, the apostolics of 1828, and a group of Mormons–is a paradox on the heaven/hell theme.

Yet another paradox is what is confining the people inside. Not only is the barrier invisible, nor is it felt. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be a barrier in the physical sense at all–it seems to be purely psychological; the guests simply won’t allow themselves to leave. Nothing is stopping them, but that nothing is everything.

This inability to leave is not universal, though: in fact, it’s the servants of the Nóbiles who not only leave at the beginning of the film, but leave urgently, as if they have some kind of clairvoyance about the impending trap that their employers are to be caught in. The only employee to stay, trapped with his bosses and their guests, is Julio (Brook), the majordomo; he is clearly a case of the exception who proves the rule, for he shows a near-bootlicking loyalty to his employers, not only by staying, but also by expressing his condemnation for the staff who leave.

The staff’s suddenly leaving the house, right when their employers are receiving a large number of guests for a dinner party, can be seen as symbolic of a revolutionary act, for in doing so, the insubordinate workers are demonstrating a truth that we leftists have known for a long time: the bourgeois need us; we don’t need them. Revolution is a dinner party, after all…as long as the workers are absent.

Julio thinks his coworkers are being traitors to their bosses, but it is Julio who is being the traitor…to his fellow workers. This currying favor with the bourgeoisie, far too common among pro-capitalist workers, is what thwarts our revolutionary potential.

Some odd repetitions occur during the film, especially towards the beginning. When Lucas (played by Pancho Córdova), the doorman and first to leave the house, isn’t available to take the guests’ coats, Edmundo tells them to go upstairs, where someone will take them. With their entrance, this going upstairs happens twice.

Another repetition occurs in the toast Edmundo makes to Silvia (played by Rosa Elena Durgel), an opera singer who performed that night just before the dinner party in his home. We see him give this toast twice; after the second toast, however, he frowns because no one is listening to him. They prefer to chat with each other.

Yet another repetition is in the greeting of Cristián Ugalde (played by Luis Beristáin) and Leandro Gomez (played by José Baviera). This one occurs three times: first, they meet as strangers, second, they greet each other with the warmest of friendliness; and the third time, they acknowledge each other coldly.

Finally, at the climax of the film, Leticia (Pinal) offers, as a solution to their inability to heave the house, the idea of everyone repeating what he or she did shortly before the realization that no one could leave, soon after the end of the playing of the Paradisi piano sonata by Blanca (played by Patricia de Morelos). The guests’ point-for-point repetition of what they did frees them.

Now, what do these repetitions mean? I believe they can be symbolically associated with Freud‘s notion of “the compulsion to repeat” traumatizing experiences, an illogical act that goes “beyond the pleasure principle,” and which in turn is associated with the death drive, which involves acts of aggression against the self and others as seen among the guests throughout the middle of the film, as they’re all going mad with despair at their inability to leave, and taking their frustrations out on each other.

Of course, there’s nothing particularly traumatizing about not having a doorman to take your guests’ coats in the Nóbiles’ foyer. Nor is giving a toast no one’s listening to a traumatic experience, or even two men addressing each other with icy hostility. But perhaps the point should be made in relation to Buñuel’s wish to satirize the bourgeoisie.

Edmundo loses face among his guests without a doorman to take their coats, and without any listeners to his second toast. What is a minor problem for most people is a kind of narcissistic injury to the proud capitalist, with whom Buñuel would not want us to sympathize. The same goes for Cristián’s and Leandro’s third and abrasive meeting, for the bourgeois can be as antagonistic to each other as they are to the proletariat, in their incessant attempts to outdo each other.

Leticia’s suggestion to have everyone repeat his or her actions to free them all from their confinement is a perfect example of repetition compulsion as an attempt to master and therefore overcome the traumatizing experience. The earlier repetitions, in establishing this idea as a theme in the film, are thus symbolic of repetition compulsion by their association with this climactic moment.

Leticia herself is a fascinating character, and not just for her beauty. She’s nicknamed “the Valkyrie” for her perceived savageness, and yet also for her virginity. Early in the film, we see an example of this savageness when she throws a glass at a window, shattering it. Yet her idea to free everyone through the repetitions make her the guests’ saviour.

This means that Leticia is both good and bad in the film. Consider Pinal’s characters in two other Buñuel films, the title role of Viridiana (1961), the nun who is so protective of her ever-endangered chastity; and her role as the breast-baring Devil in his 1965 short film, Simon of the Desert (which also had Brook playing the film’s title role). In the first film, Pinal plays the saintly thesis; in the third, she plays the sluttish negation; and in this second film, she’s the sublation of the two opposing roles.

Speaking of Hegelian dialectical opposites, yet another heaven/hell paradox can be found in Blanca’s performance mentioned above of the piano sonata by Pietro Domenico Paradies, or “Paradisi,” as he’s called in the film. This ‘paradise’ performance happens shortly before the guests’ realization of their ‘infernal’ entrapment in the house.

The idea that they can’t leave is only subtly introduced. It seems at first that the guests simply aren’t inclined to leave yet, for one reason or another. Blanca, for example, though too tired to keep playing the piano and wishing to go home, won’t go out of the room because she’s been sidetracked by a conversation and has forgotten to get her shawl. This kind of subtlety is part of what reinforces the idea that nothing is really detaining the guests but themselves.

Of course, it won’t be long before they find themselves getting more and more uncomfortable with having to stay. A few, including Lucia! are hoping to have illicit sexual encounters with their lovers, but finding the crowd of guests all around them to be a nuisance. Others are getting uncomfortable in their suits, taking off their coats and ties, which looks scandalous to Lucia.

They all have to sleep on the floor in the salon together, rather than enjoy the luxury of beds. The next morning, Julio has no food to serve breakfast to the guests, because the suppliers haven’t delivered any; so Lucia has him serve leftovers.

Such inconveniences as these are meant to help the pampered bourgeoisie to understand what it’s like to endure the way the working class must. A similar deprivation was experienced in Buñuel’s film of ten years later, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, when the wealthy protagonists’ many attempts to eat dinner together are interrupted, leaving them all hungrier and hungrier.

By the next evening, everyone is beginning to lose his or her patience over this unending captivity. With no more clean water, they start using a closet for a toilet. Here we see the irony of staying in a luxurious home, yet living no better than those in the Third World. Bourgeois heaven has become hell…with all those other people.

Everyone is on edge, one’s normal sense of social graciousness degenerating into bluntness and aggression. Raúl (played by Tito Junco) starts blaming Edmundo for having invited everyone to his home, only to be trapped in it. Indeed, as I observed in my analysis of Wozzeck, it is the stresses of being poor and unable to pull oneself out of the mire, rather than some supposed social ‘inferiority,’ that is what makes one behave improperly, and we can see the proof of this observation in how these bourgeois are increasingly losing their sense of composure because of their ongoing plight.

In fact, one of their older guests, Sergio Russell (played by Antonio Bravo), has died. He earlier expressed a disliking for jokes and pranks when one of the staff serving food at the dinner table fell and dropped his tray all over the floor, getting laughs from everyone else. Lucia thus decided not to present a surprise involving a bear and three sheep out of a wish not to annoy him.

What’s the significance of these animals in the movie? Buñuel insisted that there was no intended symbolic meaning attached to them, saying instead that he got the idea from a party in New York he’d attended, in which the hostess brought in a bear and two sheep. He insisted that the use of the bear and sheep was arbitrary, just to include “some sort of disturbing image.”

Now, this may all be true, and it probably is. After all, surrealism is all about producing illogical, disturbing images as an expression of the non-rational workings of the unconscious mind. But we should emphasize this surrealist notion of expressing unconscious meaning. Buñuel’s conscious reasons for including the bear and sheep, as well as Pinal’s blindfolding of one of the sheep, may just be arbitrary ones, but his unconscious, surrealist reasons are freely open to interpretation. Buñuel may have dismissed many critics’ interpretations–i.e., the bear representing the USSR creeping in on the capitalist nations, and the sheep representing Christianity–as nonsense; psychoanalysts, however, may dismiss his dismissing as mere examples of denial and resistance.

Since Buñuel wanted to leave his film open to interpretation, his reasons for denying the validity of such critics’ interpretations as the examples given above can be seen also as a wish not to allow those interpretations to ossify and be deemed ‘the correct’ ones. I would agree that they shouldn’t be seen as the only interpretations to make, yet I wouldn’t say they’re wrong or invalid, either.

That the bear could, though of course not necessarily, represent Soviet Russia is so easy to see that it needs no further comment. Since the number of sheep (lambs, actually) are specifically three, and they are killed and eaten by the guests in a kind of crude Communion, it is again easy to associate them with Christianity; and the blindfolding of one of them can represent blind faith in that religion, something easily seen in many among the bourgeoisie. These, of course, don’t have to be the ‘correct’ interpretations, but they’re perfectly legitimate ones, in spite of Buñuel’s objections to them.

The guests cannot go outside; nor can anyone outside come in the house. The invisible barrier between the two groups of people can represent that of social class and therefore the impossibility of social mobility. There’s also Roger Ebert‘s interpretation that the barrier symbolizes the rigidity of the society of Francoist Spain. The symbolism of this rigidity is especially apparent at the end of the film, when the people are trapped in the church, while outside, soldiers are firing their rifles at the outside crowd of people, keeping anyone from entering the church. This is rather like the cherubim with their flaming sword to stop Adam and Eve from re-entering the Garden of Eden to get to the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24)…only this Eden, like the Nóbiles’ house, is another hellish heaven, a church of Satan, if you will, from which there’s no exit, where hope is to be abandoned.

The barrier can also represent other aspects of Francoist Spain. There were all the leftists who lost in the Spanish Civil War and were kept in concentration camps. Buñuel turning the tables on the bourgeois dinner guests, them representing the Spanish ruling class, and trapping them in the Nóbiles’ house, is thus a kind of wish-fulfillment. Finally, Buñuel, being inimical to the Spanish fascists, had been living in exile from his home country for many years, like those people outside who can’t enter Edmundo’s and Lucia’s house.

Some of the guests are getting ill, physically and mentally, and Dr. Carlos Conde (Benedico) has no medicine to give them. How symbolic this is of the lack of adequate health care in Third World countries (Cuba excepted). Edmundo, however, has a stash of opiates, which he normally reserves for the naughty pleasures of himself and certain friends of his, but now he’s offering them to his guests to mitigate their suffering. How representative this is of how the poor often have to resort to drug use as a quick and easy way to soothe their pain!

…and here, we see the bourgeoisie reduced to having to resort to such extremes.

One night, Ana Maynar (played by Nadia Haro Oliva) dreams of a disembodied hand crawling about the room. Sweating from a fever and terrified at the sight, she tries to stab it with a knife after it tries to strangle her. This is one moment in the film that has caused some critics to call The Exterminating Angel a horror film. Later, other guests will have bad dreams.

Buñuel had used the image of a severed hand before. He wanted to use it in an aborted film project called The Beast with Five Fingers, a film that ended up being done in 1946 by Robert Florey. He originally used the image in a scene in Un Chien Andalou, in which a mannishly-dressed woman is using a phallic cane to poke at a severed hand (as Ana does with the knife to stab the hand)–symbolic of castration, as I mentioned in my analysis of that short film.

In the scene in The Exterminating Angel, Ana, the woman dreaming about the hand, has earlier mentioned her experience of having been on a train that suffered a derailment. That hand moves across the room in a manner that may remind her of the moving train. The length and hardness of the train could also be seen as symbolically phallic, just as the severed hand, symbolic of castration, can have phallic associations.

The derailment of the train, ‘cutting it off,’ as it were, from the tracks, and thus making it impotent and of no use, can also be sen as a symbolic castration, which in turn strengthens the train’s association with the severed hand. The hand choking her is threatening her life, just as the derailment was life-threatening.

Note that castration is symbolic of Lacan‘s notion of lack, which gives rise to desire, the desire of the Other, a desire to be what the Other desires, and to be given recognition by the Other. Such feelings bring us back to what I said at the beginning of this analysis, of how this film is comparable to No Exit, and how “Hell is other people,” because we can’t escape the judgement of those others whom we want to want us, and whom we want to give us recognition.

The lack that gives rise to desire is also the lack that the bourgeois guests are experiencing, a lack normally reserved for the poor: no food, no water, no escape from their trap. Because of this manque à avoir, the guests are coming apart emotionally, and lashing out at each other. During their sleep, an elderly man (Alberto Roc?, played by Enrique García Alvarez) even tries to take advantage of a sleeping woman or two. When the bourgeoisie lack what the proletariat have always lacked, the former prove themselves no better, no more refined, than the latter.

The guests reach such a bestial point that Raúl, always blaming their predicament on Edmundo, says that their only way out of it is to kill their host. Edmundo, always reacting to Raúl’s verbal abuse with a gracious, patient turning of the other cheek, is thus being made out as a Christ figure: his death will save them, it seems. Edmundo even agrees to shoot himself with a pistol.

This is when Leticia brings up her suggestion to have everyone repeat what he or she said or did just after the piano performance. The success of her idea, as over Edmundo’s redemptive death, thus demonstrates in symbolic form Buñuel’s rejection of the soteriology of Christ’s crucifixion.

Finally, the guests can leave. Similarly, those outside can go in. In fact, the staff by now have returned, too.

Now that their ordeal is over, most of the guests come together again to attend a Te Deum service at a church. But as I already mentioned, they will soon find themselves unable to leave. Once again, religion won’t help them any more than it could symbolically back in the Nóbiles’ house (i.e., when eating the three sheep, or killing Christ-like Edmundo). In fact, the film ends with a flock of sheep ominously entering the church.

How fitting it is to see an animal often used to symbolize passive, mindless obedience enter a place where people are trapped behind an imaginary, invisible barrier of their own making.

Analysis of ‘Videodrome’

Videodrome is a 1983 science fiction/body horror film written and directed by David Cronenberg (who just two years earlier wrote and directed Scanners). It stars James Woods, Debbie Harry of Blondie, and Sonja Smits; it costars Peter Dvorsky, Les Carlson (who also played a man tracing telephone calls from the killer in Black Christmas), and Jack Creley (whom we may recall as the teacher from that old Glosettes TV ad from two years before this film).

Videodrome was Canadian Cronenberg’s first film to get backing from a major Hollywood studio. Though it had the highest budget of any of his films at the time, it was a box office bomb. It did, however, receive praise for its special makeup effects, for Cronenberg’s direction, and for the performances of Woods and Harry. It’s now a cult classic, and is regarded as one of Cronenberg’s best films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

Since Videodrome (“video arena,” or “video circus”) is about a broadcast signal, “Videodrome,” showing snuff films, a signal that lures its viewers into a hallucinatory world of mind control and paranoia that ultimately kills them, the film can be seen as an allegory of how the media in general is used to manipulate us, the people, into believing anything the media’s corporate owners want us to believe, and to act on those beliefs, no matter how harmful they may be. Such manipulation includes manufacturing consent for wars, which can be seen as symbolized by the violence of the snuff films seen in the movie.

What’s so alluring about Videodrome is precisely this video aspect, for the TV screen can be seen as a metaphorical mirror reflection of the viewer, analogous to the mirroring back and forth between one person and another to whom he or she may be talking at one time. We see an example of such an analogy at the beginning of the film, when Bridey James (played by Julie Khaner) wakes up her boss, Max Renn (Woods) through the use of a TV to remind him of a meeting he is to have that very day with Japanese pornographers about a film to be shown on his Toronto UHF TV station, CIVIC TV, which specializes in showing extreme erotic content.

Her talking to him on a TV screen, rousing him from his sleep is meant to look almost like one side of a conversation. As Professor O’Blivion (Creley) will tell us later, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.” Seeing Bridey on the screen is like seeing her eye to eye; the worlds of fantasy and reality are blurred and fusing.

If looking at someone on a TV is hardly to be distinguished from looking at someone in real life, in front of oneself, then we can extend this idea to what I’ve discussed before of the dialectical relationship between the self and the other, of how there’s a bit of the self in the other, and vice versa. One could relate this idea to how Ian Anderson once introduced the Jethro Tull song, “The Minstrel in the Gallery,” as being about the performer not just being watched in his performance, but also him watching the ‘performance’ of his audience, for “he saw his face in everyone” after “he threw away his looking glass.” As I said above, the TV in Videodrome is a metaphorical mirror, or looking glass, in which the viewer sees his face in everyone on the screen, and narcissistically identifies with each of them.

The point is that Max projects his own unconscious desires onto the screen when he watches Videodrome, and the violence of his resulting hallucinations is a reflection of what’s inside of him. Then Videodrome in turn projects its violence back onto him, making him consciously act out his unconscious violent urges.

He watches the TV…and the TV watches him, so to speak, at least in his hallucinations. There are, or seem to be, two-way conversations going on between him and whoever is on the TV screen. This sense becomes more explicit when Max sees the Marshall McLuhan-like O’Blivion address him on the video he watches, the video when we see O’Blivion killed.

One establishes one’s sense of ego, as a distinct self, by seeing oneself for the first time as an infant in front of a mirror. One sees oneself, but the self is ‘over there,’ as if another person. One establishes oneself, yet is alienated from that self, hence conversely, there’s the sense of the self in the other, and vice versa.

Metaphorical mirrors exist in people we face in two-way, dyadic relationships, as with the infant held by his mother, them looking into each other’s eyes. An analogous two-way relationship is felt between the viewer and the person being viewed on TV.

When the media successfully manipulates our emotions, making us feel what its corporate owners want us to feel, this manipulation is the TV watching us back, like those two-way telescreens in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It’s significant that O’Blivion is meant to represent McLuhan in Videodrome, for recall what McLuhan said about the modern media: “The medium is the message,” or “the massage,” or the “mass age,” or the “mess age”; how the message is presented is, if anything, more important than its content.

Yes, the medium also massages us–that is, how the content is presented, in the case of Videodrome, via TV videotapes, is a visual form that charms us as a mother does her baby, she being one of those metaphorical mirrors; and through this charming, this massaging, the media gets us to do its bidding. It is the mass age because we’re in an age in which the media does this charming and manipulating of the world’s masses, interconnecting us all to the point of creating a global village. The medium is also, by making a mess of our age, a mess age.

Such manipulating is why some are concerned about CIVIC TV. Max appears on a TV show to defend his channel by rationalizing that, by giving his viewers an outlet to release their dark fantasies onto, they won’t feel the need to vent them on non-consenting people in real life. It is at this TV show where he meets Nicki Brand (Harry), and he immediately finds her attractive in that red dress.

That the two quickly begin a sexual relationship, all while Max has been watching his first samples of Videodrome, is significant, for she in her seductive beauty personifies the allure of Videodrome. The show presents plotless, realistic scenes of sadism, while Nicki is a masochist, enjoying being pricked with pins and burned with cigarettes.

That a masochist should personify a show featuring sadism, the dialectical opposite of her desires, is reconciled with a quote from Freud: “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.”

Nicki is so taken with Videodrome that she decides to go and “audition” for the show. That she so quickly becomes part of Max’s hallucinations on his TV screen shows us how much she is, and has always been, at one with Videodrome.

Another character, one closely associated with Nicki as I’ll point out soon, is Masha (played by Lynne Gorman). She, in about her mid-fifties, is old enough to be 34-year-old Max’s mother (“Masha” could be heard as a pun on “Mama”), which is significant, because he occasionally flirts with her, indicating a transference of the Oedipus complex.

That Masha is associated with Nicki is made clear in the scene when Max hallucinates first whipping tied-up Nicki, who masochistically enjoys it, then realizes he’s whipping Masha, tied up and in Nicki’s place, even wearing red, as Nicki was. Max wakes up and hallucinates seeing Masha lying next to him in bed, still tied up and gagged, and dead from the beating; this indicates further his Oedipal transference onto her, as well as her association with Nicki (i.e., her involvement in the erotic fantasy).

If ‘Mama’ Masha is associated with Nicki, then Nicki is also a kind of displaced Oedipal transference, which can be seen in the earlier scene when Max hallucinates seeing her on his TV screen, and she says to him, “Come to Nicki,” which almost sounds like, “Come to Mommy.”

Therefore, Masha represents his good mother, and Nicki represents his bad mother, to use concepts from Melanie Klein. Masha is the good one because, apart from submitting ‘nice’ porn to CIVIC TV, she also warns him against looking further into Videodrome. Nicki is the bad mother because, of course, she lures him more and more into Videodrome.

This splitting of Max’s mother transferences into good and bad objects reflects what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position: paranoid because of his fear of the bad internal object possibly persecuting him (which Nicki does, of course); and schizoid because of the splitting of his world into absolute good and bad, black and white. Trying to reject the bad, through projection, will result in bizarre objects, Wilfred Bion‘s term for hallucinated projections of the bad objects. Such projective identification is why Max is hallucinating.

One crucial thing to understand about his Oedipal transferences is that they are narcissistic in origin. Seeing that mirrored other face in front of oneself, be it the mother’s, a maternal transference, or a face on the TV screen, is a participating in a dyadic relationship with the other (only one other person), as opposed to Lacan‘s Other, meaning the many other people of society in general. The one other is a mirrored reflection, or an extension, of the narcissistic self, and that other is selfishly hogged, never to be shared with other people.

In his being sucked further and further into the dangerous world of Videodrome, Max is isolating himself and regressing to an infantile state where fantasy and reality have a blurred boundary. The removal of the societal Other, as represented by a father figure (here in turn represented by O’Blivion, whom we see killed, reduced to oblivion, on the videotape), is what Lacan called foreclosure, which leads to psychosis, Max’s break with reality, leading to more hallucinations and more delusions.

The media’s manipulation of us, beguiling us with those seductive images on the TV screen (or, in today’s world, our computer screens or smartphone screens; and incidentally, McLuhan predicted the internet) and twisting our minds with propaganda, is doing basically the same thing to us as Videodrome is doing to Max. In mindlessly supporting imperialist war after imperialist war, we’ve become as narcissistic, violent, delusional, and paranoid/schizoid as he is.

Max asks Masha to find out more about Videodrome for him, and as I said above, she tries to warn him to stay away from it. She insists that these snuff films show real murders, not faked ones. Of course, any producer of snuff films, in his right mind, would never risk being charged with murder when he could just fake the killings, as is done in mainstream films. Videodrome, however, doesn’t fake the killings because, as Masha tells Max, it has a philosophy.

When Max asks for a name behind this philosophy, she tells him that it’s Professor Brian O’Blivion. I would say, however, that the name behind this philosophy is that of the Marquis de Sade, who in his erotic writings merged pornography with philosophy, anti-religion, a glorification of cruelty and crime, and an ironic commentary on the oppressive power structures of our world–the Church, the state, and class antagonisms.

Right after learning about O’Blivion, Max goes to find him, and it’s significant that the building he goes to is a place where the homeless are made to watch marathon sessions of TV. Here we see a parallel of the relationship this film makes between sex and violence: the pleasure of watching TV, of being seduced by images on the screen and being put in that infantile, dyadic, almost Oedipal relationship, is associated with the structural violence of being reduced to poverty.

The rich and powerful, like Sade’s wealthy characters, his politically influential sex criminals, are torturing and killing the weak and poor. The people behind Videodrome represent these powerful people, at least the corporate media faction, indulging in transgressive, pleasure/pain jouissance and getting the surplus value of what Lacan called plus-de-jouir. Sadomasochism in the film represents the pleasure the ruling class gets from oppressing the working class.

Just as there are competing capitalist, imperialist interests, so are there competing factions for the control of Videodrome: there’s the agenda of O’Blivion and his daughter, Bianca (Smits), and there’s the agenda of Barry Convex (Carlson) of the Spectacular Optics Corporation, and of Harlan (Dvorsky), the operator of the CIVIC TV satellite dish who, though feigning subservience to Max, his “patrón,” nonetheless has lured his boss into his obsession with Videodrome by getting him to watch a broadcast of it at the beginning of the film.

Before meeting with Convex, Max has had a particularly disturbing hallucination in which he sees a yonic slit appear on his belly. He has a handgun with obvious phallic symbolism, for he puts it in the slit, along with his fist. This scene reinforces the thematic link of sex and violence in the film. It also suggests an internalizing of the combined parent figure, an infantile phantasy based on a child’s witnessing of the primal scene, of his parents having sex, which looks painful to the child and arouses Oedipal jealousy, a feeling of being left out.

Connected with this unconscious phantasy (recall Max’s maternal transferences onto Masha and Nicki) is his feeling of lack, as symbolized by that yonic slit, in turn a symbolic wound from castration. A lack of being able to be, or to have, the phallus for the mother (Masha or Nicki) gives rise to desire, which is the desire of the Other, to be what Masha or Nicki desires, these two being manifestations of Max’s objet petit a.

Consider in this connection a scene not filmed, but in the novelization by “Jack Martin,” pseudonym of Dennis Etchison, in which Max sees a TV rise out of his bathtub like Botticelli‘s Birth of Venus. If you recall the myth behind the painting, Venus, or Aphrodite, appeared from the foam after Uranus‘ severed genitals were thrown into the sea. As I discussed in this post, the castration of Uranus leading to the birth of Venus can be allegorized as Lacan’s notion of lack giving rise to desire.

Max’s desire, fueling his growing obsession with Videodrome, puts him in such a vulnerable state that he can now be easily manipulated and exploited by Convex, who comes in right on cue and has Max driven over to a branch of Spectacular Optical, a seller of eyeglasses. Since, as O’Blivion informed us, “the television screen is the retina of the mind’s eye,” then these glasses, through the association of TV with one’s eyes, are a metaphorical television in themselves. And since Convex is Videodrome’s producer, as a member of the eyeglasses company, we see a stronger link between the glasses and TV.

In his self-introduction to Max in the car on the way to the Spectacular Optics branch, which is done fittingly on a small TV screen in the car, Convex explains that the eyeglasses company makes cheap glasses for the Third World, paralleling Bianca’s having homeless people watch TV. Convex’s company also provides missile guidance systems for NATO, so we can see a sinister link between his use of media manipulation via Videodrome, his eyeglasses (as I suspect) controlling and shaping what the poor of the Third World see, and imperialist capitalism.

It is at the back of the eyeglasses store that Convex has Max wear a device on his head to record his hallucinations of whipping Nicki, then seeing himself whip Masha. His inner fantasies of dominance and control, over the two representing his objet petit a, are being manipulated and exploited (and therefore in turn dominated and controlled) by Convex.

When Max later learns of Harlan’s involvement in luring him into Videodrome, and of Harlan’s association with Convex, Harlan tells him of the need for the West to toughen up against its toughening Eastern enemies, who I suspect were the communists. We’ve seen this Western toughening up since the time Videodrome was made, suggesting how prophetic the film was in linking media manipulation of the masses with the neoliberal counterrevolution starting in the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher.

Another surreal moment comes when Convex puts a videocassette into that slit in Max’s belly. Since, as I said above, that slit is yonic, Convex is putting the cassette in Max against his will, and the insertion is done to control Max, it can be seen as a symbolic rape, another fisting.

Convex wants Max to give CIVIC TV to Videodrome, and to kill his two business partners. Here we have a pun already seen in American Psycho: murders and executions for the sake of mergers and acquisitions. Videodrome is an example of big capitalism swallowing up small capitalism–CIVIC TV. Once again, I must give that quote from Marx: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Max holds his handgun, which merges with his body and becomes an extension of his fist, a phallic fist, like those hands that put organic videocassettes into his vaginal belly.

He does as commanded. He goes into the CIVIC TV building and finds his two business partners, Raphael (played by David Bolt) and Moses (played by Reiner Schwarz; since Videodrome was filmed and set in Toronto, I wonder if this second business partner was named after Moses Znaimer, head of Citytv at the time). Max kills both of them, then flees the building, having pretended also to be wounded and therefore supposedly not guilty of the attack.

Here we see Max no longer just unconsciously getting his kicks from snuff films. And no longer is he just being manipulated by and hooked on Videodrome, as if it were a drug. Now he is an assassin for Convex. Just like those of us who start off enjoying transgressive, taboo pleasures (jouissance) brought about by Lacan’s lack and a narcissistic wish to be mirrored by a mother substitute (objet petit a), then are manipulated by the media to channel our aggressive, violent urges on specific, political targets, so is Max being used to wipe out Videodrome’s enemies.

Next, he is to find Bianca and kill her. She, however, has been expecting him, and she shows him a video recording of Nicki being murdered by the people in Videodrome, Bianca’s purpose being to sway Max over to the O’Blivion side. (But has Nicki really been killed, or is the recording yet another of Max’s hallucinations, an attempt to manipulate him into working for Bianca? Indeed, for that matter, was even her father really killed, or was his assassination, apparently done by Nicki, yet another hallucination?)

In any case, just as the killing of Professor O’Blivion represents the Oedipal wish to annihilate the father figure so as to have the mother transference (Masha/Nicki), so is the killing of mother figure Nicki a reflection of an unconscious Electra complex in Bianca (her “father’s screen”), a wish to protect her father…or at least to protect his legacy. With Max under her control now, him having seen a hand/pistol emerge from a TV, and having been shot by it (projective identification from the TV back to him, and we furthermore see bullet wounds in the ‘chest’ of the TV screen, indicating once again the mirrored, two-way relationship of the viewer and his TV), he is now to destroy Videodrome.

He recovers from being shot like a resurrected Christ, the bullet wounds being his stigmata. Accordingly, he is now “the video word made flesh,” and so, “Death to Videodrome! Long live the new flesh!” As a brainwashed, quasi-religious zealot for the manipulative media, narcissistically flattered to be associated with Christ, he will go off to kill Harlan and Convex.

His switching to the O’Blivion side mustn’t be seen as him being any better than before. The Videodrome/O’Blivion conflict is just symbolic of controlled opposition, as far as it represents media manipulation of the public. The two sides just represent competing capitalists.

Harlan puts another videotape–this time, a surreal, fleshly one–into that vaginal slit in Max’s belly; but now that Max is working for Bianca, the symbolic wound of castration that that slit has been is now a kind of castrating vagina dentata that closes up on Harlan’s hand, his fisting, symbolic phallus, and bites it off, leaving the remainder of his arm vaguely resembling a mixer’s beater. Max has gone from feeling powerless, like a eunuch, to powerful. His Lacanian lack feels fulfilled.

After killing Harlan, Max finds Convex at a Spectacular Optics convention on the theme of Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom the following two quotes are (erroneously) attributed: “Love comes in at the eye” (actually from WB Yeats‘s poem, “A Drinking Song“), and “The eye is the window of the soul” (not definitively attributable to any one source).

Apart from being, as it seems, a mere error on Cronenberg’s (or Convex’s) part, could there be any deeper meaning behind associating these quotes with the Italian Renaissance statesman, banker, and patron of the arts? Perhaps the point of linking Lorenzo de’ Medici to Videodrome is to say that he was, on the one hand, the McLuhan/O’Blivion of his day, and the art of men like Botticelli and Michelangelo (whom he sponsored) was the TV of the time; and on the other hand, his political power was like that of Convex, Bianca, et al.

In any case, Nicki’s love surely has gone into Max’s eye, which is the window of the soul that he’s lost to Videodrome.

We see Convex come on a stage after a dance performance, and he says to the audience, “Well, you know me, and I sure know you.” We also hear a member of the audience say, “Yeah, we know you.” This exchange reinforces the theme I discussed earlier of the reciprocity between performer (e.g., Jethro Tull), or person on TV, and audience, or TV viewer.

With his hand-flesh-gun, Max shoots Convex, who falls to the stage floor with his body tearing to pieces in a manner reminding us a bit of the climactic scene in The Evil Dead. This over-the-top death is explained in the novelization as being the result of Max not shooting Convex with normal bullets, but rather with “new flesh” ones.

Max’s ever-increasing madness is, of course, resulting in his ever-increasing isolation. He escapes to a derelict boat in the Port Lands. He has a hallucination of Nicki on a television set there. Recall how I’ve characterized that mirror-like reciprocity between TV image and viewer as a narcissistic one, how the ego is established in what Lacan called the Imaginary. Alongside this experience has been Max’s traumatizing, maddening experience of the Real, these surreal, hallucinatory states that cannot be symbolized through language (how the novelization managed such verbalizing is anyone’s guess); in other words, the psychologically therapeutic realm of the Symbolic is absent here. Max can only get madder and madder; he cannot return to the social world.

Accordingly, Nicki tells him that he must “leave the old flesh” to destroy Videodrome once and for all. This means he has to kill himself. In his narcissistic imagination, Max thinks that doing so will raise him up to a higher level of existence (“the new flesh”), rather like Christ’s death and resurrection giving Him a ‘spiritual body.’ Since Max, in his insanity brought on by media manipulation, is bordering on psychological fragmentation, such narcissistic imaginings can feel like a shield against said fragmentation.

He sees himself on the TV screen putting a bullet in his head, then he immediately does the same to himself. He and the TV are one, a mirror of each other, because the media, in controlling him, have made him destroy himself…just as today’s media, in manufacturing our consent for war with Russia and China, are making us all destroy ourselves through escalation and raising the threat of nuclear war.

Like Max Renn, we are all mesmerized by the images we see on our screens, be they TV, tablet, computer, or smartphone. Neoliberalism has caused us to feel a particularly gaping lack, a hole in our lives like that slit in Max’s gut. We’ve been propagandized to see things in a split-up, black and white world, with ourselves narcissistically as the white, Christ-like good, and other nations as the black, absolutely evil enemy. Political parties, like Videodrome vs. O’Blivion, pretend to be at odds with each other, when actually they push for essentially the same agenda. And we are driven to support aggressive, violent policies that could end up killing us all, like Max the flesh-gunned assassin.

Media manipulation is making us see a world so divorced from reality, so distorted a version of the truth, so surreal, that we could be understood to be hallucinating. If we’re not careful, we’re all going to “leave the old flesh.”

Analysis of ‘Wozzeck’

I: Introduction

Wozzeck (pronounced ‘votsek’) is Alban Berg‘s first opera. Composed between 1914 and 1922, and first performed in 1925, it is based on an unfinished drama by Karl Georg Büchner (which in turn was based on the real-life case-history of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a soldier executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress while suffering from paranoia and hallucinations). When Berg saw the first production of the play in 1914, he immediately knew he wanted to set it to music.

Büchner’s play is actually called Woyzeck (after the historical man mentioned above), but due to an incorrect transcription made from a barely legible manuscript, the correct title wouldn’t be known until 1921. Selecting fifteen scenes from Büchner’s unordered fragments, Berg adapted the libretto himself, with three acts of five scenes each, and retaining the essential character of the play.

With its themes of militarism, callousness, social exploitation, casual sadism, alienation, class antagonisms, and madness, Wozzeck is especially relevant for our troubled times today. The opera’s free atonality, dissonance, and use of Sprechstimme (also used in Pierrot lunaire, the song cycle by Berg’s musical mentor, Arnold Schoenberg) vividly evoke the dark atmosphere of the story. When Franz Wozzeck says, “Still, all is still, as if the world died,” and his friend Andres shows little interest in his words (Act I, scene ii), Glenn Watkins said that this was “as vivid a projection of impending world doom as any to come out of the Great War.”

When first performed, Wozzeck was a succès de scandale and received mixed reviews. Since then, it did, however, get a string of productions in Germany and Austria until the Nazis condemned it as “degenerate art” after 1933. Now, it is considered one of the most important operas of the 20th century.

Here is a link to Berg’s libretto (including both the original German and an English translation), a link to Büchner’s play, a link to a 1970 film version of the opera, and here are links to a performance of it, conducted by Claudio Abbado, in Acts I, II, and III. Here is a link to a recording with the score. Notes and text from the booklet of this CD recording were also used in the research for this analysis.

II: General Points About the Music

Of the three famous members of the Second Viennese School–which, in its early twentieth century’s avant-garde abandoning of tonality and eventually making use of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, was comprised of Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern–Berg was actually the most conservative. Schoenberg, the second most conservative of the three, nonetheless also wrote of the experimental technique he called Klangfarbenmelodie (“sound-colour melody”), which both he and Webern used extensively in their music. Webern’s music also tended to be more concise and melodically pointillistic, with wide leaps of, often, over an octave to create a sense of melodic fragmentation.

Berg, on the other hand, achieved a paradoxical fusion of the experimental Expressionistic techniques of Schoenberg with the flowing, lyrical orchestration of 19th century Romanticism. The emotional intensity of this old style, combined with the discordant brutality of musical modernism, is effective in bringing out the bleak world of Wozzeck, fittingly based on a play left unfinished with Büchner’s death in 1837.

Because Berg composed the opera in a free atonal style, he had to use other methods of controlling pitch to direct the harmony, as well as use a variety of other musical techniques to achieve unity and coherence. The most important of these is the use of the leitmotif, of which there are prominent ones for such characters in the opera as the Captain, the Doctor, and the Drum Major. Wozzeck has a motif for when he rushes on and off the stage, and another to express his misery and helplessness. Marie, his beautiful but unfaithful wife, has motifs to express her sensuality.

Elsewhere, we hear the tritone B-F, representing Wozzeck and Marie, the conflict in their bedeviled relationship fittingly expressed through the diabolus in musica. The relationship of Marie and their son is represented with the minor third, B-flat and D-flat; this is an interval commonly expressing sadness, which is fitting given her difficulties as a poor woman raising a child scandalously born out of wedlock. One notable motif is a pair of chords heard at the end of each act, oscillating and almost blurring into each other.

III: Act One

The opera begins with Franz Wozzeck shaving the Captain, who nags and taunts him with talk of going slower (langsam!) and of being “a good man” (ein guter Mensch). The Captain is clearly indicating his bourgeois disposition. It’s far easier to take things one at a time and to be a good man when one has money to give charitably and leisure time with which to take things slowly, and when one doesn’t have to sell one’s labour to survive, as Wozzeck must.

But all he can do is say, “Yes, Captain” (Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!), because as a mere soldier, Wozzeck the proletarian has no power. [Berg was no revolutionary, of course (in fact, the financial success of this opera allowed him to live comfortably off the royalties); but his writing of an opera, whose subject matter clearly manifests the problems of class conflict, during revolutionary years (1914-1922, when the Russian Revolution and its ensuing Civil War happened; also, when the failed Spartacist uprising happened, and when the Italian fascists came to power in 1922 after having crushed socialist movements in the country) makes it impossible not to take note of the political implications of the story.] All Wozzeck can do is suffer in silence at the taunts of his superiors.

The Captain heightens his provocations by mentioning Wozzeck’s illegitimate son, “a child without the blessing of the Church.” Thus, Wozzeck has no morals!

He reminds the Captain of what Jesus said in Mark 10:14, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” Wozzeck’s bastard son is also a child of God, and God is always willing to forgive sinners. The Captain, with his bourgeois mentality, finds this Bible quote to be a strange answer; his attitude thus shows us the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, who see morals only in terms of social status and outward appearance, and who ignore the stresses and pressures that drive the poor to behave in ways that society disapproves of.

Wozzeck tries to get the Captain to understand what these stresses and pressures do to the poor when he begins with “We poor people!” (Wir arme Leut!) This introduces a particularly important leitmotif, D-sharp, B, E, G, the notes of an E minor/major 7th chord, expressive of the deepest despair.

Of course, his words go in one ear of the Captain and out the other, so having finished shaving him, Wozzeck is dismissed and told to go slowly. This first scene has been in the form of a suite.

In the next scene, Wozzeck is in a field with his friend, Andres, cutting sticks. The musical form is a rhapsody: the freer form of such music, with its highly contrasted moods and colour, is fitting as an expression of Wozzeck’s unstable, troubled state of mind at the moment.

He speaks of the cursed earth; one might be reminded of God cursing the earth as punishment on Adam and Cain (Genesis 3:17; 4:11). Andres seems oblivious to what Wozzeck is saying (as was the Captain), and, eyeing rabbits, he speaks cheerfully of wanting to be a hunter. He sings a hunting song.

Wozzeck’s premonitions and catastrophizing get worse: he makes a vague reference to the Freemasons, which sounds like a common form of paranoid conspiracy-oriented thinking similar to anti-semitic ranting. Apparently, it’s always the Jews or the Freemasons who are ruling the world and ruining it for the rest of us, rather than it simply being the capitalist class who is doing this evil. It’s clear that Wozzeck is suffering from mental illness, a growing problem today in relation to the plight of the poor, wir arme Leut!

He speaks of how hollow everything is, a maw, a chasm. One is reminded of the first few verses of Ecclesiastes, that in a world of vanity, futility, meaninglessness, uselessness, and emptiness (or, if you prefer, hollowness), one gains nothing from one’s labour, toiling under the sun, as Wozzeck and Andres do in that field.

As the sun is going down, Wozzeck sees a fire that roars like trumpets, reminding us of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, when the first angel “sounded his trumpet, and hail and fire mixed with blood were hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, along with a third of the trees and all the green grass” (Revelation 8:7). Wozzeck is having visions of the end of the world…”as if the world was dead.”

Many of us proletarians today, as we see the Western imperialists continue to antagonize nuclear-armed Russia and China, and as we see our financial prospects worsening, similarly are having premonitions of the end of the world, and can see the world burning down from wildfires and other problems related to climate change.

In Wozzeck’s case, though, the end of the world is coming about in Scene Three, with Marie, the mother of his child, being tempted into flirting with the handsome and socially higher Drum Major. Naturally, the scene begins with a march, so we’ll hear, specific to this scene, a marching band including woodwinds, brass, and percussion.

Marie, with her son at the window of their home, watches the Drum Major marching with his men on the street. Both she and Margret express their admiration for the man, though the latter taunts the former for her loose ways with the soldiers. Annoyed with Margret’s slut-shaming, Marie calls her a “bitch” (Luder) and shuts the window.

No longer do we hear marching music. She sings a lullaby to her son after putting him in bed (at crucial points in the melodic contour of the lullaby, we can hear the B-flat and D-flat that I mentioned above as representing her relationship with him). She feels the shame of having a reputation in town for being a whore, but again, as with Wozzeck, the stresses and pressures of being poor can drive people to act in ways that society disapproves of. Her eyeing of the Drum Major may be lewd on a superficial level, but on a deeper level, she has hopes that uniting with him will raise the financial status of herself and the boy, the only way a woman during that more patriarchal time could achieve such a social ascent.

The boy falls asleep, and after a brief moment of her being lost in thought (with a flurry of descending and ascending notes played on the celesta), she hears a knock on the window–it’s Wozzeck. He briefly tells her of his troubling visions, but he has no time to stay; he doesn’t even look at their son, which dismays her. She says the line, “Wir arme Leut,” though not in the notes of the minor-major 7th chord mentioned above. We can see here the connection between poverty and alienation within a family, the one causing the other.

The next scene, a passacaglia, has Wozzeck visiting the Doctor, who has him on a bizarre, experimental diet of beans (and later, mutton). As does the Captain, the Doctor bullies Wozzeck, berating him for pissing on the street, thus wasting what could be useful urine samples for the Doctor’s study. He pays Wozzeck a meagre three groschen a day for these urine samples and other forms of cooperating with the experiments.

As does the Captain (with his exhortations to take things slowly and to be “a good man”), the Doctor pressures Wozzeck to have better self-control in regulating his bladder. The Doctor is thus another example of a bourgeois imposing his sense of virtue on a proletarian who, in his poverty, finds such virtue difficult to live up to.

The Doctor brags of his self-control, including the control of his temper. Nonetheless, in his experimentation on Wozzeck, we see a sadism in the Doctor that, if we were to look ahead a few decades after the completion of this opera, would remind us of Doctor Mengele. Wozzeck’s doctor has a fascistic, disciplinarian authority about him, and he speaks gleefully about a revolution in the science of diet.

When Wozzeck tells the Doctor of his visions, the Doctor is delighted to see Wozzeck’s descent into madness. For his declining mental health, he’ll get a raise…of one extra groschen. The Doctor believes he’ll become famous for his theories, thanks to the deleterious effects of his research on Wozzeck!

Scene Five is a rondo. Marie is out on the streets, and her temptation to have an affair with the Drum Major is growing. She sees him approach and shows her admiration for him. He returns the flirting.

He aggressively comes on to her, causing her at first to resist, externally playing hard to get, and internally feeling conflicted over her loyalty to Wozzeck as against her desire for this far more manly Drum Major. The music gets particularly discordant during their struggle, but she gives in to him in the end.

Act One ends with those oscillating chords I mentioned above, played faster and faster until they seem to blur into each other. The notes of the first of the two chords are, from top to bottom, C-flat/G-flat/E-flat/A-natural; and those of the second chord are, again from top to bottom, D-flat/A-natural/F-natural/B-natural. Three quarters of these groups of notes are thus rising and falling parallel major seconds, and the remaining quarter of them are rising and falling parallel minor thirds, undulating like ripples in water.

The speeding up in time starts with eighth and quarter notes, then eighth notes, then eighth notes in triplets, then sixteenth notes, then sixteenth notes in sextuplets, then thirty-second notes, and finally it ends with tremolos. All of this occurs with a crescendo beginning at piano.

It’s significant that this music should have a rippling, wave-like effect, for it can be understood to foreshadow Wozzeck’s fate in the pond towards the end of Act Five.

IV: Act Two

Act Two, Scene One (in sonata-allegro form) begins with a solo cello playing an ascending stack of perfect fifths: C-natural, G-natural, D-natural, and A-natural; then B-natural, F-natural, and C-sharp. After the cello, we hear flute and celesta play that rippling theme of rising and falling (mostly, as last time) major seconds, only now the notes alternate between, from top to bottom, B-natural/F-sharp/D-sharp/A-natural and C-sharp/A-natural/E-sharp/B-natural. These oscillations are in sextuplets and triplets, then in tremolo half notes, with eighth rests between these groupings. This watery, wave-like tune reinforces the foreshadowing mentioned above, since Marie has succumbed to temptation.

She’s back at home with her “Bub,” admiring earrings that the Drum Major has given her. She puts the boy to bed, then Wozzeck suddenly walks in and sees the earrings before she can hide them. These earrings are like the handkerchief that jealous Othello learned was in Cassio‘s possession; the difference here, though, is that where Desdemona was innocent of having an affair with Cassio, Marie really did receive the earrings from the Drum Major, with whom she has had an affair. In any case, Wozzeck will go as mad from his actually unfaithful woman as Othello went mad with jealousy over his only seemingly unfaithful wife.

This time, unlike before, he looks at his sleeping son. He sings, “Wir arme Leut!” again, to the notes F-natural, D-flat, F-sharp, and A-natural…the intervals of that minor-major 7th chord motif. As I said above, this chord has a despairing quality to it, and now Wozzeck has even more to despair about. His whole world is coming to an end, because Marie’s infidelity, which will be most public, will cause him such a humiliation that he’ll fall to pieces.

Still, like a dutiful husband, he gives her the four groschen he made from the Doctor. He leaves, and Marie, though guilty of the sin that Desdemona was only slandered with, has at least a bit of her goodness, in that Marie is consumed with guilt over her infidelity. She ends the scene singing of how “Everything goes to the Devil: man and woman and child [Kind]!” On this last word, she sings a high B-natural descending to an F-natural, that tritone, the diabolus in musica representing her relationship with Wozzeck, which resulted in their Bub.

In Scene Two, a fantasia and fugue on three themes, we see the Doctor rushing by the Captain on the street, the latter, true to his character, urging the former to slow down, like “a good man.” Nonetheless, the Doctor is in a hurry and cannot slow down.

They taunt each other with names: the Captain addresses “Doctor Coffin-Nail” (Herr Sargnagel), and the Doctor addresses “Captain Drill-angel” (Herr Exercizengel). The Doctor begins finding fault with the Captain’s health, as a way to scare him. The Captain is “Bloated, fat, thick neck, apoplectic…” As we can see here, the bourgeois can trouble each other as much as they do the proletariat. Recall Marx’s words: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Then Wozzeck appears before them, and so these two bourgeois steer their taunts away from each other and on to him. They insinuate that they know of Marie’s infidelity to him. Now, he’s not only a cuckold, but a public cuckold. His already fragile mental stability is about to crack even more!

He says that he’s a poor devil, and that she is all he has in the world. So, to lose her to the Drum Major would be to lose everything.

The Drum Major, being like the Doctor and the Captain, that is, of a higher social position than that of Wozzeck, in taking Marie away, is symbolic in his actions of the capitalist who takes from the worker the full fruits of his labour. The capitalist’s surplus value is that stolen value, in the form of unpaid labour, money not given to the worker, here personified by Marie.

A worker’s labour is the only commodity he can give in exchange for money, and his unpaid labour, in the form of surplus value, is stolen from him, just as Marie, all Wozzeck has in the world, is stolen from him.

Feminists might be offended at my referring to Marie as Wozzeck’s stolen commodity, his stolen property; but think of my reference here as a comment on his patriarchal use of her, not as a defence of that use. For one of the many ways the ruling class keeps the proletariat divided and mutually alienated from each other is the perpetuation of sex roles.

So the Captain’s and Doctor’s taunting of Wozzeck, their knowing of Marie’s dalliance with the Drum Major, is like Iago fueling Othello’s jealousy, except that unlike Iago, Wozzeck’s two superiors are being truly honest with him.

Wozzeck thus rushes away in a jealous rage.

Scene Three, largo, brings us back to Wozzeck’s and Marie’s house, on the street in front of it. He confronts her with her infidelity. To his direct accusation, “You–with him!”, that is, with the Drum Major, she brazenly replies, “What if I was?”

He is about to slap her, but she defiantly says he wouldn’t dare touch her. Her own father wouldn’t have dared hit her when she was ten years old. (Othello dared to slap Desdemona in public, though, and she was innocent.) During this argument, though, she says something truly dangerous to herself, something to inspire Wozzeck’s eventual revenge on her: “Rather a knife in me that a hand on me.”

Scene Four is a scherzo, in which Wozzeck sees Marie dancing a waltz with the Drum Major in a crowd, in an inn where people are drinking and partying late in the evening. In other words, her infidelity with the Drum Major is shamelessly public. Wozzeck sees his humiliation right before his eyes!

A special set of musicians is reserved for this scene, a tavern band made up of a clarinet in C, a  bombardon in F (or tuba, if it can be muted), an accordion, a guitar, and two fiddles (with steel strings).

Artisans and soldiers are singing about dancing and the joys of hunting, just as Andres, who is here at the inn, too, was singing of hunting while he and Wozzeck were cutting sticks in the field in Act One, Scene Two. All of this festivity is going on while Wozzeck is losing his mind, while his world is coming to an end. Hunting and drinking, for the artisans, soldiers, and Andres, are manic defences against facing one’s suffering. As we will see, Wozzeck will do some hunting and drinking of his own…but these won’t help him escape his suffering.

As Wozzeck sits there fuming all alone, the “village idiot” (Der Narr), as it were, approaches him. He vaguely senses the joy about him, something he’s too simple to understand; yet he paradoxically can sense something about Wozzeck that the others cannot–he smells blood on Wozzeck. This is more foreshadowing, of course: we all know what Wozzeck is going to do…with a knife.

Scene Five is a rondo. Wozzeck is in his bed, a bunker in the soldiers’ barracks at night. Andres is sleeping nearby, but Wozzeck cannot sleep, for obvious reasons. A chorus singing softly and wordlessly represents the sleeping soldiers.

When Wozzeck complains to Andres about not being able to sleep, the latter, annoyed to have been woken, tells the former to go back to sleep.

To make matters worse, though, the drunken Drum Major enters the barracks and brags of his sexual conquest of so fine a woman as Marie, thus compounding Wozzeck’s public humiliation. The usurper of her bed rubs it in further by picking a fight with Wozzeck, who has no hope of beating such a strong man, and one of such high social and military rank.

It would be easy to judge Wozzeck as a weak and cowardly man, but the point is that there is a power imbalance here–him as a poor soldier, and the Drum Major of so much higher rank–that the former can do nothing about it. Wozzeck’s low military rank is symbolic of the proletarian’s low social rank, just as the Drum Major’s high military rank, as that of the Captain and the higher social status of the Doctor, is symbolic of the ruling class.

Wozzeck cannot hurt the Drum Major, but there is someone of his low social caste whom he can hurt…Marie! Indeed, part of the reason he can’t sleep is that he’s thinking of the knife that she’s put in his mind, the temptation to murder her that he’s been struggling to resist.

Receiving no sympathy from his fellow soldiers for his beating and humiliation, Wozzeck can only repeat the Captain’s words: “One after the other.” Wozzeck, however, doesn’t use the Captain’s meaning, to take things slowly, one at a time, but rather that he suffers one injury after another; for such is the difference between the bourgeoisie’s experience of life, and that of the proletariat.

This is the end of Act Two, which musically has been structured like the movements of a symphony: sonata form, slow movement, scherzo, and rondo. Act Three, however, will be in the form of a series of inventions.

V: Act Three

Scene One, with Marie and the boy at home at night, is an invention on a theme. Plagued with guilt, she is reading her Bible, wishing Jesus would forgive her as He did Mary Magdalene and the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3).

With the boy near her, she tells a story of a poor boy whose parents are dead, and he’s now hungry and weeping day and night. Obviously, this story foreshadows the heartbreaking ending of the opera, where we have full knowledge of the fate of Wozzeck’s and Marie’s child.

She is worried that Franz hasn’t come home in the past couple of days. Next, she reads Luke 7:38, about Mary Magdalene’s repentance before Christ. Marie would be like Magdalene, to anoint Jesus’s feet and be forgiven.

Sadly, she will get no such forgiveness…not from Wozzeck, anyway. For in Scene Two, an invention on a single note (B), he has taken her into a forest by a pond, where he plans to murder her.

She senses the danger she’s in, and she tries to leave, but he won’t let her. As Othello did to Desdemona, Wozzeck kisses Marie before he kills her…she who, redeemed through faith in Christ’s crucifixion, could be seen to have been made as innocent as Desdemona always had been.

They notice how red the moon is, and I assume that it’s a quarter or half moon, because Wozzeck compares it to the “blood-stained steel” of the blade of a knife, right when he draws his, in preparation to stab Marie. The notion of a blood-red moon is associated with the end of the world (Joel 2:31, Acts 2:20, Revelation 6:12). As I said above, his loss of Marie is the end of the world for him, for she is all that he has. He stabs her, she screams and dies, and he runs away fearfully.

The scene ends with two crescendi, from ppp to fff, in octaves of B, in keeping with it being an invention on B. I wonder: why B, of all notes? Given that this moment can be felt to be the emotional reaction to the actual committing of the murder, that point of no going back, B–as the leading tone of the most basic scale, C major, the white keys on the piano–is thus symbolic of the greatest tension, without resolving up to C.

In Scene Three, an invention on a rhythm, Wozzeck is back in the tavern. We hear an out-of-tune piano playing a fast and jaunty polka while he drinks wine and pretends he’s enjoying himself and forgetting his guilty act, a manic defence against his deep sadness. It’s significant that the piano is out of tune, for it represents the pain he feels that he’s hiding behind his fake festivities.

He imagines he’s completing his revenge on Marie by groping Margret. She notices blood on his hand, though, right up to the elbow. He tries to hide his guilt by claiming he must have cut himself, but no one in the tavern believes him. Terrified of being found out, he runs away.

Scene Four is an invention on a hexachord. Wozzeck is back in the forest by the pond, where Marie’s body is still lying. The blood-red moon is still out.

He wishes to erase all evidence of his guilt, first by tossing the knife into the pond; then, thinking he hasn’t thrown it far enough and fearing it will be easily found, he wades into the water to find it and throw it farther in. What’s more, he must wash the blood off of himself in the water, so he wades in deeper.

He imagines the blood-red moon is reflecting his guilt from on high, incriminating him to the town. In his growing madness, he thinks the whole pond he’s bathing in is blood. He submerges himself in this “blood” and drowns himself.

What’s fascinating about this moment is the combination of Shakespearian associations that can be made. First, as mentioned above, Wozzeck is like Othello, killing his love out of jealousy, then killing himself. Second, he’s like Lady Macbeth, mad with guilt and unable to wash the blood from his hands, and committing suicide. Finally, he’s like Ophelia, mad with heartbreak over his love, mad and drowning himself out in nature.

For no apparent reason, the Captain and the Doctor happen to be strolling in the area just after Wozzeck’s suicide. They’ve heard the ghastly sound of Wozzeck’s cry before his death, and the Captain curses: “Jesus, what a noise!” Knowing they’ve heard human moans from the pond, the two bourgeois shudder at the implications (as well as at the blood-red moon), and rush away.

The juxtaposition of two proletarian deaths with two bourgeois witnesses of one of them, the latter two then rushing off to safety, represents the disturbing contrast between the suffering of the former and the privilege of the latter. This scene ends with an invention on…yes…a key (D minor)! It’s ironic how we have here an atonal opera in which–as with those crescendi of B notes–of all moments for there to be a surprising return to tonality (however dissonant it remains), it’s at the realization of the deaths of the two most sympathetic characters in the story, leaving the remaining sympathetic character, the boy, parentless.

We hear a mournful adagio in 3/4 that builds up to a despairing fortissimo climax starting on a D minor chord with an added ninth: two sets of eighth notes playing, top to bottom, E-natural/D-natural/A-natural/F-natural; then all these notes go down by parallel major seconds to give us two sets of eighth notes playing a C minor chord with an added ninth, then a B-flat minor chord with an added ninth. This climax softens to pianissimo, then an upward arpeggio played on the celesta leads us to the final scene.

Scene Five is an invention on an eighth note. The next morning, children are playing “ring-a-ring-a-roses” outside in the sun. Marie’s son is there, too, riding a hobby-horse. One child comes to tell them the news that Marie is dead.

One of the children makes sure to tell Marie’s boy that his mother is dead. He isn’t processing the horrifying news yet, so the other kids run off to the pond to see the body, while he continues riding for the moment, calling out “Hopp! Hoop!” Finally, he snaps out of it and goes after the other children, and the opera ends without our seeing his reaction to the sight of his mother’s corpse.

VI: Conclusion

Whether or not Berg unconsciously intended it, his opera dramatizes the social consequences of class conflict: poverty, alienation, mental illness, the breakdown of family, violence against one’s fellow proletarians (instead of the revolutionary kind against the ruling class), and suicidal despair. The red-blooded end of the world as depicted in this WWI setting is all the more relevant to our late capitalist world, which is looking with dread at a possible WWIII.

Analysis of ‘Watchmen’

I: Introduction

Watchmen is a 1986-1987 comic book limited series, collected into a single-volume edition graphic novel in 1987. Original characters were used, since most of them would be unusable for future stories. The series was created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins.

Moore meant the story as a reflection on contemporary fears, and as a deconstruction and satire on the concept of superheroes, as well as a commentary on contemporary politics. Watchmen depicts an alternate history in which Nixon not only doesn’t resign or is threatened with impeachment over the Watergate scandal (which is never exposed), but enjoys an overturning of the two-term limit and is thus still president by the mid-80s, when the story begins. He is able to do this because such superheroes as Doctor Manhattan and The Comedian help the US win the Vietnam War, ensuring Nixon’s continuing popularity.

Watchmen has received commercial and critical success, recognized in Time‘s List of the 100 Best Novels. According to the BBC’s Nicholas Barber, it is “the moment comic books grew up.” A film adaptation by Zack Snyder came out in 2009, featuring Malin Åkerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Patrick Wilson; a video game series, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, also came out the same year. A TV series continuing the story came out in 2019 on HBO. I’m basing my analysis on the comics and the 2009 movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

II: Alternate History vs Real History

What should we make of the alternate history, with a Vietnam War victory and Nixon continuing on as president well into the 1980s, that is, as a form of political commentary? Here’s my take: what difference does it make, really? Though communism hadn’t yet been defeated as of when Watchmen was written and published, it certainly had been as of the creation of the movie; besides, Vietnam would go over to a market economy, as would China, around the time of the comics’ publication. As for Nixon, when one considers how the foreign and domestic policies of the United States have moved unswervingly in the same neoliberal/neocon direction since the 1973 oil crisis, one can easily see how it has made no difference who’s been sitting in the Oval Office.

…and here’s where the superheroes come in.

Apart from the sheer goofiness of their names (Nite Owl?, Dollar Bill?, Captain Metropolis?, Hooded Justice?, Mothman?), the superheroes are a satire on their whole existence based on the idea that…no…they do not really embody the idea of defending truth, justice, and…wait, actually they do defend the American way. “Who watches the watchmen?” Juvenal once asked of the corrupt men who would guard women against infidelity; though we today find far better application of his words to the defenders of tyrannical governments.

It must be emphasized that, though the liberal creators of Watchmen would have been unlikely to have defended Marxist-Leninist governments (note how the comics’ portrayal of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, moved later in this alternate history to the mid-80s, is still deemed an invasion, rather than an attempt to defend the growth of socialism there against the fundamentalist, reactionary mujahideen), the tyrannical government being critiqued here is the US dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist, imperialist state led by Nixon, who stands in for Moore’s real Republican satirical target…Reagan!

So, as with John Carpenter‘s film They Live, Watchmen is meant as liberals’ indictment of the GOP specifically, as opposed to being a critique of the entire American two-party system, the military-industrial complex, and capitalism in general, though it should have been meant as such, and it has enough elements in it to be critical of so much bigger a realm of political corruption, as I’ll try to show. For to put what I said above in different words, re-elected Nixon can be a stand-in for not only Reagan, but also Ford, Carter, Bushes Sr. and Jr., the Clintons, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

One criticism of the film’s general faithfulness to the comics is that it was too faithful. Retaining, for instance, the Cold War fears of nuclear armageddon between the US and socialist Russia was deemed by film critics over a decade ago to be too dated for contemporary moviegoers to be able to relate to the tensions depicted. In the 2020s, however, with new Cold War fears of nuclear armageddon between the US and capitalist Russia, moviegoers today can relate all too well to the tensions depicted in the film.

Such fears are what have motivated me to do this analysis.

III: The Comedian Is Dead

The story begins with the violent murder of Edward Blake, the Comedian (Morgan in the film), a man in his sixties who was in remarkably good shape for his age, but no match for his much younger killer, who throws him out of the window of his New York apartment, him falling to his death. The iconic image of his pin of a smiley face stained with a drop of his blood’s a harrowing one, for it symbolizes all that the Comedian in turn came to represent: the idea of superheroes defending the innocent is a sick, cruel joke.

Superheroes in this story are, essentially, glorified police and soldiers, whom they thus represent. Many people, especially in recent years, have come to feel nothing but contempt for cops, and justifiably so, for the cops’ job is really “to serve and protect” the ruling class. Similarly, the American/NATO military serves nothing more than imperial interests.

This is where the Comedian comes in. With Doctor Manhattan (Crudup), he is the only superhero allowed by the US government to remain so under the Keene Act of 1977, which otherwise banned all “masks.” Though the Comedian was inspired by the Peacemaker, with “a little bit of Nick Fury,” there’s also some Captain America in him, too, as can be seen on his Stars and Stripes shoulder sleeves.

Watchmen the comic and film seem to have anticipated the huge outpouring of superhero films in the 2010s, especially the MCU, with its pitting of the Avengers against armies of alien supervillains, a glorification of war between the “good guys,” or “Earth’s mightiest heroes” as representing the armies of US/NATO imperialism, and the “bad guys,” the Chitauri, etc., as representing any country opposing the Western empire.

Accordingly, we shouldn’t be surprised to see flashbacks of the Comedian killing the Vietcong with Doctor Manhattan, though we feel an unsettling sympathy for Charlie as he gets mutilated and destroyed, unlike those Chitauri. What’s worse, we see what a pig of a GI Joe the Comedian is to the pregnant Vietnamese woman he kills…after refusing to take responsibility for having impregnating her. Added to that is his beating and attempted rape of Sally “Jupiter” Juspeczyk, or Silk Spectre I (Gugino) back in the early 1940s. The Comedian thus represents not only police brutality and imperialism, but also toxic masculinity (elements I linked together here), showing what a cruel joke it is to be a “superhero.”

So, the Comedian is despicable in the extreme; but he is not 100% despicable. There are, after all, his penitent tears while sitting at the bed of Moloch (played by Matt Frewer in the film), who was his supervillain enemy for forty years (Chapter II, comic pages 21-23). The Comedian feels this remorse as a result of learning of the apocalyptic plans of Ozymandias (Goode). Indeed, his maskless confession to Moloch, revealing his secret identity as Blake, puts the retired supervillain in the ironic role of priestly confessor, thus once again blurring the line between good and evil in Watchmen.

The Comedian’s grinning wickedness can be explained, if never justified, in one remarkable way. His oft-repeated line, “It’s a joke,” can be interpreted as a kind of Camus-like absurdism. He knows it’s no good playing the hero in a world where villainy keeps resurfacing after brief defeats; it’s especially no good in a world whose existence is threatened by nuclear war.

For him, fighting crime is like Sisyphus rolling that huge boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back to the bottom as soon as it’s reached the top, to have to be rolled up again and again, for all eternity. One can never make the world a better place, but one is forced to keep trying. Camus concluded, however, that one must imagine that Sisyphus is happy, as a proposed resolution of the contradiction of man’s search for meaning in a meaningless universe; similarly, the Comedian continues to play the fake role of hero with a smile, knowing full well that it’s “all a joke.” Hence he commits atrocities without batting an eye.

IV: Rorschach

Rorschach (Haley), or Walter Kovacs–who has been, like a noir detective, investigating the murder of the Comedian and has formulated a conspiracy theory about someone out to kill all “masks”–is a similarly amoral sociopath, another example of how Watchmen deconstructs and satirizes the idea of “good guy” superheroes, though his sociopathy expresses itself in markedly different ways. His mother having been an abusive prostitute makes him a literal sonofabitch. This rupture in the normal child’s Oedipal and post-Oedipal development at least in part explains his pathology (it goes without saying that little Walter had no father in the home).

One peculiarity about Rorschach is his omission of definite and indefinite articles when speaking; these omissions are more extensive in the comic than in the film. Given his psychopathological nature, such omissions symbolize how incomplete his communicating is. In other words, he’s not as engaged as most people are in the Symbolic Order, the realm of language, social mores, custom, laws, culture, etc. His refusal to abide by the Keene Act, that is, illegally continuing his work as a “mask,” is a reflection of all this. He doesn’t fit in with society, and it shows when he talks.

He sees the world as irredeemably cruel, so he believes that he has the right to be as violent and cruel as he likes to other people (e.g., breaking people’s fingers when interrogating them). His superhero name and mask…or “face,” as he calls it, comes from the Rorschach test, a projective test using symmetrical inkblots (like the shifting black images seen on his white “face”) to bring out features of a patient’s unconscious thoughts that are projected onto the ink blots when he’s asked what he sees.

So his black-and-white “face” represents the kind of projection we all do, not just his own projecting of his viciousness onto the world, but also our projecting onto him when we see his “face,” or onto anyone else. (Consider the scene in the film when, broken out of prison with the help of Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II, he finds his “face,” puts it on, and facing the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Malcolm Long–played by William S. Taylor– who has used the Rorschach test on him, he asks, “What do you see?”) He is a mirror to us as much as we are a mirror to him. Rorschach, in his permanent hostility to all those around him, personifies the alienation that is almost universal in our world.

The fact that his mask is black and white also represents his own psychological splitting, his black-and-white view of the world: if something isn’t totally pure and innocent, honest and just, it’s so fetidly evil that destroying all manifestations of that evil is perfectly defensible (the fact that he stinks becomes yet another projection onto that fetidly evil world he sees). Hence, “not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.” The splitting into black and white means projecting the black outward and keeping the white inside…or so Rorschach thinks he’s doing; yet one cannot deny one’s Shadow, so he behaves as hideously as all those he condemns and maims.

V: Nite Owl II

Upon learning of the murder of the Comedian, Rorschach first goes to the home of Nite Owl II (Wilson), or Dan Dreiberg, to warn him about his theory of a “mask-killer.” Though based on the Ted Kord version of Blue Beetle, Nite Owl is in many ways a parody of Batman, with his use of gadgets and his “Owlship” (reminding us of the Batplane), nicknamed “Archie,” short for Archimedes. Dreiberg’s father left him a lot of money when he died, allowing him to afford such things, rather like orphan billionaire Bruce Wayne. His class status as a bourgeois ensures that Dan, like the other Watchmen, will always have, if not right-wing politics, at least liberal ones, as a reflection of his wish to protect his class interests.

Still, of all the Watchmen, Nite Owl II (as well as Silk Spectre II, or Laurie Juspeczyk–Åkerman) is the most moral. He and she do the one act of saving the lives of innocent people in danger in the whole comic, rescuing people from a tenement building on fire and taking them aboard Archie (Chapter VII, comic pages 23-26). When he and the Comedian are trying to handle the rioters back in the 1970s, he’s in the role of the “good cop,” trying to reason with the rioters, while the Comedian is the “bad cop,” beating the crap out of them (Chapter II, comic pages 16-18), if not killing them.

VI: Ozymandias

After warning Dan, Rorschach goes to tell Adrian Veidt, formerly Ozymandias, now the wealthy owner of, among other businesses, a toy company that, in selling Watchmen action figures, is capitalizing on the whole superhero phenomenon. Here we see more of the comics’ satire on superheroes. Like Dan, Adrian shows skepticism over Rorschach’s “mask killer” conspiracy theory (Chapter I, comic pages 17 and 18).

Well, naturally Adrian shows skepticism: as we learn in the end, he is the mask killer.

He’s the one who breaks into Blake’s apartment, beats him up, and throws him out the window. Adrian’s the one who deceives Doctor Manhattan into thinking that contact with him caused his colleagues, his former lover, Janey Slater (played by Laura Mennell in the film), and Moloch to develop cancer, giving the godlike superhero such guilt feelings that he leaves for Mars for some peaceful solitude, thus ensuring he won’t interfere with Adrian’s plans. Since Rorschach is also piecing the plot together, Adrian must get rid of him, too–by framing him for the murder of Moloch and putting him in prison. Finally, Adrian stages an attempt on his own life to make himself seem above suspicion.

And what’s Ozymandias’ plot? To kill millions of New Yorkers with a monster he’s had biologically engineered so that the leaders of the US and the USSR, joining forces to defend the world from alien invaders, will relent from nuclear war. Thus is world peace achieved!

Now, purist fans of the comics will be infuriated with me for saying this, but I believe the film’s changing of the alien monster to energy blasts, seemingly from Doctor Manhattan, on not only New York but also a number of other major cities around the world, was an improvement. Wiping out so many more people makes it all the more horrific, and energy blasts coming from a harnessing of Doctor Manhattan’s power, by virtue of the godlike hero’s name’s association with the Manhattan Project (and therefore associating his power with nuclear weapons), creates an ironic genocide by power thus associated in order to prevent a genocide by nuclear weapons.

Ozymandias imagines that his plot, as horrific as it is, will be a necessary sacrifice to prevent a horror killing billions, because apparently, the American and Soviet governments will be deterred by this horror from ever going to war with each other. Why, however, should we believe that world peace, let alone a lasting one, will be guaranteed by this “sacrifice”? Ozymandias himself acknowledges that man’s savage, violent nature will inevitably lead to his destruction. One doesn’t have to be “the smartest man in the world” to know that that savage, destructive nature won’t be tamed forever just because of the massive deaths caused by the monster, or the energy blasts. Let enough time pass by, and all those deaths will slowly fade from memory, and our bloodthirsty, competitive habits will reemerge.

Kiling millions to save billions, therefore, must be Adrian’s rationalization, rather than his real reason, for killing all those people (I wonder if any of his businesses’ competition were wiped out in New York, with his full knowledge?). Like the Comedian and Rorschach, Ozymandias is yet another superhero psychopath (recall how easily he disintegrates his pet Bubastis in his attempt to do the same to Doctor Manhattan), but with some narcissism mixed in. He identifies with great leaders of ancient history: Alexander the Great, and later Ramses II, called Ozymandias by the ancient Greeks. We’re reminded of Shelley‘s poem, in which we read the famous lines, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

In his narcissistic imagination, Adrian thinks he’s achieved the ultimate act of greatness in creating world peace, paradoxically, through a huge massacre. We are to look on his works (supposedly not knowing they’re his works) and despair, on the one hand, at the huge number of deaths he’s caused, and on the other hand, at the great accomplishment–supposedly thus–of what has been deemed impossible to accomplish…a lasting world peace. The “mighty” would envy him for his great feat.

Yet, just as the giant statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem has been reduced to mere fragments of rubble by the passage of time, so will Adrian’s peace by mass murder–by the passage of time–fade away into oblivion with the innate human urge to resume competing and waging war. His peace will come crumbling down; in fact, it may crumble quite soon if Seymour (played by Chris Gauthier in the film), at New Frontiersman, takes Rorschach’s journal from the crank file and, reproducing in a newspaper article the contents that have resulted from Rorschach’s investigation, expose Adrian’s whole plan as a hoax (Chapter XII, comic pages 31 and 32).

Now, New Frontiersman is a right-wing newspaper (as made blatantly clear on pages 275-278 in the graphic novel), and Rorschach’s giving of his journal to them indicates his sympathies for their politics. Indeed, he often speaks disparagingly of “liberal sensibilities,” which, contrary to popular belief, are not left-wing, but centrist, swaying only temporarily to the left or to the right depending on the political climate of the time (consider, for example, how liberals were left-leaning peaceniks in the 1960s and 70s; but when Trump was elected, they started banging the war drums against Russians, leading to our predicament in the 2020s). Other masks, like the Comedian, are similarly right-wing, “practically a Nazi,” according to Adrian.

Now, Adrian is deemed one of the “most consistently left-leaning superheroes,” according to a 1975 article by the liberal Nova Express (pages 377-380), so virulently hated a publication by the editor of New Frontiersman. Still, as the wealthy owner of several companies, Adrian is merely a bourgeois liberal and a member of the capitalist class, so he hardly merits the moniker of “leftist.” He’s no more “left-leaning” than billionaire George Soros, who may critique the excesses of unregulated capitalism from time to time, but who also used the “Open Society” to help dissolve the Soviet states. Only a far right-wing moron would call Soros a ‘communist’; it’s equally absurd to imagine that Adrian, an admirer of rulers during the ancient slave/master class contradiction, is anything approaching a socialist.

If one wishes to call Adrian a liberal, fine. We’ve seen plenty of liberals in today’s world joining the choruses of condemnation of Putin and all things Russian in response to his provoked invasion of Ukraine. These same liberals are, knowingly or unknowingly (the latter being no excuse, as evidence of the provocations has been made public for years), cheering for a government that has Nazis in it, as well as in their military. (I go into more detail about this issue in these posts, Dear Reader, if you’re interested: rehashing these arguments is beyond the scope of this article.)

That Western liberals are rooting for Ukraine and manufacturing consent for continued war with Russia is a dangerous game, risking a very possibly nuclear WWIII. Such an understanding of Ozymandias’ politics helps clear our minds as to why this liberal, fantasizing about an ideal world, has massacred millions in a manner comparable with nuclear war in order, paradoxically, to prevent it. Recall how atomic bombs killed hundreds of thousands in two Japanese cities (rationalized as having prevented far more deaths), far fewer than Adrian’s mass murder in New York City.

So, one lesson to be learned from this narrative is not to be naïve in hoping that liberals will steer humanity away from extinction. The trouble with liberal normal is that it always gets worse.

VII: Doctor Manhattan

The next heroes Rorschach goes to warn are Doctor Manhattan and Silk Spectre II, the couple being in a sexual relationship and living together in the Rockefeller Military Research Center, where Doctor Manhattan works for the government. When Rorschach tells them the Comedian is dead, Dr. Manhattan says he already knows, and that “the CIA suspects the Libyans were responsible.” Though the CIA presumably wouldn’t have known of Adrian’s plot (of course, knowing the nature of the CIA, and of at least some billionaires’ CIA connections, it’s quite possible that they might be in on it), their scapegoating of Libya sounds most convenient for their purposes.

Laurie feels no love lost for the murder of the man who tried to rape her mother, breaking her ribs and almost choking her; but Rorschach just trivializes the “moral lapse” of a man who died serving his country, a typically jingoistic and insensitive opinion from a right-winger (Chapter I comic page 21).

As for Dr. Manhattan, he is similarly unmoved by Blake’s death, since “life and death are unquantifiable abstracts.” As the only superhero of the Watchmen with superhuman powers, this nude blue demigod is emotionally numb from his deeper understanding of ‘the broader scheme of things,’ as it were, a numbness that will alienate Laurie from him and make her run into Dan’s arms later.

Dr. Jon Osterman became Doctor Manhattan as a result of a freak accident in the test chamber–in which he was locked–in the intrinsic field chamber where he and his fellow researchers worked. (He went there to retrieve a watch he’d fixed, that of his lover, Janey Slater.) In that chamber, his body was torn to pieces…pieces too infinitesimally small to see (Chapter IV, comic pages 7 and 8).

He reassembled himself (just like the repairing of her watch) in stages: first, a brain, eyes, and nervous system emerged; then, his circulatory system; next, a partially-muscled skeleton. Finally, he appeared before Janey and the other research staff in the cafeteria in his full, new form–blue, hairless, muscular, and naked, glowing with a “sudden flare of ultraviolet” (Chapter IV, comic page 10).

Osterman’s ordeal is obviously Christ-like in his agonizing death and resurrection, giving him a kind of “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44), if you will, and as a kind of “second Adam,” it’s fitting that he goes about “naked…and…not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25), just like the two lovers in the garden before their fall from grace. So his disintegration into the void was a kind of harrowing of hell…but also, paradoxically, a brief experience of the no-thing-ness of nirvana.

The sublation of the dialectical opposites of heaven (or, if you prefer, nirvana) and hell can be a way of interpreting what Wilfred Bion called O, and what Lacan called the Real. It’s a place of bliss as well as of trauma. Osterman has experienced both, almost simultaneously, and he’ll never be the same again.

Having experienced such extremes, he is distanced from the normal feelings of human attachment that are a part of samsara. He scarcely feels the fire of desire that causes dukkha, suffering; so his resurrected, god-like incarnation grows cooler and cooler emotionally. Death and suffering no longer trouble him all that much. He can still feel some emotion (hence his guilt over Janey’s cancer, a particularly powerful exception for him), but feelings are scanted for him, at best.

Small wonder he can walk as a giant through the jungles and rice paddy fields of Vietnam and destroy Charlie without flinching. Such is his nirvanic indifference to the differences between life and death. This indifference, of course, is most useful to the American government. As an American god, Doctor Manhattan should be terrifying to the world. As a metaphoric nuclear weapon personified, he’ll keep the Soviets at bay.

As the personification of a nuclear weapon, capable of destroying all life, he’s the opposite of what a superhero is supposed to be. As someone so indifferent to human life that it doesn’t matter to him if nuclear war wipes it out, Doctor Manhattan is that much less of a superhero.

It is only when he realizes so good a person as Laurie, Silk Spectre II, can come–by a one in a billion chance–from the mating of Sally, Silk Spectre I, with her near-rapist, the super-despicable Comedian, such good from such bad, that Doctor Manhattan sees the birth as a miracle, and therefore he can see value in human life once again. So by this paradox, he finds the willingness to go back, from his isolation on Mars, to Earth to prevent nuclear war between the US and the USSR.

But he arrives too late to stop the monster…or, according to the film, the energy blasts to be blamed on him.

Heroes meant to prevent calamity either fail to prevent it in Watchmen, or they outright cause it…the superhero concept is further satirized and deconstructed.

VIII: The Black Freighter

A subplot running throughout the comics, but not included in the film (apart from deleted scenes), is a comic book story–read by a young man sitting by a newspaper vendor who’s always prating about the end of the world (and providing copies of New Frontiersman to Walter Kovacs when he isn’t in his Rorschach outfit but is carrying around a sign saying “The End Is Nigh”)–from Tales of the Black Freighter. (This begins at the start of Chapter III.)

The protagonist of the story–curiously not a comic book superhero, since a decline in the popularity of “masks” over the years has replaced them with, in this case, for example, seamen–has found himself the sole survivor of his crew from a shipwreck resulting from an attack at sea by the Black Freighter, or as he calls it, the “hell-bound ship.” (Chapter III, comic pages 1 and 2) Overwhelmed by the sight of his wrecked ship and the bodies of his dead crew strewn on the shore, and also fearing the hell-bound ship sailing to his hometown of Davidstown, where his wife and daughters will be killed before he can get there, he vows revenge and is obsessively driven to get home to achieve it.

When he realizes that making a raft from wood won’t be buoyant enough, he decides to make one with the body parts of the dead crewmen he’s just buried. This ghoulish act is the first example of foreshadowing in the story, for the Black Freighter has heads nailed to its prow. In his overzealous quest to avenge evil (if he can’t stop the ship from killing his family, that is), the protagonist will become the very evil he’s trying to prevent. He’s projecting his own potential for evil onto the Black Freighter (Chapter V, comic pages 8 and 9), just as Rorschach projects his evil onto the world.

Further foreshadowing of him becoming that evil is when he, on his raft of rotting corpses, grabs a seagull among many trying to nip at the dead flesh and savagely eats it alive. We see a picture of him (Chapter V, bottom right of comic page 9) with a wild facial expression and gull’s blood dripping from his mouth.

It’s interesting to note, in connection with the moral degeneration of the protagonist, how the newspaper vendor standing by the kid reading the comic has said, from the beginning, that the US should nuke the USSR. Is his attitude not a perfect parallel of that of the comic’s protagonist? So eager to kill the bad guys that he talks like a bad guy himself. The same is true of the Comedian, Rorschach, and Ozymandias, all self-righteous psychopaths who think they have the right to end human life.

Eventually, the protagonist reaches land and gets to Davidstown. Since he’s narrating the story, and he’s been through a harrowing, traumatizing, and disorienting experience, his judgement will be shaky at best. Therefore, he is clearly an unreliable narrator. What he perceives to be happening next should be observed with due skepticism.

He sees a man and a woman walking along near the beach. It’s at night, so it’s dark and not easy to see. Still, the protagonist is sure this man is a moneylender from Davidstown whom he recognizes, and the woman is his paramour. Moneylenders were despised people back around the 18th/19th century, when this story takes place, so it’s easy to see the protagonist vilifying this man as an abettor to the evil crew of the Black Freighter. (Chapter X, comic book pages 12 and 13)

He kills the lovers, then disguising himself as the man and putting the woman’s body on her horse, he rides into Davidstown with her. (Chapter X, comic page 23) Again, this use of a corpse with transportation is a foreshadowing of his eventual identification with the murderous crew of the Black Freighter, with heads on its prow.

Finally in Davidstown, he gets to his home and, thinking the murderous pirates are there, he attacks one to avenge his family…only to realize he’s actually killed his own wife. (Chapter XI, comic page 6) The Black Freighter never reached Davidstown (has it been only a figment of his imagination the whole time, a projection of his own, inner evil?), though the ship is later seen approaching the shore by the despairing protagonist, who has returned to the beach. He gets in the water, swims to the boat, and joins the crew, being as evil as they are. (Chapter XI, comic page 23)

To return to the main story, after Ozymandias has released the monster (which, by the way, can also be representative of a nuclear holocaust, through associations with such kaiju as Godzilla) on New York, a mass murder that one TV news reporter compares to “Hiroshima but with buildings”(Chapter XII, comic page 25), he tells Doctor Manhattan about a dream he’s had, “about swimming towards a hideous…” (Chapter XII, comic page 27)

He doesn’t finish his thought, though, because, as should be obvious to us, he’s referring to the Black Freighter. Like the protagonist of that story, Ozymandias has become the very evil he claims he’s wanted to prevent…though he won’t let his guilt surface to his conscious mind (it can appear only in his unconscious, in dream).

IX: Conclusion

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history,” meaning the triumph of “free market” capitalism as the highest and final stage of human civilization. But as Doctor Manhattan tells liberal capitalist Ozymandias, “Nothing ever ends.” (Chapter XII, comic page 27)

We all imagined (myself included, at the time), in our naïveté, that the end of the Soviet states would not only usher in freedom and democracy around the world, but also, in ending the Cold War, put to rest our fears of nuclear annihilation. Yet since the early 1990s, we’ve instead seen life get shittier and shittier, with increasing income inequality, the capitalist class controlling most of our access to information, a homelessness epidemic, worsening financial crises, government surveillance (and surveillance capitalism), rampant imperialist wars, and militarized police. The end of socialist “totalitarianism” has only led to a very real capitalist totalitarianism. In the past, the West feared the rule of Stalin and Mao, but we don’t need to fear them: now we’re ruled by the likes of Gates, Musk, and Bezos.

Our “heroes” of the past–Soros et al–have become the very evil they fancied themselves to be fighting.

Furthermore, just as we see on the pages of the Watchmen comics, the doomsday clock is set just a few minutes before midnight. All one needs to do to see the grim reality I’m describing is to watch the reckless nuclear brinksmanship going on with the US and NATO’s proxy war with Russia, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. And as if that weren’t madness enough, the Western imperialists are planning to play the same game of nuclear chicken with China, using the Taiwanese as cannon fodder.

The end of the world is nigh…where are Walter Kovacs and his sign when we need them?

Just as Ozymandias imagines dropping a giant squid-like monster on New York City–or, as in the film, using energy blasts seeming to come from Doctor Manhattan, killing not only millions in the Big Apple, but also in London, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, etc.–will save billions by killing millions, so do some of the warmongering imperialist psychopaths in our world imagine using smaller nukes will defeat Russia and China without wiping out the entire world. MAD indeed.

Not only are we headed unswervingly towards WWIII and nuclear annihilation, we are also blinded to this reality by the Russophobic and Sinophobic propaganda of the Western bourgeois media, who keep the truth from us just as Doctor Manhattan kills Walter Kovacs to keep the truth from the world about Ozymandias’ plot. That Western propaganda is like the tachyons used to blind us Dr. Manhattans to the dire future we face, causing us to do nothing to prevent it.

The anti-Russian partisans of the DNC, as well as the anti-Chinese partisans of the GOP, see the politicians of their respective parties as superheroes defending the US…yet, who is watching the watchmen? In their hate of their version of the Black Freighter, be it China, or Russia, or both of them, these Western politicians have built their raft of corpses–from all their previous warmongering–and they’re on their way to Davidstown.

Not enough of us yet know that these Western politicians will soon swim to that hell-bound ship and join their bloodthirsty crew…will there be enough of us to stop them before it’s too late?

As we can see, Watchmen, in its comic and movie forms, is extremely relevant to our troubled times today.

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins, Watchmen, Burbank, CA, DC Comics, 1986-1987

Analysis of ‘A Farewell to Kings’

A Farewell to Kings is the fifth studio album by Rush, released in 1977. The album demonstrates remarkable musical growth in the band, with their shifting away from their original, Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock sound and into the realm of progressive rock.

To this musical end, the trio expanded from a basic guitar/bass/drums sound to one incorporating not only six- and twelve-string acoustic guitars, but also classical guitar (by Alex Lifeson). Furthermore, singer/bassist Geddy Lee adds a Minimoog, and both he and Lifeson play bass pedal synthesizers; this electronic sound would be further expanded to the use of more synthesizers by the 1980s, this being a dominant aspect of their music throughout that decade.

Drummer Neil Peart adds a wide array of percussion instruments on this album, including glockenspiel, tubular bells, Vibraslap (heard during Lifeson’s solo on “Closer to the Heart“), and Chinese temple blocks. These new musical colours, combined with Peart’s growth from his original Keith Moon-inspired aggressive drumming style to one of prog rock virtuosity, show the newer influence of the crackingly precise chops of Carl Palmer and Bill Bruford.

But just as newer musical ideas are being phased in, so are older ideas being phased out. As I said above, the hard rock sound, though still present to a large degree, is noticeably less here than on previous albums. And although Lee’s soaring head voice (with its grating vibrato) is as evident as ever here (in fact, on “Cygnus X-1,” he hits his highest note ever, a B-flat 5…or 6?), it won’t be long after this album (two albums later, specifically) that he will phase out the use of head voice and limit his highest notes generally to those within mixed voice, and focus on his lower, chest voice.

A Farewell to Kings is an album that Rush were most pleased with: Lee has never found fault with it, and Peart said that the title track “seems to encapsulate everything that we want Rush to represent.” It’s one of my personal favourites of the band’s, if not the favourite–it’s the first of theirs that I’d heard as a little kid, not long after it was released. Apart from all the musical colours I described above, A Farewell to Kings is genuine art rock, not only with long songs divided into sections, but also with a more prominent use of odd time signatures and superb musicianship that had since become synonymous with Rush.

Here is a link to all the song lyrics on the album.

The cover, by Hugh Syme, shows a demolition site in the background as juxtaposed with, in the foreground, a king slumped on a throne and made to look like a marionette. The picture expresses some of the themes of the title track, and by extension, those of the rest of the songs on the album, as I’ll explain below.

Decades ago, I spotted the obvious theme of morality, but a much more important theme is idealism, particularly the idealizing of the past as against the disillusionment felt in the modern world. Also, there’s the theme of the danger of recklessly seeking to attain those ideals, leading to one’s self-destruction.

The title track begins softly, with Lifeson playing a classical guitar melody with one bar in 3/4, then three bars in 4/4 before returning to the 3/4 beginning, and playing the whole cycle all over again. He plays it a third time, but with the first two of the three 4/4 bars, replacing the third with a transitional bar in 5/4, then one in 4/4, to introduce a middle passage with Lee’s Minimoog and Peart’s glockenspiel.

The first theme returns with all three instruments, and with the 5/4 theme played three times. Though this gentle introductory tune includes a synthesizer, the classical guitar’s lute-like sound makes one think of a time hundreds of years ago. The music’s tranquility makes one imagine, correctly or incorrectly, that that old time was a better, more peaceful one.

A sharp contrast is heard when the electric guitar, bass, and drums come crashing in, suggesting the turmoil of the modern world, a sad decline from that (perceived) idyllic opening. We hear two bars of 4/4, then a switch to several bars of 7/4 before returning to 4/4.

Now, the lyrics come in, Lee singing what amounts to be a conservative’s complaint of “Whatever happened to the good old days?” (If one didn’t know any better, one might think of Archie and Edith Bunker singing “Those Were the Days” at the piano.)

Added to this conservative lament is the use of medieval imagery in Peart’s lyric (i.e., references to “castles,” all things “kingly,” and “nobles”). Let me just get this straight: a farewell to kings, that is, to feudalism, is a bad thing? Morality can be upheld only through the absolute power of a monarch, the ‘divine right’ of kings?

Such would be a very strange position for three young, long-haired rockers (who only the previous year sang of the pleasures of dope in “A Passage to Bangkok“) to take. Either Peart was being ironic, or he was being metaphorical in his references to kings and castles as an ideal, or the lyric is in the voice of a reactionary whose political ideals are in sharp contrast with those of the band.

I’d say that a hint to what Peart was really writing about, perhaps by way of a Freudian slip, is in the line “Ancient nobles showering their bitterness on youth.” Does this line not encapsulate what the whole lyric presents to the listener–grumpy old men griping about all these bad kids, with their long hair, loud rock music, and sex and drugs, only it’s expressed with all this medieval imagery, just to reinforce how “ancient” the complainers are?

One thing to remember about Rush, and about Peart in the 1970s in particular, was the influence of right-wing libertarianism, and of “the genius of Ayn Rand” in their reworking of her novella, Anthem, in their side-long suite, “2112” (not to mention their song of the same name as her book, and in the name of Rush’s record label). Surely, these three haters of ‘Big Brother government’ weren’t holding up the monarchy as a fitting alternative. And if the idealizing of monarchy is meant as a metaphor, then for what?

I want to give Rush credit here, and say that this song, however much Peart insisted would “encapsulate everything that [they wanted] Rush to represent,” is meant as an ironic presentation of the views of authoritarian conservatives “showering their bitterness on youth.”

In other words, Rush represents ironic tongue-in-cheek.

Sandwiched in between these verses is a tight instrumental section in alternating 4/4 and 2/4, with Lifeson doing a solo with a delightfully angular tone on his Gibson ES-355 over Lee’s Rickenbacker bass octaves in A, and Peart’s tight drumming. Lifeson stops soloing for a moment and plays an A-chord with Lee’s A octaves and Peart’s drumming of the 4/4 and 2/4 rhythm; then we have just 4/4 and a chord progression of A major, G major, and D major, over which Lifeson resumes soloing before a reprise of the “Cities full of hatred…” verse.

A final verse, to the same music as that of the reprised verse, ends with the hope for a world that’s “closer to the heart,” an allusion to the famous song that acts as a solution to the problem presented in the title track. More on that later, of course.

Though lyrically, “Xanadu” is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem “Kubla Khan,” Peart’s idea originally came from the classic film Citizen Kane, in which the titular character (based in part on William Randolph Hearst) owns a mansion called Xanadu. Just as the title track yearns for an ideal morality in the feudal past (metaphorically, if not literally), so does “Xanadu” involve a quest for the ideal of eternal life.

As with the title track, “Xanadu” begins with birdsong (indeed, Messiaen would have loved it!). We also hear a low E played on the bass pedal synthesizer, along with Lifeson soloing with a volume pedal, and Peart playing the Chinese temple blocks, swiping the chimes, and tapping an E on the tubular bells.

Next, Lifeson plays–no longer with the volume pedal–a seven-note cycle of E–E (octave higher)–A–B–E-flat–A-flat–A, which then brings in the bass and drums. After this passage in 7/8, we return to 4/4, still in E major, with a riff including a whirlwind of notes starting on D, in the E-Mixolydian mode. Then, we’re back to 7/8 (Rush’s favourite odd time), with Lifeson quickly strumming chords of E-major, D-major, B-major, A-major, and G-major, but with an open high E string (he does a lot of this–playing E-shape barre chords, but with the high E-string open, without the barre–at various points in the song). Peart joins in with cowbells of different pitches, and Lee with the bass pedals set at a treble range. The bass and drums soon join Lifeson in this 7/8 passage.

The instrumental opening goes on for about five minutes before Lee finally begins singing, making allusions to Coleridge’s poem. “Drink[ing] the milk of Paradise” is what the speaker hopes will confer immortality onto him, though the milk, combined with honeydew, also suggests the use of narcotics (recall, in this connection, “A Passage to Bangkok,” as well as Coleridge’s own drug use).

The speaker seeks the ideal of eternal life, and hopes to find in Kubla Khan’s “pleasure dome” the ideal abode, paradise. But just as hoping for moral ideals in a romanticized past in “A Farewell to Kings” is foolish, so is the speaker’s hope for happiness in immortality in Xanadu foolish.

A thousand years pass, and the speaker has no hope of dying. He yearns for the end of the world, hoping to be destroyed with it, and thus to be freed of the “prison of the lost Xanadu.” Just as Charles Foster Kane can find no happiness or fulfillment in his wealth and power, the speaker, in his “bitter triumph,” cannot find any in honeydew and the milk of paradise.

Wealth, power, immortality, ideals…these don’t provide happiness. That’s what A Farewell to Kings is all about.

Now, “A Farewell to Kings” may have presented the problem of immorality (just as “Xanadu” explored the problem of immortality), but “Closer to the Heart” presents an attempt at finding solutions. Obviously, “the heart” is meant to indicate that we need a world of love as the solution, though as I’ll later argue, the solution as given isn’t adequate.

From a formal, structural perspective, the song’s lyrics (written by Peart, but inspired by a verse by Peter Talbot, a friend of the band’s) are cleverly written, with parallel structure from verse to verse. Examples of such parallelism include the rhyming last words of the third line of each verse (“reality,” “creativity,” “mentality,” and “destiny”); in the first line of each verse are references to different careers one could have (“men who hold high places,” “the blacksmith and the artist,” “philosophers and ploughmen,” and “captain”); the blacksmith would “forge,” and the artist use his “creativity,” ploughmen “sow” the philosophers’ “new mentality,” and the captain goes “sailing into [the] destiny” of “the chart” that “I will draw.” The most obvious parallelism is the repeat of the song’s title in the last line of each verse.

Now, this all makes for fine rhetoric, which again uses archaic diction, as in the album’s title track, the question song to which “Closer to the Heart” is the proposed answer. Here’s the problem: nothing in the song actually details how we are supposed to move towards a more loving world.

Matters start to get a little disturbing when we consider how the band that’s preaching how we must move “closer to the heart” was only the previous year touting the ‘philosophy’ of an embittered Russian bourgeois expat in the US, she who wrote of The Virtue of Selfishness, which espoused “rational egoism,” or as I would call it, rationalized selfishness.

In all fairness to Rush, and to Peart in particular, when they recorded these 1970s albums, they were young and naïve about the world. Their expertise was in music, not politics. Given the intense anti-communist propaganda of the Cold War, the kind that raised a hack writer like Rand to fame (seriously, I read Anthem when I was young and, being similarly naïve at the time, was more sympathetic to the story’s anti-socialist message, and even then, I was not impressed with her prose), it’s easy to see how Peart could have been seduced by her ideas, as so many have been. And to be even fairer to Peart, in the last decade of his life, he confessed that he’d renounced Rand (who, incidentally, was no libertarian, but rather an advocate for capitalist government) and begun calling himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian“…translation: a liberal. Indeed, it was the individualism of her message, not the pro-capitalist one, that he’d always liked, anyway.

As for those conservative politicians whose Rand influence has stayed with them, look over the past forty years of neoliberalism and ask yourself honestly if their politics have steered the world any “closer to the heart.” Tax cuts for the rich have resulted in their wealth ballooning to the point that they can essentially buy politicians and both American political parties, ensuring that the owners of the big corporations determine the direction the world goes in, which means more for them and less for the rest of us (all of this has given a new, bitter irony to Peart’s complaints of “the seeds that we let grow”). As I’ve explained in other posts, the “free market” dialectically leads to “corporatism,” or the capitalist government that Rand wanted, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

So, with the song’s championing of a more loving world, with its clever rhetoric and a lack of a concrete plan for realizing its goal, “Closer to the Heart” is another example of the album’s theme of idealism. Note that utopian thinking exists on the left and on the right. Everyone has his or her own notion of the ‘perfect world’: there are, for example, the Nazi ideals of Lebensraum and judenrein, though decent people would never espouse such horrors. “Free market” fundamentalists’ notion of unbridled capitalism, through the voodoo of the invisible hand, leading to happiness and harmony is another utopian fantasy: how does unchecked selfishness help the world? It’s easy to see how it results in unaccountable corporate tyranny, though. And leftism isn’t necessarily all idealistic: contrary to popular belief, Marxism is not, as I explained here, utopian socialism, but scientific, grounded in revolutionary theory.

Now, “Closer to the Heart” may have failed to provide a method for achieving the more loving society, but Lee’s lyric for “Cinderella Man” gives us something of an idea. Just as “Xanadu” was inspired (in part) by a classic old black-and-white movie, so was this one: namely, by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, one of Lee’s favourites.

Longfellow Deeds (played by Gary Cooper) is dubbed the “Cinderella Man” by a newspaper reporter, named Louise “Babe” Bennett (played by Jean Arthur), because of his sudden rags-to-riches inheritance of his late uncle’s $20,000,000 fortune. He’s from a town called Mandrake Falls, and he goes to New York to get the money.

Since Deeds eventually decides to give all of the money to poor, starving farmers (the 1936 film is set during the Great Depression), powerful men scheme to get their hands on his money by having him declared insane, and therefore too mentally incompetent to be trusted with the responsibility of managing and dispensing with so huge a sum of money. His eccentric behavior, which includes suddenly punching men for no apparent reason, walking in the rain, and feeding a horse an excess of donuts, seems to confirm that he’s insane. In fact, a psychiatrist deems him to be a manic depressive. In the end, though, they “just couldn’t beat him.”

So, Lee’s lyric tells the plot of the film in an extremely abbreviated form. The proposed ideal moral solution to the problem of poverty is, essentially, a kind of charity, acts of generosity done of one’s free, individual will, as opposed to the workers’ revolutionary seizing control of the means of production, resulting in a state-planned economy providing free healthcare, education, housing, and full employment.

It’s interesting to note, in light of Rand’s influence on Peart, that Mr. Deeds Goes to Town is a film by Frank Capra, who also did It’s a Wonderful Life, another film about the value of Christian charity, and one despised by the likes of Rand, who have idiotically claimed it is a “communist” film. Capra, a kind of right-wing libertarian in his own right, didn’t even like FDR’s New Deal, which was meant to keep the Depression-era American working class from agitating for a socialist revolution. As I argued in my analysis of this latter film (link above), the notion that altruism of any kind can be airily called “communist” really only displays the mean-spiritedness of the “rational egoists.”

“Madrigal” is a simple love song, with a sweet melody that Lee plays on his Minimoog, and with Peart’s drums recorded in an echo room. Even this love song can be seen as a manifestation of the theme of ideals, for when one is in love, one idealizes the love object, ignoring his or her faults, and exaggerating his or her virtues, especially as a contrasting bulwark against this harsh world we live in, as expressed in Peart’s lyric. That the song is called madrigal is again, as with much of the diction of its lyric, an example of the use of archaic imagery (suggesting associations with courtly love poetry, which idealized the Lady as love object), reinforcing that sense of idealizing a distant past against our troubled modern world.

“Cygnus X-1 Book One: The Voyage” is, in contrast to the previous songs’ settings at different points in the past, a science fiction story about going “across the Milky Way” in a spaceship to reach a black hole “in the constellation of Cygnus.” It’s in four parts, the Prologue opening with an electronically-altered narration by Terry Brown, the producer of A Farewell to Kings and all the other Rush albums from their second, Fly by Night, up to Signals.

1 is very brief, with Lee singing of how entry “through the void” of the black hole leads one “to be destroyed,” or could it be a wormhole into either another part of the universe, or a door to a parallel one? Our protagonist dares to find out.

Lee begins playing broken-up segments of the bass line that, when Lifeson and Peart join in, will comprise a riff in 3/4, 7/8, 3/4, and 4/4. Soon after, a frantic riff comes in with chords of C-sharp minor, E minor, and G-sharp minor, which we’ll hear again at the climactic end of the song. A guitar line of G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads into a riff in 11/8, 12/8, and 11/8, with chords in C minor, a passing chord of B minor to F-sharp major, E-flat minor, and a passing chord of D minor back to C minor. The Minimoog eventually comes in, largely doubling the chords.

2, narrated by the protagonist, describes the flight on his ship, the Rocinante, which is named after the horse ridden by Don Quixote, a foolish idealist who, having read so many chivalric romances, fancies himself such a hero, a knight-errant in search of adventure. He’s an awkward fool, engaging in a task far beyond his abilities. The protagonist in the spaceship is similarly foolish and idealistic, engaging in a dangerous quest (though, in “Book Two: Hemispheres,” he enters–through a wormhole, presumably–the world of the Apollonian and Dionysian battle of the mind and heart, achieving the ideal of balance between the two).

Beginning this section is an upbeat chord progression of C major, F major, D major, and G major, musically suggesting the rosy optimism of the protagonist. Things don’t stay positive for long, though.

A repeat of the G, A-flat, B, C, D, E-flat, F-sharp, and G leads to a solo by Lifeson with the wah-wah pedal. Next is a quieter section suggesting the traveling of the Rocinante deep into space, with Lifeson playing octaves of C, A-flat, and B. Backed by Peart’s drumming, Lee comes in with his bass soon after, with fragments of his bass line from that frantic, climactic progression heard in the Prologue and soon to be heard again–notes of C-sharp, E and G-sharp…hearing this is a foreshadowing of the protagonist’s doom. Fittingly, the bass line does a bitonal clash with the guitar line, reinforcing the sense of tension building up to the climax. But just before that climax, there’s a louder section in E, in 4/8, 3/8, and 4/8.

3 has the Rocinante spinning out of control as it reaches the black hole, with that frantic chord progression fully developed in the form of C-sharp minor, E minor, G-sharp major, and G major, then C-sharp minor, E minor, and C minor, all in 6/8. The protagonist screams out that his “every nerve is torn apart.” (The tragedy of his self-destruction in his spaceship is paralleled by the farce of Don Quixote charging, on his horse, the windmills.)

The song ends with soft but eerie chords of C minor, E-flat minor, and E minor added ninth, then E minor again, but without the ninth. This fades out, suggesting the fading out of the protagonist’s life.

The protagonist thus goes through the whole Hegelian dialectic of being, nothingness, and in Book Two, the sublation of being and non-being, that of becoming, the balance between the two (as well as that between the Apollonian mind and the Dionysian heart), the achievement of the Hegelian ideal.

But this ideal isn’t to be reached until the next album. Instead, as far as A Farewell to Kings is concerned, our quixotic hero just destroyed himself, as does the drinker of the milk of paradise in the other long song ending Side One of this album. The first hero destroys his mind in madness, and the second destroys his body; the first erases the possibility of his non-existence, the second erases his existence…both heroes doing so in the foolish pursuit of unattainable ideals.

Analysis of ‘Notorious’

Notorious is a 1946 spy film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and written by Ben Hecht. It stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman, with Claude Rains, Louis Calhern, and Leopoldine Konstantin.

The film was a watershed for Hitchcock artistically, having a heightened maturity. It was his first attempt to create a serious love story, with two men (played by Grant and Rains) jealously vying for the attention of a beautiful woman (Bergman) within the context of a spy thriller.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

What’s curious about this film is how it depicts clandestine operations by ex-Nazis in Brazil just after WWII, when the Nazis had just been roundly defeated. One would think that the ex-Nazi war criminals hiding out in South America would want to keep a low profile by not doing anything suspect just after their defeat, with Nazi hunters after them.

The ex-Nazis of this film are high-ranking members of IG Farben, the German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate infamously associated with such atrocities as the creation of Zyklon B, which killed over a million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust. These IG Farben executives, it is discovered, are mining uranium ore, to be used in the making of atomic bombs. (Incidentally, from the discovery of nuclear fission to the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan, the Nazis were hardly motivated to develop nuclear weapons; getting rid of Jews was their priority at the time. And only now are these ex-Nazis interested in uranium ore?)

What is odd about the villain conspirators being from IG Farben is that the conglomerate was seized by the Allies at the end of the war in 1945, its directors to be put on trial from 1947 to 1948, thirteen of the tried twenty-three directors being convicted of war crimes. If a Nazi conspiracy to make nuclear weapons were afoot, it would seem unlikely that its men would allow any association to be made with IG Farben.

What’s more, while at the end of the war there would have been plenty of animosity felt towards the Nazis by the general populace of Western countries, there were also plenty of people among the Western bourgeoisie who had expressed sympathy for the Nazis as a group dedicated to destroying communism. Accordingly, not only did many Western bourgeois hope that Hitler would invade the USSR, and encouraged such a move at the Munich conference, but also a great many ex-Nazis were given prestigious jobs in the American government, in NASA, in NATO, and in the West German government, as part of the Cold War offensive against the Soviet states. Recall also that a number of Hitler’s business backers were American companies and other Allied multinationals.

Now, Operation Paperclip wasn’t made public through the media until December of 1946, well after the release of Notorious. Truman hadn’t officially approved of Operation Paperclip until September of 1946, again after Notorious was finished. It was therefore extremely unlikely that Hitchcock and Hecht would have known anything about the operation.

Still, with the Nazis decisively defeated, and not yet having the knowledge of the mining of uranium ore, it seems unlikely that the American government as portrayed in the film would be so concerned with the activities of a few ex-Nazis hiding out in South America. The Nazis were no longer an effective challenger to Western imperialist interests; on the contrary, it was now the Soviets who were such a challenge. And as I said above, the Western ruling class still had a soft spot in their hearts for commie-hating Nazis.

So what’s the real point about having ex-Nazis as the villains in Notorious?

Well, the movie-going public, as opposed to the capitalist class, would have had an unequivocal dislike of Nazis just after WWII, so the IG Farben men would have made fitting villains. Hecht, as a Jew, would naturally have hated Nazis, too. Finally, the mainstream liberals in Hollywood at the time, in their defence of bourgeois democracy, would have seen Nazis as appropriate villains whose presence in Notorious would have made the film appealing to the public.

On a deeper level, though, Notorious reflects the ambivalence that the liberal bourgeoisie of the time would have had towards such villains. This ambivalence is seen in how surprisingly sympathetic Alex Sebastian (Rains) is, as an ex-Nazi in love with (and his heart broken by) German-American Alicia Huberman (Bergman), the beautiful daughter of a German traitor in the US who has been convicted of aiding the Nazis.

Indeed, the love triangle between these two and the American government agent, TR Devlin (Grant) can be seen to be an allegory of this Western capitalist ambivalence to Naziism. Alicia, a woman exploited by the American government to seduce Sebastian–or, put more bluntly, to prostitute herself to him–in order to spy on him and discover what wickedness the IG Farben men are up to, personifies the land and resources that the US (as personified by Devlin) and Nazi Germany (as personified by Sebastian) are competing for, to possess and to dominate.

The men’s mutual jealousy over her is thus an allegory of 1) the Western capitalist use of fascism to counter communism, and 2) the inter-imperialist conflict of WWII when Hitler showed that he wanted much more than just to invade and colonize the Soviet Union; he also wanted to muscle in on the territory of Britain and other Western imperialists.

Alicia, as that American daughter of the German traitor, also fits in with my allegory in how she’s, on the one hand, looked down on, is notorious, as an alcoholic and a tramp who, at the beginning of the film, is suspected of being sympathetic to her father’s politics; yet on the other hand, is also such a desirable beauty. Western liberals despise fascist brutishness, yet they nonetheless find it politically expedient in furthering capitalist and imperialist interests.

Now, the object of desire here is a beautiful woman who drinks, and drinking–of alcohol especially–is a major thematic motif in Notorious (indeed, Hitchcock’s cameo in the film shows him drinking a glass at a party). This drinking is recurrently associated with danger and destruction: we see this first in her drunk-driving scene with Devlin, then later in the discovery that the uranium ore is being hidden in wine bottles in the cellar of Sebastian’s house.

This association of alcohol, wine in particular, with danger and destruction reminds us of Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, and madness (consider the violence and wildness of his Maenads). The rivalry between Devlin and Sebastian over the charms of Alicia is the essence of irrational jealousy, leading to her near-death by poisoning and Sebastian’s downfall at the end of the movie, when he can no longer hide the fact that he has fallen for an American spy. This understanding deepens my allegory in that the madly jealous inter-imperialist rivalry during WWII between the capitalist West and Nazi Germany resulted in so much death and destruction.

While I’m sure that neither Hitchcock nor Hecht consciously intended to present the allegory I’m describing here, I consider the political circumstances that led up to WWII and those depicted in Notorious to be such that my allegory is inevitable, if only through the unconscious emergence of a few Freudian slips. Accordingly, I don’t find it to be too far out of place to see Devlin as a pun on devil.

Devlin takes Alicia by plane from her home in Florida to Brazil; through the airplane window, she can see the statue of Christ the Redeemer. It seems as though, through her working for the American government, she is about to redeem herself for her father’s treason. During the flight, and by an interesting juxtaposition, she also learns of her father’s death in prison by swallowing a poison capsule. She sees the statue immediately after hearing the news; it’s as if her father’s death is a Christ-like sacrifice freeing her of her family’s Nazi past.

They fly into Rio, and it isn’t long before Devlin and Alicia fall in love. Their love affair being in Brazil of all places, where she is to seduce Sebastian, adds more depth to my political allegory of this film when one considers how the Monroe Doctrine led to an increasingly possessive attitude towards Central America (i.e., the Banana Wars) and South America, that is, in imperialist terms. Since the beginning of the Cold War especially, any attempt at a leftist liberation from US imperialism would lead to a CIA coup d’état, replacing the erstwhile leftist government with an authoritarian, right-wing one, reminding us in a way of the ex-Nazis hiding out in South America.

The US government, thus, has been like a jealous, possessive lover of Latin America, just as Devlin has been of Alicia. A comparable kind of possessiveness can be seen in the US occupation of the southeastern and central part of West Germany just after WWII. German-American Alicia is eyed this way by Devlin, and Sebastian’s later jealous eyeing of her in Brazil allegorically suggests the ex-Nazi presence in South America. The allegorical interpretation of the Devlin/Huberman/Sebastian love triangle is complete when one considers the above-mentioned American use of ex-Nazis in their government from the beginning of the Cold War.

That closeness of America and Germany, apart from being personified in Alicia herself, is also seen in her famous extended kissing scene with Devlin, in which Hitchcock deftly evaded the censors of the prudish Production Code by briefly breaking up kisses that could last as long as the three-second limit. Indeed, one could think of the breaking up of the kisses as representative of the ambivalent attitude of the US government towards a Germany with a fascist past: love her, Devlin, but not too much.

Anyway, his love for her will soon turn into animosity when he learns from his superiors, including Captain Paul Prescott (Calhern) of the US Secret Service, that her job is to seduce Sebastian so she can find out what he and the other IG Farben men are up to. As I said above, Devlin’s and Sebastian’s mutual jealousy over the German-American beauty represents the ambivalent attitude the US government has always had towards fascism.

Like all good little liberals, the American ruling class is supposed to hate Nazis…but this doesn’t mean the Nazis don’t have their uses, as do other kinds of fascists, that is, in how they can serve imperialist interests by, for example, thwarting the advancement of socialism. Even now, the American liberal establishment, in order to avoid feeling any cognitive dissonance, pretends that the Russian/Ukraine war is a fight for liberation against the ‘aggressor’ Putin, while also denying, or at least minimizing, the neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian government and military, who are perfectly content to ban opposition parties and persecute ethnic Russians living in the area.

So, to get back to the story, Devlin is more than uncomfortable to know that the woman he’s attracted to is being used to attract another man. That the Americans can’t just go in and arrest the IG Farben men–because they’d then just find others to replace Sebastian et al, and so their sinister work would continue–is reasoning whose validity I’m not convinced of. Nazi war criminals are war criminals…arrest them! When the replacements come, arrest them, too. Nazis as of 1946 ceased to be a threat to US bourgeois imperialist interests (and as we now know, Nazis were actually helping the American government against its then-real threat, the Soviets), so just arrest the IG Farben men.

Devlin’s jealousy will be swelling when he learns that Sebastian wants to marry Alicia, who will agree to it…and he isn’t the only one feeling this jealousy over the marriage that’s coming; so is Sebastian’s mother, Madame Anna Sebastian (Konstantin). Though Rains retained his British accent while playing German Sebastian, Grant spoke with his Trans-Atlantic accent (bringing up associations between American, British, and Nazi imperialism in the context of Notorious), and Bergman largely managed to hide her Swedish accent in her portrayal of a German-American, the Austrian actress Konstantin spoke with her German accent undisguised, which really brings out the stereotypical Nazi associations in her role, as not only one of the main villains of the movie, but also as Sebastian’s ruthless and domineering mother.

There is a parallel to be observed in his relationship with both his new wife and with his mother–one of servile love. Just as Sebastian is uxorious towards Alicia, so is he Oedipal in his attitude towards Madame Anna, something she can use to her advantage in controlling him. One is reminded of the love Hitler had for his mother, Klara, after whose death he grieved for the rest of his life.

Hitchcock’s mother died four years before Notorious was made and released; he addressed his own mother issues for the first time in this film, and the notion of a domineering mother like Madame Anna, a reservoir of her son’s guilt, anger, resentment, and Oedipal yearning, was something Hitchcock would explore further in films like Psycho and The Birds. Indeed, he would often incorporate psychoanalysis in such films as these and in Spellbound, a film he did the year before Notorious.

The unhealthiness of an unresolved Oedipus complex that is exploited by a cunning mother just adds a deeper level of villainy to this group of ex-Nazis, for properly understood, the Oedipal longing for a parent’s love and undivided attention–combined with the frustration of never fully having that attention–is a narcissistic trauma. Sebastian’s unhealthy relationship with his mother, in which he is weakened and made vain and foolish, ends up being transferred onto Alicia, making him uxorious in his feelings for her. She, as an American spy, can exploit his weakness in getting to the key to the wine cellar to find the hidden uranium ore.

She’s being exploited, too, recall, by the American government, and to complete the job, she must agree to marry Sebastian and allow him into her bed–a conquest of his comparable to the American takeover of aboriginal land (I’m reminded of lines 25-32 from Donne‘s Elegy XIX, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’), which inspired Hitler to want to conquer Slavic land. Alicia must go along with this fake romance, to keep up appearances so Sebastian will never suspect she’s an American spy. Devlin must also keep up appearances and maintain a professional attitude, pretending he’s had no romance of his own with her.

Indeed, keeping up appearances is a major theme running throughout Notorious. Alicia’s mission as a spy includes keeping up appearances that she’s as much in love with Sebastian as he is with her. She imagines Devlin’s love for her is pretend, while he keeps up appearances of a stoic lack of interest in her, always hiding his jealousy behind a feigned contempt for her, all for the sake of keeping the mission going. The IG Farben men keep up appearances of wine bottles innocently containing wine when some of those in the cellar actually contain uranium ore.

Ironically, when Sebastian intrudes on Devlin’s and Alicia’s moment alone in the cellar just after discovering the “sand” in one of the wine bottles, Devlin has her pretend to kiss him in order to keep up appearances of having an affair to hide their real offence against Sebastian, the discovery of what’s hidden in that bottle. This ‘appearance’ of being in love, of course, hides the fact that they really are in love…though they won’t admit this until the end of the film.

The penultimate keeping up of appearances is when Sebastian and his mother pretend to be concerned for Alicia’s declining health–to cover up for his foolish falling in love with an American spy–when it’s their piecemeal poisoning of her coffee, another drink Notorious associates with danger and destruction, that is causing her declining health. And the final keeping up of appearances, which ultimately fails, is at the end, when Sebastian and his mother pretend that Devlin is just taking Alicia to the hospital instead of actually rescuing her from her two poisoners.

Sebastian pretends not to fear death as Devin is taking Alicia down the stairs towards the front door, but when she’s put in the car and Devlin is about to drive away, Sebastian is desperately anxious to have them take him in the car, too. More keeping up of appearances.

Sebastian has everything to fear, for the other IG Farben men, knowing there’s no telephone in Alicia’s bedroom from which Devlin could have called the hospital, proves that the hospital story is a lie…so Sebastian must meet the same fate as that of Emil Hupka (played by Eberhard Krumschmidt) for having reacted with shock, in front of Alicia, at the wine bottles, which tipped her off to their significance.

The paranoid intensity of security maintained by the IG Farben men is what makes me doubt the plausibility of there being any substantial American cause for suspicion of sinister plots by these ex-Nazis against American imperialist interests. They’re hiding their conspiracy so tightly that it seems virtually impossible for the Americans to have discovered anything; Alicia’s being tipped off by Emil’s display of agitation seems little more than a fluke.

Such a tight keeping up of appearances by the IG Farben men leads me to discuss the ultimate pretense of this film, whether consciously intended by Hitchcock and Hecht or not: that the US government, just after having defeated the Nazis, would still regard fascism as an intolerable evil in any form. The American moviegoing public would surely have continued to vilify Nazis, so it would have been expedient for Hollywood producers to keep up the appearance of despising fascism, too…for the sake of ticket sales, at the very least.

But bourgeois liberal Hollywood interests aren’t all that far removed from those of capitalist imperialism and colonialism. Hecht as a Jew would have justifiably hated Nazis in all sincerity, but he was also an avid supporter of the establishment of the settler colonial state of Israel, whose persecution of the Palestinians has been every bit as evil as the Nazi persecution of the Jews was. Notorious‘s keeping up of appearances of regarding Nazis as an enemy of America covers up how useful the West has always found fascism, which they’ve since falsely equated with communism…another deft move of propaganda on the part of the ruling class.

Western capitalism’s appeasement and, therefore, encouragement, of the rise of fascism in the 1930s, in its attempt to thwart socialism, was ultimately the creation of a monster they’d quickly regret. The Western bourgeoisie were Dr. Victor Frankenstein; fascism was the monster. WWII was the horror story. Notorious was, in my opinion at least, an example of a bourgeois attempt to save face over its creation of that monster.