Tag: emotional abuse

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part II

Here’s a link to Part I, if you haven’t seen it yet.

VI: Derry: the First Interlude

As Mike has written in his notes about Derry, “Can an entire city be haunted?” (page 189, King‘s emphasis) The entire city of Derry can be seen to symbolize the mind, a kind of collective mind, peopled with a host of characters who could thus represent everything from Melanie Klein‘s internal objects, both good and bad, to Carl Jung‘s archetypes.

The surface world of the town, from the ground up, would represent consciousness, where all is sunny and sweet. The underground, the sewers, and the cellars of each house, as I mentioned in Part I, would represent the unconscious mind. It, that is, Pennywise, would thus personify the Collective Shadow, normally repressed and dormant for about 27 years at a time, then let loose for about a year. One tries one’s best to repress, hide, and forget about trauma, but it eventually will out all the same.

The whole adventure that the Losers go through, once as kids in the late 1950s, and again as adults in the mid-1980s, can be seen as allegorical of what Jungians call Shadow work. In order to heal from trauma in a lasting way, one must face one’s traumas, and this is what we see the Losers doing (in an allegorical sense), first only partially achieving it as kids, then thoroughly achieving it as adults in their final confrontation with Pennywise.

Though confronting one’s Shadow, where all the dark traumas of the unconscious reside, is necessary for the sake of healing, it’s also dangerous. Jung himself, in his explorations of his own unconscious through Active Imagination, Shadow work, and other methods of integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of his mind, brought himself dangerously close to a total psychotic breakdown.

In their final confrontation with It, Eddie dies; the surviving Losers aren’t even able to carry his body out from the underground. What’s more, this confrontation happens during a huge storm, the worst in Maine’s history, with rains reminding us of the Great Flood and that rainstorm at the beginning of the novel, an apocalyptic storm that causes the downtown area of Derry to collapse. This collapsing of downtown Derry, which is a merging together of the upper and lower worlds, is symbolic of that necessary but dangerous integration of the conscious and unconscious through Shadow work.

VII: Ben Hanscom Takes a Fall

As Ben sits on his airplane flight to Derry, “as drunk as a lord,” according to the stewardess observing him (page 211), he finds the old memories finally starting to come back to him. In his state of drunkenness, as well as his hovering between consciousness and unconsciousness, he finds “the wall between past and present disappear[ing]” (page 215). He is entering a world of non-differentiation, the traumatic Real, as Lacan would have called it.

It is fitting that Ben is drunk and falling asleep as he is starting to get these old memories back. As Nietzsche noted in The Birth of Tragedy, Dionysus, the god of wine, chaos, irrationality, emotion, and disorder (as opposed to Apollo as god of logic, clarity, the sun, and the principle of individuation), is also a god of unity, of non-differentiation. So drunk Ben, between wakefulness and sleep, is also experiencing a blur between the past and the present, the trauma of non-differentiation.

This is also rather like the non-differentiation of the Great Flood as paralleled in the rainstorms at the beginning and climax of the novel, when the waters above meet the waters below, recreating the primordial Chaos, tohu wa-bohu, in chapter one of Genesis.

Ben’s memories of being a kid at school, when he was fat and therefore an easy target of bullies like Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss, were also a disordered mix of good and bad, because it was also then that he had his crush on Beverly (pages 216-217). He demonstrated his poetic talent by writing his verse celebrating her beautiful, fiery red hair…”winter fire,/January embers” (page 246).

His trip down memory lane is compared to the adventures of the time-traveller in HG Wells‘s classic story; in particular, we’re reminded of “the land of the Morlocks, where machines pound on and on in the tunnels of the night” (page 215). This hellish, subterranean world is easily associated with the underground of Derry: its sewers, cellars, and representation of the unconscious and the Shadow, personified by that ultimate Morlock, Pennywise.

Henry is mad at Ben for not letting him copy his test answers in class. Henry likes to call overweight Ben “Tits” (page 252). We soon learn that Henry is much worse than your average bully: he’s a violent psychopath, a fact proven when he takes out a knife, has Belch and Victor hold Ben, then digs the blade into Ben’s gut.

That cutting into Ben’s flesh, apart from the obvious pain and terror it causes the boy, is a violation of the boundaries between self and other, that traumatic non-differentiation of the Real, of Dionysus.

It’s significant that Ben escapes Henry and his gang by falling through the fence separating the street they’re all on and the Barrens, which is a stretch of scrub land next to Derry, a swampy area where the sewers are. The Barrens, therefore, can also be symbolically linked with the unconscious…perhaps with the preconscious, since, though lower, it’s still outside. Ben’s breaking through the fence is also representative of a non-differentiation between consciousness and unconsciousness.

VIII: Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (1)

Just as Ben has been flying in a plane on the way back to Derry, going from utter oblivion to flashbacks of childhood memories, so has Bill. And just as Mike’s writing about Derry has been a form of therapy for him, so has Bill’s writing of horror novels been a form of writing therapy for him.

All the stories he’s written, all the novels–they came from Derry, Bill muses (page 283). They came from that summer, when George died. They came from his trauma. His interviewers would ask him where he got all of his ideas from, and he’s answered by speaking of the inspiration coming from his unconscious…yet he’s doubted, more and more as the years go by, if there ever was such a thing as an unconscious (page 284). This unbelief in the unconscious comes from his total forgetting of Derry.

Eventually, though, a memory starts coming back, one of “beating the devil.” (page 285) The unconscious, be it a Freudian or Jungian version of it, doesn’t come back to Bill as a subterranean world of Morlocks, as it has for Ben; it’s just Derry. Bill’s focus on the conscious world of Derry is his resistance against confronting the unconscious.

Bill remembers his old bicycle from his childhood, named Silver, after the Lone Ranger’s horse. Bill is indeed a hero on that bike, beating the devil on it as he rides dangerously fast on it to save a life, be it Eddie’s, when he has to race off on it to get the asthmatic’s medicine, or be it Audra‘s at the end of the novel, when he races on the bike with her, risking a crash for both of them, to get her to snap out of her catatonia.

Beating the devil is just like beating Pennywise. Fittingly, as Bill rides the bike, he imitates the Lone Ranger, calling out, “Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYY!” (page 288) His risk of death, on both occasions on that bike, brings him to the brink of hell, then past it, coming around to salvation in heaven, as it were, for Eddie’s and Audra’s sakes. Bill is thus like a Christ figure, harrowing hell, then causing a resurrection of sorts (Audra’s), and ascending to a metaphorical heaven. In this way, he’s beaten the devil.

Bill wants to help Eddie because he failed to help his little brother. First, he helps Eddie with a nosebleed he gets after an altercation with Henry’s gang; Bill helps Eddie the way Bill’s mom used to help Georgie when he had nosebleeds (page 292). And when Eddie’s aspirator is empty, Bill rides off to the drugstore for his medicines…which, as it turns out, is mere tap-water (page 302).

When Bill goes off to get the ‘medicine,’ Ben stays with Eddie in the Barrens, where he’s met the two just after escaping Henry’s gang and getting the knife cut in his gut. After Bill returns with the ‘medicine’ for Eddie and rides off, Eddie tells Ben about the murder of Georgie, that it happened “right after the big flood” (page 311).

Eddie, as a double of Georgie, dies when the second “big flood” happens, and not too long after that, adult Bill rides dangerously on his bike for Audra’s sake, beating the devil once again.

Bill may have saved Eddie in the Barrens, but the boy cannot get over having failed to protect his little brother, and the night of that very day in the Barrens, when Bill is back home, he has a terrible fright reminding him of his guilt over George.

He remembers when Georgie was alive, and the two boys were arguing in front of the TV over who got to eat the popcorn (page 313). This kind of sibling jealousy and rivalry would have been part of the basis for Bill’s unconscious wish to get rid of his little brother, an unconscious wish that, in turn, has become Bill’s guilt now that George is really dead.

Bill goes into George’s bedroom and takes out an old photo album with pictures of the little boy in it. A shocking thing happens, something that has now happened a second time, the first time being the previous December, after which Georgie was killed.

Bill has been looking at a picture of George “fixedly for some time” (page 319). He’s about to close the photo album when he sees Georgie roll his eyes in the picture, then turn them up to look in Bill’s eyes. Then, with “a horrid leer,” Georgie winks his right eye at Bill (page 320). Apart from the obvious supernatural aspect, Bill’s fear stems from his guilt regarding the original wish-fulfillment of a dead, still, smiling Georgie, changing into a living, moving, vengeful little brother.

IX: One of the Missing: A Tale from the Summer of ’58

We learn of a ten-year-old boy named Edward Corcoran, who went missing back in the summer of 1958. He and his four-year-old brother, Dorsey, were abused by their stepfather, Richard P. Macklin, who actually beat Dorsey to death with a hammer, though he lied about it, claiming the little boy died of a fall from the top of a ladder. (Chapter 6)

Edward’s teacher reported seeing bruises all over his body, and she was so concerned for him that when she heard that he’d gone missing, she prayed every night that he’d run away from home, sick and tired of his stepfather’s abuse, rather than killed from another of Macklin’s beatings.

Though Macklin was suspected in the disappearance of Edward, we learn that It really killed the boy, It in the form of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, though originally appearing in the form of Dorsey (pages 336-341). Still, it could be argued that Macklin indirectly killed Edward, since his repeated physical abuse of the boy drove him to run away from home, thus exposing him to the danger of It. Besides, It–as the personification of trauma throughout the novel–is the killer of the boy only insofar as trauma killed him, the trauma inflicted on him by his raging stepfather.

Family abuse, of course, isn’t limited to the Corcoran family. As we know, Beverly suffered it from her own father, who is incorrectly referred to as her stepfather on page 330–a fortuitous error in that it helps to link the Corcoran boys to her through the theme of family abuse.

Edward Corcoran’s death is further linked thematically with the Losers’ experiences on pages 330 and 331 by a kind of synchronicity. On June 19th–though Macklin had nothing at all to do with the boy’s death (in the literal, physical sense, of course)–he died when Ben was watching TV with his mom, Eddie Kaspbarak’s mom was neurotically worrying about her boy possibly catching “phantom fever,” Bev’s “stepfather” [sic] kicked her in the derrière and told her to dry the dishes, Mike “got yelled at by some high-school boys…not far from the farm owned by Henry Bowers’s crazy father,” Richie was looking at pictures of half-naked girls in a magazine, and Bill was throwing the photo album across the room because Georgie’s photo winked at him.

All of the Losers “looked up at the exact moment Eddie Corcoran died…as if hearing some distant cry” (page 331). It, the creature, was behind this synchronicity, a synchronicity of shared trauma and abuse.

Mike couldn’t sleep on the night of the beginning of summer vacation, so soon after Corcoran’s death. He went out, rode his bike for a while, then parked it and walked to the Canal (pages 341-342). On the way, he found a pocket knife with the initials EC on the side. He also saw grooves in the grass leading to the Canal. “And there was blood.” (page 343)

The horror of these sights, where Corcoran died, brought back memories in Mike’s mind of a giant bird attacking him. We see how all of these traumas are thus interlinked.

It would be interesting to look at, compare, and contrast three mythical creatures in It. We’ve already looked a bit at the Turtle. There’s also the actual form if It as a giant spider. And now, we have the giant bird Mike confronted.

The first two giant animals, as representations of good and evil, have in common the fact that they crawl. This comparison suggests that It, the Satan of this cosmology to the Turtle’s God, is trying to do an evil emulation of good, is being parasitical to good. Satan is sometimes described as being an imitator of good, of wanting to be like Him.

“The prince of darkness is a gentleman,” Edgar says in King Lear. ” ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” Antonio says in The Merchant of Venice. And in Paradise Lost, Book IV, Satan says, “Evil, be thou my good.” Pennywise similarly starts off with friendly charm before killing Georgie; his crawling on spiders’ legs can thus be seen as an imitation of the Turtle’s crawling on its legs.

Now, the giant bird that Mike has to fend off is, of course, evil, and contrary to the first two giants that crawl, this one is way up in the sky. On the other hand, when Stan has to fight off It as a child, he uses nothing other than a book of birds to help him. Crawling creatures can be good or evil; flying creatures can also be good or evil. Dualities of this sort pervade It.

X: The Dam in the Barrens

As Eddie Kaspbrak is driving a Cadillac in Boston, on his way to Derry, he’s thinking about such things as the subways, bad places to go, like tunnels (page 373). Such subterranean places would remind him of the Derry sewers, the Barrens, and the dirty cellar of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, in one of the windows of which he, as a child, saw a leper.

Such underground places–like the realm of Ben’s Morlocks–are crawling with germs, the sources of all of Eddie’s fears. Indeed his very sickness is his fear, the poison of his childhood memories (page 373).

Eddie remembers the day, when they were all kids, that Ben, whom they’d all recently met, decided to build a dam in the Barrens. On this same day, Bill talks about his experience seeing Georgie wink at him in that photo. It’s a brave confession on Bill’s part, him risking ridicule and disbelief; but since Eddie, Ben, and Stan have had–and Richie in the not-too-distant-future will have–comparable supernatural frights, they all hear Bill with sympathetic ears.

Interestingly, when Ben decides to build the dam, using his already remarkable talents as an architect, he says, “We could flood out the whole Barrens if we wanted to.” (page 376) The dam’s stoppage of the river water doesn’t, of course, flood out the whole Barrens, but this choice of words is still significant in how it can be linked with the rainy day when Georgie died, as well as with the flooding and destruction of downtown Derry during the climax of the novel.

These associations with the Great Flood suggest the washing away of all evil and the ultimate defeat of Pennywise. Building the dam, stopping and thus controlling the waters of the Barrens, which are associated with the turbulent world of the unconscious and the Shadow, thus represents a conquering and controlling of the boys’ fear.

This day is also a great bonding moment for these Losers. The building of the dam is actually a rebuilding of a dam destroyed by Henry and his gang. Rebuilding it, and bonding with each other, is doubly therapeutic for the boys, as is the beginning of a discussion about It.

Since It personifies trauma, talking about It is a kind of talk therapy for healing trauma. When Bill can talk about his photo album and George’s wink, Eddie can find it easier to talk about the leper in the cellar of the house on Neibolt Street, Ben can talk about his close encounter with It, and Stan can talk about his scary experience.

Eddie uses one word to describe the moment when he knows it’s finally safe to talk about his traumatic experience: “Recognition.” (page 395) The boys are sharing a mutual validation of their trauma, and building the dam on the same day, after their bullies destroyed the first one, is well juxtaposed with this talk therapy, for they are all beginning to rebuild their lives as well as the dam–as new friends.

I mentioned earlier how duality pervades It, in the form of mixtures of good and bad: good and bad birds, good and bad crawlers. There is also good and bad in, on the one hand, experiencing trauma, and on the other, talking about trauma, releasing the pain, and bonding with friends as a result of the discussion of trauma.

Similarly, there’s the horror of Eddie’s seeing a leper crawling out from under the porch of the house at 29 Neibolt Street, and hearing him offer the boy “a blowjob for a quarter” (page 400). A blowjob in and of itself is a pleasant thing, but not given to a child by a leper! My point is that we see dualities of good and bad mashed together on many occasions in It.

Remember also that the Shadow is not always evil; it’s just the ego-dystonic aspects of our minds, the things we want to reject. These things are often evil, but sometimes they’re hidden talents we’re afraid to acknowledge in ourselves because acknowledging them might force us to rise up to challenges we’re afraid of facing. Eddie has to learn to accept the reality of germs and sickness, that using his immune system will strengthen him against sickness. Facing and defeating It will turn the Losers Club into the Winners Club…even if a few of them die trying.

Now that Bill has told his photo album story about George, Eddie can tell them all about the leper, Ben can tell them about seeing the clown in the form of the mummy, and Stan is about to tell them about his experience of It, but all of them are interrupted by Mr. Nell (page 412), a police officer who reprimands them for building the dam and making a mess of the river in the Barrens. The water that’s being dammed up is waste from the toilets and dirty, used sink water; it’s all a great congregation of germs that would make Eddie retch if he knew.

Part III is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part I

I: Introduction

It is a 1986 horror novel by Stephen King. The story is told in a kind of non-linear narrative, alternating between two time periods separated by a 27-year interim: the late 1950s, when the protagonists are kids, and the mid-1980s, when they are adults with established careers, many of them married.

King conceived of the story back in 1978, and he started work on it in 1981, finishing it in 1985. The titular antagonist was originally meant to be a troll as in “Three Billy Goats Gruff,” but inhabiting the city’s sewer system instead of living under a bridge.

It won the British Fantasy Award in 1987, and it was nominated for the Locus and World Fantasy Awards the same year. Two major adaptations of the novel have been made: a two-part TV miniseries in 1990 starred Tim Curry, Richard Thomas, John Ritter, Tim Reid, and Annette O’Toole; and two films–It and It Chapter Two–came out in 2017 and 2019 respectively, starring Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, and Bill Skarsgård, among many others.

As in many of King’s novels, novellas, and short stories, It is set in Maine (him being a native of Durham), in particular, in the fictional town of Derry, a place that seems pleasant and normal on the surface, but underneath (literally!), there are hidden evils. In the sewer system, and even in the cellar of the Denbrough house, there is the symbolism of hell, the unconscious, and Jung‘s Collective Shadow.

II: General Thoughts

It is a novel of such massive, epic scope that I cannot be expected to do justice to all of its oh, so many aspects, but I’ll deal with as much of it as I can, and I’m dividing it up into parts so that its admittedly tedious length can be bearable. The page numbers I’m using to quote or reference scenes are based on this edition.

I’ll start by mentioning the more obvious themes of the novel, including childhood trauma brought on by bullying, family abuse, and ethnic and racial prejudice. With this trauma comes repressed memory causing a total forgetting of all that happened in Derry, both when the protagonists (“the Losers Club“) were kids and immediately after having killed It once and for all. Connected to this forgetting is, in turn, the collective looking-the-other-way that the residents of Derry always do whenever something evil happens.

On another level, one hardly dealt with beyond brief nods to it in the two movies, and not dealt with at all in the TV miniseries, is the dualistic cosmology of It. While It, in Its typical form of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, is the principle of darkness, evil, and chaos, the principle of light, good, and order is represented in the form of a giant turtle named Maturin, which was little doubt influenced by various myths about the world being supported on the back of a giant turtle.

So Maturin, having vomited out and thus created the universe, is like God to Pennywise’s Satan. Maturin would be maturing, putting away the childish things of clownish Pennywise, just as the Losers’ quest to defeat Pennywise and thus face their fears ridding themselves of their traumas, is their own putting away of childish things.

III: After the Flood (1957)

To keep the Biblical allusions coming, the story begins with a rainstorm in Derry, and in the neighbourhood where Bill and George Denbrough live, little Georgie wants to play with a paper boat–made by his big brother Bill–his little ark in the Great Flood. “By that time, many people in Derry had begun to make nervous jokes about arks.” (page 4)

To finish making the paper boat for George, Bill-being too sick in bed with a fever to get it himself–wants George to go down to the cellar and get the paraffin. The cellar–which as I said above, is as symbolic of hell, the unconscious, and the Collective Shadow as is the sewage system–is terrifying to the little boy.

The smell of the cellar is awful, made worse by the flood (page 9)–recall the Great Flood allusion made above, and connect this all with the apocalyptic deluge ending of the novel. Down there, Georgie sees an old can of Turtle Wax; he stares at it in a daze for almost half a minute (pages 9 and 10). Naturally: in such a devilish dungeon, the frightened little boy would want to bond with Pennywise’s angelic opposite.

Though annoyed and impatient with his little brother’s fear of the cellar, Bill nonetheless loves him, and shows that love by making the paper boat as well as he can for little Georgie’s enjoyment. The little boy goes out in the rain in his raincoat with the boat, innocently unaware of how the Great Flood allusions are foreshadowing of his imminent, violent death.

When the paper boat slips into the storm drain, he’s so preoccupied with getting it back that he doesn’t seem anywhere near as scared of the dark underground as he was of the cellar. And instead of seeing the God-like turtle, he meets Satanic Pennywise, who like the Big Bad Wolf to Little Red Riding Hood, puts on the charm for Little Yellow Rain-Slicker. (Note in this connection that, in Charles Perrault‘s version of the children’s tale, she is eaten up by the Big Bad Wolf [symbolic of a child molester], and that’s the end of her–she simply dies, just like Georgie.)

In this iconic scene, which is probably the first that comes to mind when anyone thinks of It, just before Pennywise bites off Georgie’s arm and leaves him to bleed to death, he says, “Everything down here floats,” after saying, “when you’re down here with me, you’ll float, too” (page 18). Everything floats like a balloon filled with air; every dead soul floats down in Hades, the air of its spirit wandering aimlessly and hopelessly.

The violent tearing-off of Georgie’s arm is a symbolic castration of the sort, given his age (six), that represents, in Lacanian terms, the traumatic shift from the comfort of the dyadic, Oedipal, mother-to-son relationship to one with the larger society, as personified by the intervention of a third party, the father. Properly understood, the Oedipus complex in its expanded sense is a universal, narcissistic trauma, in which the child must learn to give up the dyadic, one-on-one relationship with one parent (traditionally, the mother), a relationship in which the child wants to hog the one parent all to him- or herself, and the child must accept sharing this parent, as well as all other people, with the world.

This giving-up of the one parent who’s done everything for you to share him or her with others, who has been conceived as an extension of oneself, and going from other to Other, to use Lacanian terms, is too difficult for some to do, as Georgie’s death can be seen to symbolize (i.e., he leaves his house, goes out into society, and he gets killed). This stage in life is a shift from the dyadic, narcissistic Imaginary (represented by seeing oneself in a mirror, or looking in the loving eyes of one’s smiling mother, whose face is a metaphorical mirror) to the social, cultural, and linguistic norms of the Symbolic, the entering of people other than one’s Oedipally-desired parent into one’s life, forcing one to interact with many people.

This is a traumatic change in a child’s life. The difficulty of accepting the social world of the Symbolic, wit its shared language and customs, can result in a clumsy adjustment to it, as symbolized by Bill’s stammer. His trauma over his little brother’s death stems from guilt over having failed to protect Georgie, which in turn can be seen to have stemmed from an unconscious wish to remove Georgie, so Bill can have his mom and dad to himself.

This trauma of entering society, sharing those you love with others, and dealing with nasty people is dealt with and developed in many different forms throughout the novel. Bill is bullied for his stutter; Beverly Marsh is bullied for being a girl who hangs out with a bunch of boys (i.e., she’s slut-shamed); Stanley Uris, a Jew, has to deal with antisemitic prejudice; Mike Hanlon has to put up with, among other things, being called a “nigger”; Ben Hanscom as a kid is bullied for being fat; Eddie Kaspbrak is picked on for being weak, an asthmatic hypochondriac, and having an overprotective mother; and Richie Tozier is bullied for his loudmouthed antics and his often inappropriately-timed attempts at humour (being a “four-eyes” doesn’t help him, either).

IV: After the Festival (1984)

Another example of the nastiness of entering society, as opposed to staying only with the one you love, is when, in 1984, Adrian Mellon and his partner, Don Hagarty, are harassed by a group of homophobic punks, the situation escalating to Adrian’s murder, him being thrown off a bridge. While the group of punks clearly parallels Henry Bowers’s gang of bullies who terrorize the Losers in the late 1950s, with Adrian’s death is also the presence of Pennywise (pages 23-24).

The point is that, on the literal level of It, Pennywise is the killer, but on the symbolic level, he personifies trauma and the frequent inability to overcome that trauma. It’s especially difficult for little kids to do so, and that’s why Pennywise typically kills children. When King created It as appearing usually in the form of a clown, it was because he concluded that children fear clowns “more than anything else in the world.” It feeds on people’s fears.

One way we could think of calling the monster “It” is as a pun on id, that part of us that desires, wants, and craves, typically to the point that is socially unacceptable or wrong. It craves the kids as food, satisfying Its hunger on them.

Now, of course, to say that It is merely a personification of the id is a grotesque, even absurd oversimplification, since there’s obviously so much more to It than animalistic desire. Still, seeing “It” as a pun on id is helpful in that it orients us in the right direction as to understand what the monster in the sewers really symbolizes. The id is completely repressed and in the unconscious…not partially–fully. Those sewers are the unconscious. They represent repressed memory; this is why the Losers forget everything that happened in Derry when they were kids…all except Mike, who never left the town, and has worked there as a librarian right up to the 1980s part of the story.

So when It has finished Its 27-odd-year hibernation, It resumes Its preying on kids in the town, the way repressed traumas keep coming back to the surface in some form or another. No matter how hard we try to hold the traumas back, they keep resurfacing, coming back up from the dark, smelly sewers of our minds.

V: Six Phone Calls (1985)

And so, remembering the promise that all of the members of the Losers Club made when they were kids after defeating It in the late 1950s–that if It came back to terrorize Derry again–that they would all come back to Derry, too, and kill It once and for all, Mike starts calling up all of his old friends to tell them about the problem.

Even as adults, some people cannot handle facing their old trauma head on, so when Stan Uris receives his phone call from Mike, instead of packing his things and heading back to Derry to keep his promise, he goes into his bathroom ostensibly to take a bath, but gets razorblades, and “slits his inner forearms open from wrist to the crook of the elbow” (page 76). With his blood, he uses his finger to write IT “on the blue tiles above the tub” (page 76).

Before Stan even receives the call from Mike, there is a long section describing how his life has been since the late 1950s, and sandwiched in between many of these events is a brief reference to those scary days, a kind of God-is-dead moment of despair, foreshadowing Stan’s suicide “The turtle couldn’t help us.” (page 62, King’s emphasis)

The Losers each have different ways of hanging onto their traumas. We’ve seen how Stan has hung onto his so much that he’d rather kill himself than face them again. Mike has hung onto his by being the only Loser to stay in Derry and to research the history of Pennywise; his writing down and journaling of events is his way of processing his traumas.

Bill processes his traumas by writing about them in the form of horror novels; he’s so focused on depicting the traumas vividly that he’s developed a talent at it and become a successful author, even married to a movie actress, Audra.

Other Losers have ways of hanging onto their traumas in a way best described through object relations theory, that is, how one’s early childhood relationships (e.g., with one’s parents) become repeated in later relationships. We see these repeated patterns in Eddie and Beverly.

Eddie’s mother is obese and overprotective of him, instilling an intense hypochondria and fear of germs in him. His choice of a wife, Myra, is similar in both her physicality and personality. Eddie “looked from Mother to Myra and back again to Mother.
“They could have been sisters. The resemblance was that close.” (page 118)

Beverly’s father, Alvin Marsh, is abusive and controlling, always ‘worrying about her,’ and suspecting she’s been fooling around with boys. She ends up marrying Tom Rogan, also an abusive, controlling man. Eddie and Beverly continue in dysfunctional relationships because they know no other way to relate to people. Someone like Tom preys on emotionally vulnerable women like Beverly, and he was able to spot her vulnerabilities easily: “But she was weak…weak somehow. It was as if she was sending out radio signals which only he could receive.” (page 137)

Richie Tozier has always dealt with his trauma through his joking around, a defence mechanism for coping with the terror around him by psychologically running away from it and reaching the opposite, happy side. In this way, his humour is a kind of manic defence, an avoidance of pain and sadness by putting on a happy, excited front. Connected to this avoidance of reality through frivolity is his vast array of fake Voices, which are the wearing of a False Self to hide his True Self. Though not on a pathologically narcissistic level for Richie, this fakery of his is narcissism on a small scale, a defence against the psychological fragmentation that could result if his childhood traumas, exacerbated by Pennywise, were to push him over the edge.

When Mike phones Richie to come back to Derry, the latter is again doing one of his Voices, not one of the comical ones he does on the radio as a DJ, “but a warm, rich, confident Voice. An I’m-All-Right Voice. It sounded great, but it was a lie. Just like all the other Voices were lies.” (page 77) So Richie has hung onto his trauma through this ongoing comic routine, and through the use of these fake Voices.

The record collection he has as a DJ, the vaults of records, his collection of Golden Oldies, were also a cover for something much darker. “They’re not records but dead bodies. You buried them deep but […] the ground is spitting them up to the surface. You’re not Rich ‘Records’ Tozier down there; down there you’re just Richie ‘Four-Eyes’ Tozier […] Those aren’t doors, and they’re not opening. Those are crypts, Richie. (pages 82-83)

As the memories come back to him, Richie remembers Henry Bowers chasing him, “and he felt more crypts cracking open inside of him.” (page 84)

Ben seems to have been doing the opposite of hanging onto his childhood traumas. He lost his weight with proud determination and kept it off, all the way to the mid-1980s, when he’s received his phone call from Mike…and this is why he needs to get drunk at the local bar before going back to Derry.

While Ben is doing heavy drinking instead of overeating as he did as a kid, the association of childhood trauma and ingesting a form of food is still here, for psychological purposes. There’s also a dialectical relationship between his so complete amnesia over his childhood in Derry that he doesn’t even know of the amnesia (page 104), and hanging onto the trauma, as we saw in the marital choices of Eddie and Beverly, or in Bill’s relapsed stammer.

Part II is coming soon.

Stephen King, It, New York, Pocket Books, 1986

My Novella, ‘The Targeter,’ Is Now Available on Amazon

My surreal novella, The Targeter, is now published on Amazon. It’s a quick read, only 111 pages, including the ‘about the author’ page. It’s also only US$14.55. Here’s the link to the Amazon page.

The novella is about a despairing 40-year-old English teacher from the West but living as an expat in Taiwan who–due to his apocalyptic, potentially nuclear, WW3 predicament, in which a civil war in China has made his home a warzone–has given up on life. Feeling there’s no way out of his situation (he’s estranged from his Western family), he decides to get drunk on bourbon and stoned on pot, ecstasy, and ketamine. In his stoned stupor, he begins a long reverie of himself as a quasi-Buddha figure (‘the targeter’ is a pun on Tathāgata, and it reflects his wish ‘to hit the target,’ or not sin), a comparison of his own life events with the mythical biography of Siddartha Gautama (he calls himself Sid Arthur Gordimer). As the war draws closer and closer to him, his being under the influence has made him blithely indifferent to the fact that, wandering out in the streets where the gunfire and bombing are going on, he’s walking right into his own death.

I wish again to thank the publishers of Alien Buddha Press for putting my short book in print!

Publication of ‘The Targeter,’ a Surreal Novella, by Alien Buddha Press, on July 14th

This is my new novella, originally published chapter by chapter here on my blog, but now you can gain access to all the chapters easily without searching my blog’s archives.

It will be released on July 14th on Amazon. It’s a quick read, only 111 pages, including the ‘about the author’ page.

It’s about a despairing 40-year-old English teacher in Taiwan who–due to his apocalyptic, potentially nuclear, WW3 predicament, in which a civil war in China has made his home a warzone–has given up on life. Feeling there’s no way out of his situation, he decides to get drunk on bourbon and stoned on pot, ecstasy, and ketamine. In his stoned stupor, he begins a long reverie of himself as a quasi-Buddha figure (‘the targeter’ is a pun on Tathāgata, and it reflects his wish ‘to hit the target,’ or not sin), a comparison of his own life events with the mythical biography of Siddartha Gautama (he calls himself Sid Arthur Gordimer). As the war draws closer and closer to him, his being under the influence has made him blithely indifferent to the fact that, wandering out in the streets where the gunfire and bombing are going on, he’s walking right into his own death.

I want to thank the publishers of Alien Buddha Press for putting my short book in print!

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter Two

“Oh, there goes Al again!” his older brother, Freddie, called from the top of the basement stairs. “In the basement, talking to himself.”

“Shut up, Freddie!” Al shouted. “Go away and mind your own business! I’m busy!”

“Yeah, busy talking to yourself,” Freddie said. “Freak!”

“I’m not talking to myself. I’m praying to the ancestors. You know that, you faithless scum!”

“I know you still believe in that stupid old religion, which never did the family any good, and which we all left behind in Asia, ’cause we aren’t backward-thinking, the way you are!”

“My praying to the ancestors is the only thing keeping the family’s bad luck from getting any worse.”

“You’re the only one giving the family any bad luck,” Freddie said. “You’re a stupid, spastic loser!”

“Go to hell!” Al shouted. “Leave me alone!”

“Leave me alone!” Freddie said in a mocking, whiny voice.

“Will both of you be quiet?” their father shouted from the living room. “Freddie, get out of the basement and help me move this desk. Leave Al to his silly praying, if he must do it. Cut out the noise, and give the rest of us some peace!”

“Freak!” Freddie shouted at Al, then slammed the basement door.

“Asshole,” Al whispered, then he sighed and looked back at the altar. He closed his eyes and started to concentrate on the spirits.

He breathed in and out, slowly and deeply.

He listened in the silence of the dark room, waiting for a sign of the spirits’ presence.

Finally, after about half a minute, he heard a hoarse, feminine voice, speaking in Chinese.

What do you want, boy?

“Po?” Al said, his voice wavering.

Well, what is it?

“I have a girlfriend,” he stammered in Chinese.

How sweet, the old woman’s voice rasped with sarcasm.

“She w-wants to m-meet the family,” he went on. “Please d-don’t cause any trouble w-while we have dinner together here. I love her v-very much.”

How touching. Why should we care about your personal problems, boy? Your family abandoned us years ago. We became demons because of your neglect. Your weak attempts to placate us are far from enough to compensate. Why should we do anything kind for a worm like you?

“What can I do t-to ease your wrath? What do you want me to do t-to ensure that she and my family can have a pleasant dinner here together, with no bad luck, no disasters of any kind?”

There was a long silence.

“Please, Po. What do you want from me?”

Po paused thoughtfully in silence a little longer.

He opened his eyes, then said, “Po?”

A glow of light appeared weakly at first, then it grew larger and brighter. Finally, he saw an apparition of an old woman in traditional Chinese clothing, a red Qing Dynasty dress with an ornate, light-blue headdress. She looked like a bride at an old wedding.

As pretty as her clothes were, though, the look on her face was anything but pleasant. It wore a scowl and piercing, malignant black eyes that looked at him as though she wanted to kill him, slowly and painfully.

He was afraid to ask again, but he knew he had to.

“What do you want me to do for you, Po?”

Have the girl’s whole family come here for dinner.

“Her whole family?”

Yes. Her mother, father, brothers, and sisters, if any.

“Why h-have all of them come, Po?”

Why not? If you want to marry this girl one day, don’t you think it’s right if all of both families meet and get to know each other?

“W-well, yes, but…”

But what? What could be the problem? Now, Po was grinning. What could possibly be wrong with that? Families should be close, shouldn’t they? Her words implied his family’s neglect.

“O-of course, but…what do you want to do with her family?”

What we spirits will do with her family is none of your concern, boy. Just make sure they’re all here, and don’t interfere with us while they’re here. If you want to live a long and happy life with this girl, with us never troubling you again, then you’ll do exactly as we wish without question. Give us her family, and you’ll be free of us forever. I give you my word.

“But, Po,” he said as he saw her image slowly fading away, “at least give me some idea of what you plan…”

Give us her family… Her voice dissolved in a reverberating echo, as did her apparition.

He just stood there alone in the darkness, shuddering.

‘The Ancestors,’ a Horror Story, Chapter One

Al Dan, 25, and Hannah Sandy, 24, were taking a walk in the park at around 9 pm. They’d been seeing each other for almost a year. Smiling, she had her head on his shoulder. With an ear-to-ear grin, he was enjoying resting the side of his head against the top of hers, feeling the soft cushioning of her long, blonde hair.

He looked up at the night sky. “The stars are really beautiful, aren’t they, Hannah?” he said.

“Yeah,” she said after taking a quick look. “I love coming out here in this park with you.”

“It’s such a nice place for us to take a walk after having dinner,” he said. “The trees, the grass, the smell of the flowers, the soft breeze on our faces, and best of all, you.”

“Aww, you’re so sweet,” she said, then they gave each other a peck on the lips. “You know, Al, we’ve been going out for about a year now, and I’m so happy with you, I don’t see myself being with anyone else.”

“I feel the same way. You’re pretty, you’re nice,…”

“You’re cute, you’re sweet, you’re funny, you’re considerate to me in ways that no other guy I’ve dated ever has been,…”

“You drive me wild in bed,…”

She giggled and hugged him tight. “You’re great in bed,…”

They both hugged each other even tighter and kissed again.

“There’s just one thing, though, Al.” They stopped walking and looked at each other.

“What’s that?” His smile faded.

“I introduced you to my mom, dad, and brother months ago, but I still haven’t met your family. Not even once.”

He was frowning and visibly shaking.

“What is it, Al? I’ve asked to meet your family for the third time now. The first two times, you made excuses to get out of it, and now, you’re still uncomfortable about me meeting them. What’s wrong?”

He was stammering, groping for the right words.

“Your family doesn’t like the idea of you dating a white woman, is that it?” she said with growing anger. “They’d never accept you with anyone other than an Asian, someone of Chinese descent only, is that it?”

“No, no,” he said, holding her hands and looking into her eyes so she’d see his sincerity. “It isn’t like that at all. My family’s not racist at all. They’re completely tolerant. It’s…just…that…”

“What?!”

“Well, it’s hard to put into words. If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. You’d think I’m crazy.”

“Well, what is it?” She was calming down, and sensing genuine anxiety about his family mixed in with that love for her that she’d always known was sincere. She looked in his eyes with empathy. “Come on, Al. What’s bothering you about your family?”

“Well,…my mom and dad…and my brother and sister…are always putting me down, insulting me, bullying me, and blaming me for everything that goes wrong in the family. They’ll make me look stupid, and I’m afraid that after a night of listening to them belittle me, you’ll think I’m a loser and want to dump me.”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, then hugged him. “If I see your family treating you badly, I’ll see that as a blot on them, not on you. I know the real you, and if they can’t see your goodness, then that’s their problem, not yours. I’ll always love you, no matter what. But let me meet them so I can at least see for myself what kind of people they are, OK?”

He put on his most convincing fake smile, hiding all of his undying worries. “OK.” They kissed.

*************

After walking her home and kissing her good night, Al walked back to his house as slowly as possible, for he needed as much time as he could give himself to think of a way out of this predicament.

What the hell am I going to do? he wondered. I can’t tell Hannah about my family’s secret curse! She’d never believe me; she’d think I’m crazy, and I probably am. I’ve certainly been driven crazy by this problem my family started ever since we moved here in Toronto from China, and they gave up on the old family traditions.

I’m the only one who still believes in them, and the family laughs at me for doing so. The ghosts of the ancestors, mad at the family for neglecting them, directly trouble only me. Only I ever pray to them, keeping them from doing their worst. The only problems we have are constant cases of bad luck, which the family blames on me, instead of realizing it’s the ghosts that are doing it. If I were to stop praying to them, they’d be far more malevolent, even violent. Not only could a lot of bad luck happen during our big dinner together; the ghosts may do something awful to Hannah, to hurt her. I can’t let that happen!

Oh, what am I going to do? I can’t keep making excuses to stop Hannah from seeing my family. She isn’t going to accept verbal abuse from them as a sufficient reason to avoid meeting them. She wants to take our relationship to the next level, and I do, too. I want to marry this girl! No one’s ever loved me or valued me the way she does, and marrying her will require my family’s involvement, one way or the other. I’ll have to take this risk if I’m to keep her.

Al was now within a block of his house. He thought, Maybe I can pray extra hard to the ancestors. The family’s neglect of praying to them is what has made them so angry with us, so if I pray all the more earnestly to them, maybe I can appease their wrath, at least to an extent. Maybe I can ask them to tell me what they want me to do in exchange for not troubling us anymore. Trying to get the family to pray to them again is useless: they don’t believe in the spirits, and as I’ve always known, the moments of bad luck that the ghosts cause are always made to look like they’re my fault, rather than being supernatural. I’m the pious one who prays to the ghosts, but I suffer the worst: no good deed goes unpunished!

He went in the front door of his house, then into the basement where the altar was. He sighed, then lit a stick of incense and put it between his hands. He bowed before the altar. Oh, well, he thought. It’s worth a try.

Trust Is Like the Soul

About a month or so ago, my older sister, J., sent me a direct message on Twitter (stupidly renamed ‘X’ by Elon Musk, proving once again that the wealthiest in the world aren’t necessarily the smartest, just the most exploitative…but I digress). She has apparently read some of my blog posts on my family issues back in Canada. I don’t know which ones she read: there are so many of them that I doubt she had the time, let alone the patience, to get through anywhere even approaching all of them, but she seems to have gotten the basic idea of why I’m so upset with her and our two older brothers, R. and F.

I must say that this reading of hers is perhaps the first time she’s ever meaningfully paid close attention to my side of the story regarding my relationship with the family. Over a period of decades of never taking my point of view about anything seriously, her response to what I wrote is a precedent that I find quite…impressive.

Since she knows she has to choose her words tactfully in an attempt to hoover me back into the family, and my living on the other side of the world means that her choosing her words foolishly will only strengthen my resolve not to end my NO CONTACT status with her and our brothers, she expressed herself with the usual honeyed words. ‘I’ll always be her brother, and she’ll always love me.’ Pleasant words to read, no doubt, and the kind of thing a love-starved man like me needs to hear…but not the kind of thing that will make me easily forget decades of emotional abuse from her, our brothers, our dad, and most of all, our–in all likelihood–malignant narcissist mother.

I’m sure J. sincerely believes she loves me, but there are a number of things that need to be understood about this love to put it in the right context. I’m her younger brother: she has to love me. I’ve discussed in other posts how she, as the golden child of the family, was pressured by our mother to personify an idealized version of Mom: J. had to be the ‘perfect’ daughter, has to be the ‘perfect’ sister to R., F., and me, the ‘perfect’ aunt to our nephew and niece, the ‘perfect’ mother to her two sons–she has to be the ‘perfect’ family woman, all to please our mother and be ‘worthy’ of Mom’s love. Remember that a narcissistic mother makes her sons and daughters compete for her very conditional love, so they aim to please her in every way.

Now, to be fair to J., none of this pressure or her caving in to it was her fault–it was our mother’s. By placing these impossible-to-fulfill standards on J., and by manipulating her into believing she must embody–and has successfully embodied–these lofty ideals, Mom was not doing her job as a mother. In fact, J. should be infuriated with Mom for putting her through all of that. It was never J.’s job to be Mom’s ‘perfect’ daughter: it was J.’s job simply to be herself. But let’s at least be honest about all of this. J. ‘loves’ me because she has to, not because she deep-down wants to.

I, too, was assigned a phony role to play in the narcissistic family: I was the scapegoat, or identified patient. I was manipulated by Mom, through gaslighting, into embodying everything she hated about herself and therefore projected onto me–hence the autism lie, which was a projection of Mom’s narcissism (recall the early definition of autism, which is hardly applicable today). This role that I was forced into playing is why the family ‘loves’ me, but has never really liked me–and that includes J., who always tried to change me into a more ‘acceptable’ person. She thinks this kind of changing people is a form of love (she got this, no doubt, from Mom having done it to her), rather than thinking that accepting a person as he is will do a much better job of making him feel loved, which would in turn inspire him to change himself and rid himself of his dysfunctional habits.

J. is the only family member who makes any attempts at all to contact me, and that has far less to do with any genuine feelings of affection for me, and far more to do with her need to salvage what’s left of the family she’s lost over the years (her husband–for whom I composed this short piece of music–our parents, and me out of estrangement). She wants to keep alive her fairy-tale, romantic notion that we’re all a ‘happy, loving family’: this is all tied in with her being the golden child, as I described above. The point I’m trying to make here is that I exist, to her, only as a family relation–that is my whole value to her. As a unique, individual person, I mean nothing to her. Recall what she said: I’ll always be her brother, and she’ll always love me (my emphasis).

I mean absolutely nothing to R. and F., my two ‘brothers.’ I could rot away in a leper colony, and they wouldn’t care; they’d blame me for getting into the predicament rather than pity me for my misfortune. As I said in my post, False Families, they’d probably be amused at the idea of my home becoming a war zone from the US provoking a war with China over Taiwan, the way the MIC and NATO provoked Russia into a war over Ukraine. There is no affection between R. and F. on their side and me: I feel none for them because, in their constant bullying and belittling of me as a kid, teen, and young adult, they destroyed any foundation for a normal, healthy, brotherly relationship between us. Mom sat back and let it all happen, too, perfectly aware that her flying monkeys were hurting me. Dad didn’t do much to help me, either. R. and F. feel no affection for me because they regard me as a worm: why would I be OK with that?

The childhood trauma I suffered from the family’s abuse resulted in a number of dysfunctional habits of mine at the time, which existed as trauma responses, but which our mendacious, ignorant mother labelled as ‘autism symptoms’: these trauma responses included maladaptive daydreaming and social isolation. If no other people are around, I can feel safe, because my family’s treatment of me as a child taught me that people are mean and hurtful. Bullies at school and in the neighbourhood only made my problem worse, and I got no relief when I got home.

When your family betrays your trust, it’s hard to trust anybody, because as object relations theory teaches us, those primal family relationships you have as a child are like the blueprints for all future relationships you’ll have with anyone else. The bad relationships with family members become bad internal objects that haunt you like demon possession (<<p. 67 here). Alienation thus becomes epidemic: if those early family relationships go sour, you learn to believe all future relationships will go sour, too, because you don’t know any other way to relate to people; even if you try your best to fit in, you’ll unconsciously do something wrong to sabotage the relationship. As an adult, I have C-PTSD because of what happened when I was a kid, and I’ll always feel as though I can’t fit in, however hard I try.

Publilius Syrus once said, “Trust, like the soul, never returns once it is gone.” I first heard that quote in Child’s Play (not the Chucky movie), which I watched with my mother when I was a teen. I can never return to the family that betrayed me with lies, abuse, and gaslighting. I’m trying to heal, currently through the application of Jungian concepts like Shadow work and Active Imagination to get to the darkest recesses of my unconscious to find out what’s making me sabotage my life so much–I can’t heal by being in any way involved with the very people who made me sick in the first place.

If I were to be around R., F., and J. ever again (even if just online), I would be subjected to their little digs at me again. Those little digs may typically be small, by any objective measure, but even the minor ones would trigger in me memories of the nastier moments I endured with them when I was a kid. Also, I have good reason to believe that the three of them, as well as our mom when she was still alive, were doing so many smear campaigns on me–whenever discussions around the dinner table, for example, drifted towards me as a topic–that the younger generations have been taught to have at least slight regard for me, if not outright loathing.

You see, it isn’t so much that they ‘did this’ to me forty years ago, or ‘did that’ to me thirty years ago; it isn’t just the things that they did; it’s more about who they are that made them do these things, because I know that–them being who they are–they are sure to do those kinds of things again. I’m not just wallowing about in my remote past: I’m trying to protect myself from future re-traumatizing.

To regain my trust of R., F., and J. would be a Herculean task for them, especially with the limitations of the internet, and I simply don’t think the three of them regard me as worth the effort (R. and F. wouldn’t regard me as worth even a slight effort). For these reasons, I must maintain NO CONTACT with them, however well-intentioned my sister may seem.

Analysis of ‘The Brood’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’

I: Introduction

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a 1974 slasher film produced and directed by Tobe Hooper, written by him and Kim Henkel. It stars Marilyn Burns, Paul A Partain, Edwin Neal, Jim Siedow, and Gunnar Hansen, all relatively unknown actors, since it was filmed on a low budget.

The film was marketed and hyped as if based on a true story, and while it, like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs (i.e., Buffalo Bill), was inspired by Ed Gein and his crimes (serial killing, grave robbing, wearing human flesh, cross-dressing, etc.), the plot is largely fictional.

It initially received mixed reviews from critics, but it was hugely profitable and has since been regarded as one of the best and most influential horror films ever made. It helped establish, as did films like Black Christmas and Halloween, a number of tropes common to slasher films, including the final girl, and the killer as a hulking, masked figure.

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

II: Politics and Lies–a Brief but Necessary Digression

There is subtle political commentary in this film. Pretending it’s based on a true story, apart from hyping the film to get a wider audience, is a way of saying that, in a sense, the horrors depicted represent some unsettling realities in our world back in the early 1970s, and perhaps, even more so today. The date for the events of the film is given as August 18, 1973, the same year that, just two months later, the oil crisis would begin. Nixon would resign, because of the growing scandal around Watergate, the year of the film’s release.

In other news around that time, the Vietnam War was in its final years, ending the year after the film’s release. Also, during the early development of Hooper’s story, there was the Chilean coup d’état of September 11th, 1973. Hooper’s point in pretending that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a true story is that the media lies all the time about what the US government has been doing all over the world…so why couldn’t he lie, too?

Nixon lied that he was “not a crook.” The atrocities of the Vietnam War, committed by US troops, were rationalized and minimized in the news media as being an essential part of ‘defending Western democracy’ against ‘the Godless commie menace,’ as was the putative reason given for overthrowing the democratically-elected Salvador Allende to replace his socialist government with Pinochet‘s right-wing dictatorship, which killed, imprisoned, tortured and disappeared tens of thousands of leftist political dissidents. The Pinochet government also established the “free market” policies of the Chicago Boys, benefitting only the Chilean wealthy and American investors, but throwing the rest of the Chilean population into poverty.

This “free market” model would be a kind of prototype for Reagan’s and Thatcher’s economic policies of the 1980s, all lied about in the media as promising economic prosperity for all, when in reality all these policies did was bring about the neoliberal nightmare we’ve been suffering through more and more in the decades since. Indeed, Hooper’s film could be seen as prophetic in a way, for its making and release coinciding with the oil crisis means that the early 70s were the beginning of the end of the Keynesian era of welfare capitalism and its post-WWII economic prosperity. The poverty surrounding the family of Leatherface (Hansen) can be seen as symbolic of the coming economic problems of the US and beyond.

A hint in the film that helps us understand the story’s connection with the ups and downs of capitalism is when the hitchhiker (Neal)–in the van with Sally (Burns) and Franklin Hardesty (Partain), Jerry (played by Allen Danziger), Kirk (played by William Vail), and Pam (played by Teri McMinn)–tells them that the air gun used to kill cattle in the slaughterhouse was no good because “people were put out of jobs.” Technological advances tend to replace workers, as many fear AI might do today.

Technological advances also play a role in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, which in turn leads to periodic economic crises, putting many out of work, which is what has happened to the hitchhiker’s family, including Leatherface, the old man (Siedow), and Grandpa (played by John Dugan).

These economic crises, happening every ten to fifteen years, combined with such other capitalist problems as income inequality and poverty for the majority of the population, problems that are especially scandalous in the richest country in the world, will eventually take their toll on the mental health of much of the population. Small wonder Leatherface’s family is so screwed up, this family being an extreme example of the mental health issues of many in the United States.

III: Deathly Desires

Now we can look at the issue dominating the beginning of the film: grave robbing, of which we later learn is the hitchhiker’s responsibility. Both he and his brother, Leatherface, exhibit traits of what Erich Fromm called the necrophilous character. This is not to be confused with necrophilia as a sexual perversion. Rather, Fromm characterizes it thus: ““Necrophilia in the characterological sense can be described as the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures. [Fromm, page 369, his emphasis]

This necrophilous sickness in the hitchhiker and Leatherface is also something I wrote about in an article expressing my concerns about the escalations of current global conflicts leading to a very possibly nuclear WWIII. These concerns are also linked to capitalism and imperialism, since war is a business and a racket, meant to generate profits for such weapons manufacturers as Boeing and Lockheed-Martin. Beyond the wish to make money, though, is the fact that these psychopathic warmongers in the Pentagon, etc., seem to have a lot in common with the ghouls of this movie, a desire for death. Only the differences in income and social status, of the real-life people and the movie characters, separate them from each other.

Sicker than merely digging up bodies is the way the hitchhiker and Leatherface, as was the case with Gein, like to turn human corpses and skeletons into grisly works of art. In these ‘sculptures,’ we see the perverse and paradoxical merging of the creative and destructive instincts. Family abuse, something I’ll return to and expand on later, has surely been the root cause of this ghoulish perversion of the artistic impulse.

Instead of having a conventional soundtrack with, for example, an orchestral score, Tobe Hooper and Wayne Bell recorded a track of eerie background sound effects. This lack of conventional expressivity in music (the country songs heard in the film notwithstanding) is paralleled with Leatherface’s lack of verbal language and the hitchhiker’s speech impediment. These elements, taken together, represent one of the film’s major critiques of American society, as well as of capitalist society as a whole: the inability to communicate because of social alienation; the ghoulish sculptures mentioned in the previous paragraph are of course also a reflection of this problem.

Tied in with the ghoulish art and the alienating inability to communicate is how the film begins mostly with a black screen, as photos are taken of the parts of the exhumed corpses, all while those grating, screeching sound effects of Hooper and Bell are heard. In that blackness is a feeling of undifferentiated, hellish isolation, with no one to talk to, a place where terror cannot be verbalized.

IV: The Graveyard Scene

The five youths in the van go to a graveyard in the area where the grave robbing has occurred, somewhere in central Texas; they want to see if the grave of Sally’s and Franklin’s grandfather has been disturbed–it hasn’t. Still, a few things happen here that have some bearing on, or at least that hint at, what’s to come.

A cowboy (played by Jerry Green) leads Sally away to where her grandfather’s grave is, but he does it in a way that suggests he has a sexual interest in her. She is, after all, pretty and curvaceous. He takes her by the arm and tells her boyfriend that he’s going to run off with her. This ties in with the song, “Fool For a Blonde” (Sally is blonde), heard later in the van when the hitchhiker is given a ride, and he almost kills her towards the end of the film. My point is that men eyeing women lewdly, the subject of the song and what’s obviously on the mind of the cowboy taking her to the grave, is on a continuum with the psychopathic extreme of the hitchhiker trying to send her to her grave, then feast on her flesh. All of these men are regarding women as delicious meat.

The other noteworthy thing during the graveyard scene is the drunk (played by Joe Bill Hogan) alluding to the horrors we’re about to see, horrors no one believes are true because a drunken old man is talking about them. He’s like an ignored prophet, a male Cassandra. This foreshadowing continues back in the van when Pam reads the dire predictions of their horoscopes that day.

V: Franklin and the Hitchhiker

The vulnerability of Franklin is emphasized early on, not just because he’s in a wheelchair, but also from his fall off the side of the road when he needs to urinate, as well as when the hitchhiker uses his knife to slash Franklin’s arm, making him whimper in pain. So when he’s finally carved to pieces with Leatherface’s chainsaw, it’s especially horrifying.

The hitchhiker’s viciousness is, of course, tied in not only with how “weird looking” he is (i.e., the port-wine stain birthmark on the right side of his face, his quirky body language), but also the awkwardness of his conversation with the five of them (graphically describing the killing of the cattle in the slaughterhouse, showing them his knife, imposing on them to pay him for a photo he’s taken of Franklin). His deep digging of Franklin’s knife blade into his own hand, before slashing Franklin’s arm with his bigger, stronger knife, shows the relationship between sadism and masochism that Freud wrote about. It also indicates how the hitchhiker’s violent nature is rooted in his own personal trauma.

After getting rid of the hitchhiker, who has smeared his blood on the side of the van and has childishly blown raspberries at them as they drive off, the five youths stop at a Gulf gas station to fill up the van; but the owner of the gas station, the old man, says he has no gas (which I see as an allusion to the 1973 oil crisis). He presumably has seen the blood on the van, and I suspect he knows that it was his younger brother who put it there, to mark the five for death. He says he won’t get any more gas ’til late that afternoon, or not even until the next morning; but I suspect he’s lying (he’ll never get any gas), hoping to have the kids not only buy and eat his barbecue (!), but also to keep them there so he and his brothers can make barbecue out of their flesh.

VI: Vegetarianism

When Franklin asks the old man where “the old Franklin place” is, which is dangerously close to the house of the family of psychopaths, the old man warns them to stay away. Though just as psychopathic as the rest of the family, the old man is able to put on a respectable face of sanity for the public, in his hopes of hiding his family’s criminal insanity from the world.

It’s been noted that The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a ‘vegetarian‘ horror film, in that the brutal killing and cannibalistic eating of the victims–by a family of former slaughterhouse workers–gives the audience an idea of the suffering of farm animals. Indeed, Paul McCartney once made a video saying that if we ever saw the brutality inflicted on farm animals, we’d all be vegetarians. When hearing about the killing of cattle in the slaughterhouse during the ride in the van, Pam says, “People shouldn’t kill animals for food.”

Since the psychopathic family is so poor, it’s easy to see that survival is one of their main reasons for resorting to cannibalism. It’s also exocannibalism, the killing and eating of outsiders, who are perceived as the enemy. In these two motives, we see capitalism again as the root cause, through extreme poverty and alienation, but also in the commodification of the human body (i.e., selling human flesh as “barbecue” in the old man’s gas station). Finally, eating their victims can be seen as an attempt to introject their healthy qualities; since the brothers are so obviously sick, they desperately seek some kind of a cure.

VII: Abuse, Trauma, and Projection

Their extreme psychopathy is on a continuum with the kind of pain we all feel, but it’s moderate for us, of course. We can see this in a comparison of the hitchhiker with Franklin, both of whom come across as childish with their blowing of raspberries, and both having knives. We all want to blow off pain by projecting it, which is symbolized in the film by blowing raspberries and digging knives into people. Sometimes pain is projected in a moderate way, as with Franklin; other times, in an extreme way, as with the hitchhiker.

Family abuse (i.e., the old man’s aggressions against Leatherface and the hitchhiker) has driven the younger two brothers to project their pain in an extremely violent way, while emotional neglect makes Franklin project only in a minor way, blowing raspberries during a temper tantrum at the old Franklin house.

With his slashed arm, Franklin has just had a terribly traumatic experience, and he needs to process his fear by constantly talking about it. Though his endless prating gets irritating for the other four, he needs to have his feelings validated and empathized with in order to be soothed and healed. The others’ neglectful attitude, even to the point of Jerry taunting Franklin that the hitchhiker is going to kill him, only makes his trauma worse.

VIII: A Brief Psychoanalytic Digression

The soothing process that Franklin needs is well understood through the container/contained theory of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (read here for more about psychoanalytic concepts). Harsh emotional experiences–especially those of babies and psychotics, who are incapable of self-soothing–need to be contained, that is, soothed, detoxified, and processed, in order for one to make sense of them and return to normal mental functioning. The container is the one who helps us process and detoxify these harsh feelings, the contained; the mother is usually the baby’s container, and the psychotherapist is the mental patient’s container. If we’re reasonably healthy, we can be our own containers, or self-soothers.

The container is given a yonic symbol, and the contained is given a phallic one. Healthy containment, starting with the use of projective identification as a primitive, pre-verbal form of communication between mother and baby, leads to normal mental functioning and the ability to communicate in society through language–what Lacan would have considered a healthy transition from the dyadic mother/son relationship in the Imaginary to a relationship with many people in the cultural world of the Symbolic.

Franklin and the hitchhiker have made at best tenuous entries into the socio-cultural world of the Symbolic; Leatherface, on the other hand, hasn’t properly entered that world at all, since the closest he’s able to use language is through whimpering and oinking. He’s generally described as being mentally handicapped, but I suspect that extreme trauma from his childhood has silenced him…has, pardon the expression, retarded his development.

You see, sometimes containment is negative, that is, the opposite of soothing. Negative containment can lead instead to a nameless dread, something the three brothers originally experienced, then started projecting on to other people; this negative containment is symbolized in the film by Leatherface’s phallic chainsaw, or the hitchhiker’s phallic knife, cutting into their victims’ bodies and making yonic wounds in them. In Lacanian terms, this nameless dread could be called the Real, that traumatizing, inexpressible, undifferentiated world expressed in the black screen seen at the beginning of the film.

Note how I never refer to the three psychopathic brothers by their names, as they’re referred to in the sequels. I prefer to refer to them as the “old man,” “hitchhiker,” and “Leatherface” as given in the end credits, because I feel that their namelessness is significant as far as the meaning of the film is concerned. Not having names reflects their social alienation, as well as their inability to communicate and be communicated to normally. These problems of theirs explain their regressive tendency towards the infantile, primitive, preverbal communication of projective identification as through the piercing of the contained (the knife, sledgehammer, or chainsaw) into the container (the victim’s wound). The hitchhiker, recall, calls his brother “Leatherface,” rather than by a normal Christian name.

IX: When Victimizers are Victims, Too

Kirk and Pam go off outside, and they find the house of the psychopath family. Hoping to get some gas from them, Kirk ventures inside to look around and see if anyone is in.

This going into a house one hasn’t been permitted to enter, only to suffer terrible horrors, if not to be outright killed, had already been seen in Psycho (Detective Arbogast and Lila Crane going into Bates’s house), and would be seen in Pulp Fiction (Butch and Marcellus Wallace barging into Maynard’s pawn shop). This ‘invasion’ of the psychopaths’ private world will result in the invasion of the intruders’ bodies by a hammer, a hatchet, a chainsaw, and a knife.

Being so impoverished, and mentally ill from that impoverishment, the family of psychopaths perceive the outside world to be unremittingly hostile. Their viciousness is thus projected onto the world. Small wonder Leatherface is so terrified when Kirk, Pam, and Jerry come into his house.

Indeed, as scary as Leatherface is, he is by far the most scared of all. The old man beats him and bullies him, his only name seems to be Leatherface (note that I’m unconcerned with the sequels and remakes), and–speaking of that name of his–can one even being to wonder what cruel tortures he went through to make him need to cover his face with dying human flesh?

I’m less concerned with any physical damage or disfigurement done to his face, or ugliness, that the masks are supposed to hide. The three masks we see him wear in the film, those of the Killer, the Old Lady, and the Pretty Lady (i.e., the last one with the makeup on it), all represent three personalities for Leatherface, for without the masks, he has no personality. The extremity of the abuse he has suffered, from financial hard times taking away his job and identity as a slaughterhouse worker, to the particularly cruel abuse from his family–presumably from early childhood–has destroyed his whole sense of self. His masks represent False Selves hiding no self, just as the old man’s pretense of comforting gentleness to Sally during the film’s climax, as well as his warning of the five youths to stay away, is his False Self of kindness and sanity hiding his psychopathic True Self.

So when we see Leatherface, we see a mad slasher, but he sees himself as protecting his home. First came the financial hard times, and the unemployment and hunger that have led to cannibalism; then there were all these strange people coming into his house uninvited. He feels as though the whole world is closing in on him.

X: The First Killings

Still, his use of that sledgehammer to crack Kirk’s skull open is a scary sight to see. His wearing of the Killer mask to murder Kirk, Pam, and Jerry is thus fitting. That slamming shut of the steel door to the back room after killing Kirk is chilling. It also begins what is for me the tensest, scariest moment of the film. We’re all begging Pam not to follow her dead boyfriend into the house.

Her stumbling into that room with all the lint-covered skulls and bones of humans and animals just confirms all of those dire astrological warnings she read in the van. I’m not sure if a tiny ribcage we see hanging is one of an animal or of a baby. She’s so overwhelmed with these ghoulish sculptures that she pukes.

Part of the terror of her seeing Leatherface is his terror of seeing her in his house; as I said above, believe it or not, he’s the most scared of all. On the other hand, an interesting contrast to be made is between how the male victims are largely killed, usually dispatched quickly, and how the female victims are terrorized before either being killed, or in Sally’s case, slashed and beaten in the attempt to kill her.

Hanging Pam on her back on that hook is more than painful to watch: like the phallic stabbing of Marion Crane in the shower in Psycho, the invasion of that phallic hook in her back is a symbolic rape. I’m reminded of a line in Tori Amos‘s “Me and a Gun,” a song about her having been raped at knifepoint (I think we know what the gun really was): “…and a man on my back.” Recall, in connection with all of this, what I said above about the objectifying of Sally early in the film, and her being sliced up by the hitchhiker towards the end.

[Incidentally, on page 11 of the script, just around when the cowboy takes her by the arm and away from Jerry to find her grandfather’s grave, Sally is described as “braless and her breasts bounce enticingly beneath the thin fabric of her t-shirt.” She’s also described on page 2 as “a beautiful blond girl,” reminding us of the lecherous song, “Fool For a Blonde.”]

XI: Punching Down

This abusive, sexually-charged treatment of women (symbolically, that is), as if they were just pieces of tasty meat, is linked with a more general issue of this impoverished, psychopathic family: they punch down, instead of even trying to punch up. I discussed this issue in my analysis of the TV film, Duel. The frustrations of the poor under capitalism are far too often taken out on other poor people, a product of alienation, rather than channeled together, in solidarity with all of the poor, to rise up in revolution against the ruling class. The slaughter of defenseless animals is certainly tied in with, and symbolic of, this problem of punching down.

It’s always easier to take one’s frustrations out on the weak, then to rise up against the strong.

Even more punching down happens when Jerry repeatedly taunts Franklin with the threat, however joking, that the hitchhiker is going to kill him–a truly mean thing to say to a traumatized, vulnerable young man in a wheelchair, though I’d say that Jerry’s worst sins are that hair and that shirt of his.

XII: The Climax

After the killings of Jerry and Franklin, Sally becomes the final girl, screaming and running from Leatherface and his chainsaw in the outside grasses and bushes at night. This terror involving running away from an armed killer in the bush at night suggests the trauma of soldiers and civilians in the jungles of Vietnam, experiencing the terror of an ambush. Such a comparison deserves to be made considering the subtle political commentary I mentioned above in a film made in the early 70s.

Sally runs into a house where she thinks she’ll be safe, though she’s totally unaware that it’s the house of the psychos. Leatherface saws up the front door to get in after she has locked it; this damaging of his own home represents how the abuse of others can be so destructive that it can bounce back and harm oneself. Certainly, when the old man comes home and sees the door, he’ll be abusive to Leatherface for it; of course, if the family hadn’t been going around ‘punching down’ in the first place, things wouldn’t have escalated to the point of ‘punching themselves.’

Sally runs up to the second floor and finds Grandpa and ‘Grandma,’ presumably, hoping she can get some help from them. Note the lack of any living females in this beyond dysfunctional family. Small wonder Leatherface crossdresses: he isn’t transgender–he just does it to compensate for the lack of sisters, mothers, and grandmothers.

Sally has to jump out the window and run outside again. She returns to the Gulf gas station where she thinks the old man will help her; but just as with the family’s ‘grandparents,’ any sense of safety from Leatherface in this shelter is only illusory. The gas station can thus be seen as the ‘sane’ double of the house. It seems normal, the cooked human flesh masquerading as ‘barbecue,’ just as the old man seems reasonable and comforting to Sally at first…until he brings out the bag and rope. Indeed, the insane are often able to wear a mask of sanity when in public.

Part of the old man’s sadism is leaving the gas station door wide open as he goes off to bring over his truck. That wide-open door, with the blackness of night outside as well as our knowledge that Leatherfae is out there somewhere, just adds to the tension.

XIII: An Abuser’s Mask of Sanity

The old man hitting her with the broomstick to subdue her should be seen as no different from his beating the hitchhiker or Leatherface: he’s simply abusive, while putting on a front of sanity and reasonability. With her tied up, gagged, and in the bag as he drives her back to the house, he talks his fake consoling words while poking her with a stick and chuckling like the sadistic psychopath that he is. This juxtaposition of ‘consoling’ and cruelty is typical of the abuser, who alternates between periods of ‘kindness’ and meanness to his victim in order to establish traumatic bonding. As a result, Sally’s ordeal draws out into a seemingly endless nightmare.

Driving towards the house, the old man finds the hitchhiker, and we learn–through the former’s angry scolding of the latter–who has been responsible for all the grave robbing. The old man is concerned with preserving the false image of his family’s innocence and status while allowing all kinds of viciousness and cruelty in secret. Recall his words when seeing the sawed-up front door to the house: “Look what your brother did to the door! Ain’t he got no pride in his home?”

An example of the family’s cannibalism, as well as their regard of pretty Sally as delicious food, is when Grandpa is allowed to suck the blood out of a cut on her finger. Franklin was right when he said in the van, upon meeting the hitchhiker, “A whole family of Draculas.”

Such a false image of a ‘virtuous’ family with a good social status is common among abusive ones, their insistent, narcissistic denial of any wrongdoing. Such a duality of seeming virtue versus secret vice is epitomized when we see the three brothers and Grandpa at the dinner table with screaming Sally. The old man (playing the role of ‘father’), Leatherface in the dark wig and Pretty Lady mask (‘mother’), and the hitchhiker (the ‘rebellious teen son’) parody the traditional American family at dinner. Their bickering looks like a trivializing of their profound dysfunction–again, typical of abusive families. (Incidentally, research has suggested that psychological aggression in American families is so prevalent as to be almost universal.)

Paralleled to this duality of the façade of the virtuous family vs. the real, dysfunctional one is the duality of the cook vs. the killers. The hitchhiker, in the role of the ‘rebellious teen son,’ defies the authority of the old man, the ‘father,’ by saying he’s “just a cook,” while the hitchhiker and Leatherface have to do all the dirty work of killing Sally et al.

The old man, pretending he’s the sane one of the family, says he takes “no pleasure in killing,” even though he’ll stand by and allow his brothers to do it, even laughing as it’s happening. He’ll cook the human flesh, but he hypocritically fancies that he’s above killing. The family’s cannibalism, recall, represents the non-vegetarian lust for animal meat. Many of us are content to buy and cook our beef, chicken, pork, etc., but let the farmers do the killing for us.

XIV: Mirroring Faces

The hitchhiker and Leatherface like to add psychological terror into the mix by going up to Sally for a closer look. (One is reminded of that song, “Fool for a Blonde,” in which the singer sings about watching women, thinking lewd thoughts.) The hitchhiker asks Leatherface if he likes her face, implying that after they kill her, he’ll cut hers off and use it as a new mask. I used to think the hitchhiker was asking Sally if she liked Leatherface’s Pretty Lady mask, which of course she never would.

Leatherface’s Pretty Lady mask, with make-up crudely painted on it, and his woman’s wig, can be improved on in terms of beauty, or so he imagines, if he replaces it with hers as a new mask. His stroking of her pretty long blonde hair indicates that he’d like to replace the wig with it, too.

As I said above, this cross-dressing of his shouldn’t be confused with the actual transgender experience; as with Norman Bates and his ‘Mother’ personality, the Pretty Lady is just one of Leatherface’s False Selves, because his trauma has deprived him of a True Self. The Pretty Lady is actually a feeble narcissistic defence against total psychological fragmentation.

Leatherface looks at Sally as if she were a metaphorical mirror showing his ideal-I, which he wishes he could live up to. He has a tenuous narcissistic link to the Imaginary while teetering on the brink of the Real, where he’d have no identity at all, no link at all with reality, since the trauma of the undifferentiated, inexpressible blackness of the Real is a total psychotic break with reality, total psychological fragmentation.

While he looks at her, admiring an ideal of feminine beauty, she of course can only look back at him with disgust. This contrast underscores the alienation felt between the ideal-I and the fragmentary, awkward reality that is Leatherface’s physical existence. It also underscores the alienation felt in the inability to communicate with others, to connect in the world of this film.

The brothers and Grandpa sit at dinner, posturing as a normal family, while Sally screams and screams, tied to a chair with the severed hands of one of her murdered friends attached to it. Leatherface and the hitchhiker mock her screams like two mean, immature kids, as if abuse were a trivial form of pain. The hitchhiker’s immature mocking of her screaming and–as he sees it–babyish sobbing is a projection of his own babyishness, with his blowing of raspberries.

When the old man chides his two younger brothers for the noise they’re making and their mocking her, saying, “No need to torture the poor girl,” he’s demonstrating his hypocrisy in pretending to have even a modicum of sympathy for her, since only seconds earlier, he too was laughing at her screaming and crying. His fake pity is another example of the false front of goodness that an abuser presents to the public, to make himself look good.

XV: Escape

Finally, the brothers decide to let Grandpa kill her with a quick blow of a hammer on her head. The old man brags that Grandpa’s “the best killer there ever was,” that he could kill her with “one lick,” and so her death would be quick and minimally painful; but at his advanced age (he’s over a hundred years old!), Grandpa can barely hold the hammer in his hand, much less give Sally a fatal blow. So a ‘quick death’ turns into all the more of a prolonged agony for her.

When the hitchhiker offers to take the hammer from Grandpa and kill her, he foolishly loosens his grip on her, so she can break free and jump out the window. It’s morning, and the sun’s up. As she’s limping towards the main road, the hitchhiker pursues her with his knife, and Leatherface comes out with his chainsaw.

With the end of the film, we see again how abuse often comes back onto the abuser when the hitchhiker, in the middle of the road and his attention consumed with cutting up Sally, doesn’t notice an oncoming truck until it’s too late, and he’s crushed under its wheels. Similarly, Leatherface chases her and the driver, who’s stopped and gotten out of his truck; and after the driver throws a large wrench at Leatherface’s head, knocking him to the ground, his chainsaw digs into his leg. Now Leatherface has to limp.

XVI: Leatherface, the Ultimate Victim

A pickup truck is driving by, and Sally gets in the back. They drive away, her laughing triumphantly. Leatherface will have to go home and tell the old man that not only did the girl get away, able to tell the public about the psycho family, but also that the hitchhiker died.

Leatherface knows he’s going to suffer terrible abuse for his failure to get her. Recall that I called him the most scared of all the characters in this film. He has no victim to take out his frustrations on (in the negative container/contained sense I described above). He will only be able to whimper unintelligibly as his older brother beats him with a stick, like a cruel husband beating his wife (and it’s sadly fitting that Leatherface is dressed like someone’s wife at this moment). All Leatherface can do is flail his chainsaw as he watches her disappear in that truck, him unable to put his despair into words. She escaped his abusive world…he can never do so.

How like the unverbalized frustration of the poor who punch down, and who are so poor, so low, they often don’t even have anybody to punch down on.