Analysis of ‘Magic’

Magic is a 1978 psychological horror film directed by Richard Attenborough and written by William Goldman, based on his 1976 novel. The film stars Anthony Hopkins, Ann-Margret, and Burgess Meredith, with Ed Lauter, David Ogden Stiers, and EJ André.

Gene Siskel ranked Magic at #9 on his 10 best movies list of 1978, and Roger Ebert praised the performances of Hopkins and Meredith on Sneak Previews, though he was disappointed with the final act. Goldman received a 1979 Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay. Hopkins received nominations for Golden Globe and BAFTA awards, and Meredith received the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actor.

While some critics claimed Magic is rather like the “Ventriloquist’s Dummy” section of Dead of Night (1945), Attenborough vehemently denied any such similarity or plagiarism, as did Goldman. In September, 2025, Sam Raimi and Roy Lee announced their intention to remake Magic, with Raimi confirmed in May 2026 to direct it.

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

The film begins with a shot in the home of Merlin (André), the sick and aging mentor of aspiring professional magician Charles “Corky” Withers (Hopkins), who has arrived in Merlin’s home to tell him how his first solo attempt at a magic show went. Though Corky, indeed, made no technical mistakes, he tries to make Merlin believe the audience loved him. Merlin can see through Corky’s b.s., and so the latter has to admit that the audience was ignoring his act the whole time…until Corky blew up at them in his sweaty, nervous frustration.

Merlin advises Corky to come up with a gimmick to get the audience’s attention…which he, a year later and after the death of Merlin, does. His gimmick is to combine his magic act, which involves card tricks, with ventriloquism, using a dummy he’s named “Fats.” This change has brought Corky from a zero to a success.

His agent, Ben Greene (Meredith), has Todson (Stiers), a man who works at a TV network, watch Corky perform; Todson is impressed only when Fats appears. It looks as though Corky is going to be a star on TV. After Todson and Greene have visited Corky backstage to congratulate him for a successful show, and he is left alone with Fats, we see the first sign of Corky’s mental instability, for he has a brief but needless exchange of words with the dummy.

Indeed, later on and in New York City, Greene is about to clinch a TV show deal for Corky, who will first need to do a medical exam for the producers. Corky adamantly refuses to do it, insisting that there is nothing wrong with him in the psychiatric sense, when in fact he doesn’t want it to slip out that he has projected part of his personality onto Fats. Greene is equally insistent, however, that Corky do the medical exam, so Corky bails and escapes to the Catskills, where he grew up with his now-dead family, and where an old high-school crush of his, Peggy Ann Snow (Ann-Margret), lives.

On his way there in a cab, Corky sees his old house and remembers when he lived there with his family. They then drive by a cemetery, where his family members are buried; Corky remembers his father’s funeral.

In these details about his old family life and his relationship with Merlin, we can gain some insights about his psychiatric condition.

According to psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut, his theory of the bipolar self posits that the basis of psychological stability rests on two poles–one of ideals, and the other of grandiosity. With these two intact, one’s narcissism is of a healthy, moderate, restrained, and thus acceptable sort. The poles are the idealized parental imago and the grandiose self.

One sees in one’s mother and/or father a greatness that is reflected back onto oneself, for the parents act as a mirror, in their love of their child, of the grandiosity felt in the child. Over time as the child grows up, these idealizations and grandiosities are let down in tolerable amounts of disappointment, and the child should grow up to be a mature, normal adult. If one pole should fail, on the other hand, compensation must be made by the other pole. If both poles should fail, one suffers psychological fragmentation, a falling apart of the personality and a psychotic break with reality…as happens to Corky by the end of the movie.

Corky’s idealized parental imago would, it seems, have been his father, whom we see in a brief flashback in front of the old house tossing a football to Corky’s older brother; then, as I said above, there’s a flashback of his father’s funeral. With his family “all gone,” there is neither parent for him to have as an idealized parental imago, so in his fragile psychological state, he’d have had to look elsewhere for that.

In Merlin, Corky’s magician mentor, he’d have had a father transference, and therefore a replacement as an idealized parental imago. Indeed, in that opening scene when Corky is telling Merlin how his first solo magic act went, we see Corky feeding Merlin a spoonful of medicine, as a filial son might do for his aging, sick father. But a year later, after Merlin is gone, Corky no longer has anyone to hang his ideals on. His already fragile ego is made all the more fragile.

He now has to compensate with the other pole, his grandiose self. The problem there is that, having always been shy and introverted, Corky has repressed that grandiose self. He as a kid was too shy to tell his high-school crush, Peggy, that he likes her. While in that flashback mentioned above, when his father was tossing the football to his brother, Corky was sitting alone on the porch, carving something out of wood.

It is thus only through Fats that Corky can release and truly experience his grandiose self, for Fats lets out all the extroversion and foul-mouthed sauciness Corky is too shy to express himself. “Fats” is a fitting name for the large-headed dummy, for its persona is that of a fat-headed egotist, the perfect projection of Corky’s grandiose self.

This is why Corky needs Fats so desperately, to let him experience the only pole of his bipolar self that he has left, to help him regain a sense of psychological structure. This is why Corky can’t let Fats be quiet for even a mere five minutes, as Greene will ask him to do, to prove he isn’t mentally ill. Without Fats, Corky has neither pole, and thus he’ll undergo psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break from reality, a defence against which is narcissism, manifested in Corky’s grandiose self…Fats.

A haunting motif heard in Jerry Goldsmith’s score for the film is the use of a harmonica, to remind us of the pathological presence of Fats. Significantly, we don’t usually hear a normal melody of single notes played on it–just an inhaling and exhaling of chords, as when someone who doesn’t really know how to play a harmonica would do.

One breathes in and out of a harmonica, as if to infuse it with (musical) life, like God breathing the breath of life into Adam’s nostrils and making him a living soul (Genesis 2:7); but this inhaling and exhaling with a harmonica hardly gives it any (musical) life. Similarly, throwing one’s voice with a dummy makes for an amusing act, but it doesn’t give any real life to the dummy. The musically naïve might think his breathing into the reeds of the harmonica–its nostrils, so to speak–makes music; psychotic Corky thinks throwing his voice with his dummy, giving it the breath of life, will make it become a living soul.

There is one way, however, that Corky may have someone to be his new transference for idealization: Peggy. His crush on her may have originally been an Oedipal transference; as for now, many years later, whether based on the original Oedipal narcissistic trauma or not, his infatuation with her can still be a new idealization, making it possible for him to reestablish that pole so he needn’t depend on the pole of the grandiose self, making Fats no longer necessary.

This is why Corky is so keen on finding Peggy in the Catskills and resuming a relationship with her, even to the point of seducing her with a card trick and persuading her to get out of her unhappy marriage to Duke (Lauter). Corky knows Fats is bad for him; his narcissism is split and pathological–his grandiose self isn’t integrated with his realistic self (the regular, timid Corky)–but a renewed relationship with her just might bring about that oh, so needed integration. “Fats” won’t have that, though, and so the projected grandiose self will try to sabotage Corky’s relationship with Peggy.

Corky’s discussion with Peggy about Merlin’s “telepathy” with his wife is interesting. Just before his wife died, Merlin claimed he could read her mind. Goldsmith’s eerie, atmosphere music comes in at this point in the scene, suggesting a link between this telepathy idea and Corky’s wavering mental state. He admits he perhaps wants to believe in Merlin’s telepathy, since he imagines this telepathy between husband and wife shows how much they cared about each other.

This scene, of Corky’s discussion with Peggy about Merlin’s telepathy, can be linked to an earlier one of Corky holding a photo of Merlin, in the corner of which is a small photo of a woman, presumably the wife, since she’s neither Peggy nor Corky’s mother. If Merlin was a father transference for Corky, then perhaps the wife was a mother transference, too. A belief in telepathy can mean, for Corky, a way of feeling a stronger bond with those selfobjects (to use another term from Kohut) that he has, with an idealized parental imago, or with his projected grandiose self.

On the one hand, therefore, his use of the card trick on Peggy, to prove he may have a telepathic connection with her, is not just to seduce her, but also to prove he cares for and loves her; it’s also to establish her as a new selfobject for idealization. For on the other hand, Corky’s belief, or wish to believe, in telepathy is also the basis for his delusion that he’s having real conversations and exchanges of ideas with Fats; he knows ‘Fats’s’ thoughts, and so he can communicate with him. Fats, as his projected grandiose self, is another selfobject he needs as a source of narcissistic feeling, of the experience of continuity, coherence, and well-being (or, at least, as he can understand these in his delusional way).

So when he does the card trick with her, and he at first fails to guess the correct card in her hand, he gets rattled; for this failure suggests the unreality of telepathy, which would destroy the edifice of his delusional belief in a living Fats. It would also weaken his hopes of a strong bond with Peggy. Corky’s failure would thus lead to the loss of both selfobjects, leaving him with neither pole functioning, and he would descend into fragmentation and total psychosis.

He succeeds on the second try with the telepathy/card trick, though, and presumably it’s because of some trick, some form of “misdirection,” as Greene calls the basis of any magic trick–a distracting of the audience while the magician creates the illusion of magic. The fact, nonetheless, that Corky gets so emotional about succeeding or failing at “telepathy” shows that he really believes, or at least needs to believe, in it, as the basis of his delusional thinking about selfobjects like Fats.

Corky and Peggy make love, which is the first time she’s ever cheated on Duke, who is away on business. After Greene finds Corky and discovers his delusions about Fats, Corky has to kill him to stop him from seeking psychiatric help for him. Then Duke returns to Peggy, and he immediately has Othello feelings about Corky.

And in the introduction of Duke to the story, we see the further development of the theme of jealousy in Magic. We’ve already seen the jealousy of “Fats” towards Peggy and in Corky’s wish to be with her, him seeing her as his new selfobject of idealization, she who is replacing Merlin and his wife as such selfobjects, who in turn replaced Corky’s parents as such. As for his relationship with his parents-as-selfobjects of idealization, it is the nature of the Oedipus complex for the child to be narcissistically jealous of one parent having the Oedipally-desired other parent, this latter one whom the child wants to hog all to himself.

In Corky’s new parental transference with Peggy, Duke is in the role of father-transference, and Corky must get rid of him, too; for just as Duke is jealous of Corky getting his hands on Peggy (as a threatened father would feel by his son in the Laius complex), Corky is equally jealous of Duke not letting him hog Peggy all to himself.

Now, just as Corky has used the body of Fats to bludgeon Greene, so does he hide behind Fats’s body to stab Duke. He kills Duke not just out of the jealousy I’ve just described, but also because Duke has learned that Greene, whose drowned body he discovered in the lake, was Corky’s agent, after Corky denied knowing who Greene was, and therefore that Corky must have killed him [suspicious of Corky, Duke has rummaged around the room Corky is staying in and has found Greene’s identification hidden in one of Corky’s drawers].

In Corky’s mind, it’s Fats who has committed the murders of Greene and Duke, not himself, for Corky is projecting not only his grandiose self onto Fats (to the point of splitting it off and forming a separate personality), but he’s also projecting his murderous impulses onto the dummy.

Next, Corky must confront Fats in its “jealousy” over Peggy. Corky wants to elope with her, but she feels she owes it to Duke to tell him she’s leaving him first. (She, of course, doesn’t know that Corky has killed him.) Corky just wants to leave with her right away, imagining that his physical distance from the dummy will keep him safe from the split-off personality and its increasing manipulation of him.

Indeed, to get back to Duke when he was alive, it’s ironic that he, upon discovering Greene’s body on the shore of the lake, has tried to give the body the “kiss of life,” as he calls it, to make Greene’s body a living soul, and of course fails; on the other hand, Corky’s throwing of his voice for Fats, that harmonica breathing, if you will, has successfully made the dummy into a living soul (according to Corky’s delusions). Now, it is around the time when Corky’s hopes for eloping with Peggy are at their highest when we finally hear a single-tone melody on the harmonica, breathing the “kiss of life” into it and bringing it to musical life. Corky thinks he can just leave with Peggy and ignore Fats’s threats of confessing the murders.

Of course, dressed almost exactly like Fats now, Corky cannot psychologically separate himself from the dummy. His insistence of running away with Peggy has pushed Fats, in its “jealousy,” to make the split-off personality not only tell Peggy that Corky’s card trick was just to seduce her, upsetting her and making her want to leave him, but also to command Corky to kill her with that knife. It is here where Corky really falls apart.

He cannot get rid of his split-off grandiose self, now a multiple murderer, and he cannot be with his new selfobject of idealization. He’s been reintegrating the grandiose self, as we can see in the near-identical clothes, but it will dominate Corky. The roles are reversed: the dummy is making Corky move, as he imagines. Will it make him stab Peggy?

While in the middle of his psychotic frenzy, he presses his face against a mirror with a wild look on his face; when he collapses on the floor upon, we assume, complying with Fats’s command to kill her, we see the dummy in the reflection, for Corky and Fats are now one. Corky as Fats–doing his voice without the dummy present when he visits Peggy in her house–is clearly him being a dummy in more ways than one, so severe is his delusional state.

As it turns out, though, he doesn’t end up using the knife to carve her, but instead to carve a wooden heart as a gift for her. And as for a stabbing, Corky/Fats sticks the knife in his own gut, for the only way Fats can die is if Corky dies with him. It doesn’t matter how much one tries to project an unwanted part of oneself; that unwanted part will always be within oneself.

Peggy, loving the wooden heart and forgiving Corky, will be heartbroken to discover his suicide.

Analysis of ‘Eyes Without a Face’

Eyes Without a Face (Les jeux sans visage) is a 1960 French horror film directed by Georges Franju and written by Boileau-Narcejac, Jean Redon, Claude Sautet and Pierre Gascar, based on Redon’s 1959 novel. The film stars Pierre Brasseur, Alida Valli, Juliette Mayniel, and Edith Scob.

The response during the film’s initial theatrical release was not all positive, with controversy in Europe over the gore, which even though minimized to satisfy the censors, still caused a reaction of disgust from some critics. When released in the US, the film was oddly renamed The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, and shown in a double bill with the 1959 Japanese-American horror film, The Manster.

Over the years, though, EWaF‘s critical reputation has improved, with contemporary critics praising the film’s poetic approach to horror, as well noting its influence on other movies (Halloween, Face/Off, and The Skin I Live In, to name a few examples; EWaF even inspired the Billy Idol song of the same name). The film is thus now considered one of the greatest and most influential horror films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the movie (in English translation). Here are links to the full movie (this one, though colourized and breaking down a few times, at least has the English subtitles synchronized with the French speaking).

The film begins with a kind of eerie carnival- or circus-like music during the opening credits, suggesting how the two villains of the movie are playing a macabre game on their unsuspecting young female victims. One of those villains, Louise (Valli), is driving a car outside of Paris at night with a tense look on her face; in the back seat is the faceless corpse of a girl Louise is about to dump in the river. Her driving out at night is a journey into the darkness, a losing of one’s way, metaphorically speaking, that sets the tone for the film.

The next day, Dr. Génessier (Brasseur)–the man who surgically removed the facial skin of the girl in a failed attempt to graft it onto the face of his daughter, Christiane (Scob), whose face has been disfigured after a car accident–is giving a lecture on skin grafts to an audience including women in awe and admiration of his abilities. Ever cool and emotionally detached in his attitude, the doctor leaves the admiring women thus to discuss, with the police, the discovery of what seems to be the corpse of Christiane (actually, it’s the body of the girl Louise dumped in the river).

Génessier (his name a pun on Genèse, or Genesis) fancies himself on the verge of a scientific and medical miracle: the transplanting of skin onto other people’s faces, as he has successfully done to Louise, and so he hopes, with utter determination, to do so for his daughter. The doctor thus has a God complex, playing God in changing the Chaos of his daughter’s disfigured face into the form of a new, pretty one, then looking on his work and seeing that it is good.

Christiane, whose name is an obvious pun on Christ, is the suffering servant, if you will, of her narcissistic “God the Father.” Her disfigured face would thus be like the bloody face of Jesus with the crown of thorns on his head. She’d rather die, yet her father keeps her ‘resurrected’ (even while she’s legally dead, with the body of the other girl buried in Christiane’s place at ‘her’ funeral, so no one other than her father and Louise knows she’s still alive) so Génessier can continue attempting grafts using the facial skin of other girls whom Louise will find for him and lure to his house.

He keeps Christiane’s despair alive, ironically, by keeping her hope alive…then frustrating it (if unintentionally) with his every failed skin graft. He tries to comfort her by telling her to keep faith in him, that one day, he’ll finally get it right; yet his version of faith, hope, and love, which would abide forever, is instead an eternal despair and self-loathing for her.

Until a successful graft is achieved, she has to wear an expressionless white mask, one that inspired the Shatner mask that Michael Myers wears in the Halloween franchise. And yet though she is disfigured, Christiane is no monster: she’s a gentle, kind-hearted soul, full of empathy and compassion. She loves, for example, the many stray dogs Génessier is holding captive for his medical experiments. Indeed, it is he who is the monster, a kind of combination of Dr. Victor Frankenstein (in his attempts to bring her to life, as it were) and the Frankenstein monster (in soul, if not in body).

For all of his supposed love of Christiane, Génessier is really doing the surgeries for his own vanity. As a typical narcissist, the doctor sees his daughter as an extension of himself. Seeing her disfigured face, he doesn’t feel compassion for her, but rather a wound to his own ego. When he looks at her, he’s looking into a metaphorical mirror. He has lost face figuratively, just as she has lost face literally.

Speaking of mirrors, all of those in his house have been removed, but she can still see her faceless face in other reflections–in glass, etc. He would have her wear her mask as a habit, though she doesn’t like wearing it, calling it more frightening than her disfigured face. The mask is to shield his eyes, not hers, from her disfigurement, for it reminds him of the fact that it was his fault she is disfigured: the car accident happened because he was driving too fast at the time. He doesn’t feel guilt over it, though–as a typical narcissist, he feels shame over it.

Also as is typical with narcissists, Génessier wants to have control over everyone and everything. When he was driving like a lunatic, he even wanted control of the road, so Christiane complains to Louise. Similarly, he wants control of Christiane [he even tries to control her smile later in the film, not wanting her to smile too much, after a temporarily successful graft] and Louise, as well as of all the dogs he has in captivity. There is a clear parallel between the two women and the dogs: the former are in a metaphorical cage, the latter in literal ones, as are some doves they have in the house. Christiane is what society, with its cruelly high standards of beauty, would call a “dog” because of her disfigurement, and accordingly, she is in a cage of her own.

At the funeral supposedly for Christiane, Louise feels a pang of conscience about the girl who really died, and she says she cannot go on doing what the doctor would have her do–find more girls for him to remove their facial skin. He slaps her and angrily tells her to be quiet. It’s clear he’s using Louise out of her sense of obligation to help him, since he repaired her face, and she wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful to him; so she’s in a cage of her own, too. She wears a choker pearl necklace to hide a surgical scar on her neck.

With his stony, cold expression, a truly ugly face, it’s also clear that he cares only about himself, not his daughter’s happiness. For in removing the faces of other pretty girls to put on Christiane’s, he may be restoring her beauty (if successful, which he ultimately never is), but he’s also destroying the beauty and lives of these other girls, something the doctor obviously doesn’t care about, despite his cool admission that he’s done much wrong in trying to restore Christiane’s face, a mere paying of lip service about his crimes.

Indeed, the father of the first victim, a girl named Simone, asks about the body discovered by the police, asking Génessier if he’s sure that it’s Christiane’s, and not Simone’s. Knowing full well he’s killed the man’s daughter, the doctor lies that the discovered body is Christiane’s, then abruptly leaves Simone’s father, icily saying the man still has hope of finding the girl (when, of course, he has no such hope at all).

EWaF, in a larger sense, can be seen as a social commentary on the pressures put on women to be beautiful, men’s preference of that beauty obviously being a huge source of that pressure. Génessier, as the head of Christiane’s patriarchal family, thus personifies that male preference of beauty.

Christiane doesn’t necessarily have to be beautiful, of course–she just needs to be loved. As one of her father’s latest experiments, she isn’t being particularly loved by him. She misses her fiancé, Jacques Vernon (played by François Guérin), her father’s medical associate (in the hospital nearby Génessier’s house) who assumes she’s dead as does everyone else. Even if she were to get a new face, how could she be with Jacques again? Discovery of her still being alive would lead to a new police investigation, the discovery that the faceless corpse is Simone’s, and criminal charges against Génessier.

Christiane yearns so much to be with Jacques again, to hear his voice, that she has a habit of phoning him, just to hear him talk; yet not daring to let him know it’s her on the other end, she cannot say anything. He just ends up being annoyed at the silence after his asking who the caller is, and he hangs up.

During the time leading up to the first of these phone calls, and starting with Louise having put the mask on Christiane, we hear some plaintive soundtrack music in C minor and in triple time, as she wanders about the house alone, seeing a photo of Jacques. Indeed, for a horror movie, EWaF has an overall sad tone to it, like George A. Romero‘s Martin. The scene ends with her seeing a painting of her former self with a dove on her hand. She looks wistfully at the picture, longing for the freedom she sees in it.

Louise goes out to Paris to find the next victim, a Swiss girl named Edna Grüber (Mayniel). As Louise befriends and charms Edna, soon offering a place for the college girl to stay while studying away from home, we hear that carnival/circus music again (“Générique“), for the game is being resumed.

Louise drives Edna to Génessier’s big, beautiful home out in the country, a charming place surrounded by trees, yet its distance from Paris is a problem for the university student. When she arrives at the house and hears all the dogs barking, this is an ill omen for her, and she’s having second thoughts.

When Edna is introduced to Génessier, Louise lies and calls him “M. Dormeuil,” a pun on dormir, “to sleep,” for indeed, Edna will soon be put to sleep with a cloth, soaked in chloroform, pressed against her face. Edna, after realizing what will have been done to her, will later die by suicide from a jump from a window on an upper floor of the house…”to die, to sleep, no more.” Dr. Génessier, the would-be bringer of the genesis of life, is actually Dr. Dormeuil, bringer of “that sleep of death” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene I).

What is the most unsettling scene in the whole movie is soon to come: Edna’s surgery to remove her facial skin, shown in agonizing, graphic detail, in real time. Génessier, assisted by Louise, of course, draws a line around Edna’s face to mark where he’ll cut the skin, and he draws circles around the eyes, too. We see the actual cutting and removal of the skin, ending the scene with a brief shot of the bloody interior of what was Edna’s face.

This infamous scene is what makes EWaF truly a horror film. At its screening at the 1960 Edinburgh Film Festival, seven audience members fainted during the surgery scene, and countless others walked out. When learning of the fainting, Franju quipped, “Now I know why Scotsmen wear skirts.”

Just before the surgery scene–in which Génessier and Louise maintain cold looks on their faces as they proceed to ruin Edna’s–we see Christiane wandering about, visiting the dogs in their cages. She pets several of them, showing them love and affection, an empathy and compassion sharply contrasted with the cold, clinical attitude of her father and Louise.

After seeing the dogs, Christiane goes into the operating room to see Edna, still unconscious and lying on an operating table. She comes close to Edna’s coveted, pretty face, and when she touches it, Edna wakes up. Now, Christiane has already removed her mask, so Edna sees in horror what’s up until this point been kept from us, the audience–how Christiane’s disfigured face actually looks: dark, skinless, scarred, and grotesque. Edna screams at an image that will soon be a mirror for her; Christiane also sees a soon-to-be mirror, for that face will soon be her new one, if only temporarily.

This mirror symbolism is important, for in seeing each other, the girls will identify with each other, too–Edna committing suicide (as Christiane has wanted to do), and Christiane gaining compassion for any future victims.

Indeed, when Christiane has Edna’s facial skin on, and she finally looks normal–if only for a time–she sees Edna’s face rather than her own in the mirror. It’s almost as if Edna is looking back at her. Christiane may be pretty again, but she still isn’t free. She also wants to be alive for Jacques, yet she’ll have to have a brand new identity, and all she wants to be is herself.

Edna’s body is put with Simone’s in the grave of ‘Christiane.’ If Christiane represents Christ, and Génessier represents the God of the Genesis creation story, then Simone (and Edna) can be seen to represent the one who some Gnostics believed was substituted for Christ on the Cross, Simon of Cyrene. This would in turn make Génessier the Demiurge creator of the physical world, whom the Gnostics often characterized as an evil god, that of the flesh as opposed to that of the spirit.

Génessier is not, however, the only man in this film who is using a female to further his interests and imperiling her to the point of possibly having her face cut off. The police have apprehended a girl caught shoplifting, and as their suspicions about Génessier mount, which include Jacques believing he’s heard the voice of Christiane on the phone, they want this girl, Paulette Mérodon (played by Béatrice Altariba), to dye her hair blonde to make her look more like the two missing girls and thus entice the predatory doctor to go after her. After all, Jacques having noticed–at the funeral–the pearl choker necklace high on the neck of the doctor’s assistant, Louise, matches the testimony of someone who’d heard Edna say Louise always wore that distinctive necklace.

Anyway, Christiane’s new skin soon begins to waste away, and so her father will have to find a new victim for another attempt at a graft. Pauline, with her hair dyed blonde, is sent to Génessier’s hospital, pretending to have migraines. The doctor will see her there, regard her face as a suitable one for the next graft, and have Louise ready to pick her up in her car just after Pauline has been discharged from the hospital.

Meanwhile, Christiane has not only lost hope in her father’s attempts to restore her face: she’s also grown a sense of moral disgust at what he’s been doing to these poor girls. She can’t bear to sit idly by and let other girls suffer the loss that she has suffered.

So while Génessier–called back to the hospital to discuss Pauline’s disappearance with the police, and therefore interrupted from the surgery in the nick of time–is absent from the operating room, Christiane takes a knife and cuts a wakened and terrified Pauline free from her restraining straps on the operating table. Then, when Louise returns to the operating room and demands that Christiane stop what she’s doing, the latter uses the knife to stab the former in the neck–fittingly, right where the surgical cut has been hidden behind the necklace–killing Louise.

Then, Christiane goes to the room with all the dogs in their cages, and she frees all of them. She also frees the doves in a large cage nearby. She’s freed all of these animals, as she freed Pauline, because of course she identifies with all of them. In freeing them, she’s freeing herself, for she’s accepted her appearance as it is; she no longer wants or needs a new pretty face, stolen from another victim.

The dogs, in their rage over how Génessier has treated them, run outside with his having returned and opened the door into their room, and they attack and kill him.

Christiane also comes out the same way with the doves flying after her, one of them resting on her hand as in the picture mentioned above. Just as she represents Christ as God the Son (or in her case, God the Daughter), so do the doves represent God the Holy Spirit. As for the Father…well, God is dead, as is the rule of the patriarchal family hitherto dominating her and insisting that she be ‘pretty’ again.

She disregards his bloody corpse and walks into the neighbouring forest with the doves fluttering by. She’s free because, even with the mask covering her disfigured face, she’s truly beautiful inside, with her good, compassionate heart. Even when the police (after the end of the film) presumably connect her with the stabbing of Louise, a self-defence plea (and defence of Pauline) should be easy, given the extreme nature of Génessier’s crimes, with Louise as his accomplice, and the compassion that should be felt by a jury for long-suffering Christiane.

Her acquittal will be her Ascension.

Analysis of ‘Naked Lunch’

I: Introduction

Naked Lunch is a 1959 novel by William S Burroughs, adapted into a film by David Cronenberg in 1991, which starred Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, and Roy Scheider. The film is hardly an adaptation at all, since it uses mostly odds and ends from the book, while also adding elements from other writing by Burroughs, as well as biographical elements of his. Indeed, the film is more to the spirit than to the letter of the book, since a faithful adaptation would have been impossible: it would have been far too expensive, its lack of a coherent, linear plot would have baffled audiences, and it would have been banned in many, if not most or all, countries for obscenity.

Indeed, as a seminal work of the Beat Generation, NL (originally The Naked Lunch) was notorious for its use of four-letter words, blatant expression of (particularly gay) sexuality, and candid descriptions of drug abuse. A Boston obscenity trial initially resulted in the banning of the book, though awareness of its obvious literary merits as having redeeming social value would soon overturn the banning. As a result, NL has become immeasurably influential.

I’ll first be looking at the film adaptation, since that will be easier, all the while making comparisons and contrasts with the novel. Then I’ll delve into the book, hitting on highlights of it and giving my interpretations of them, since a point-for-point analysis of every detail will be as impossible as making a film of it all.

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

II: The Film

The music we hear during the opening credits and throughout, composed by Howard Shore, is brooding strings, with fittingly free-jazz style saxophone soloing by Ornette Coleman. It gives off a film noir aura as well as a sense of the kind of music Beat Generation writers like Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg would have dug; the atonal, avant-garde nature of the sax playing also fits in with the surrealism of so much of what is seen in the film.

The notion of William Lee (Weller) as a pest exterminator is nowhere to be found in the book. Actually, Cronenberg got the idea from Burroughs’s short story, “Exterminator!” Furthermore, very little of that actual story is even used in the film, apart from Lee’s boss complaining, in a thick Yiddish accent, that maybe Lee would like him to spit in his face. The rest of this pest exterminator aspect of the first act of the film is more built around this short story than directly coming from it.

Lee, based on Burroughs, is in trouble at work because he ran out of bug powder when doing a job. It turns out that his wife, Joan (Davis), has been using the bug powder as a heroin-like drug to get high on.

Why does she like it? It gives her “a very literary high…It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” This of course is an allusion to The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka, in which the protagonist, Gregor Samsa, wakes up one morning transformed into a giant insect (commonly depicted as a cockroach, like most of the bugs Lee is to kill with his bug powder). Unable to go to work anymore, and causing his family nothing but revulsion, Samsa is eventually left to starve to death while others in the family have to provide for them financially. It’s a classic tale of modern alienation.

In this way, we can see how Samsa’s predicament fits in with that of the drug addicts in the film adaptation and the novel. They feel like bugs: useless, revolting pests that need to be got rid of. The bug powder itself is a toxin, of course, representative of how destructive narcotics are.

One “routine” (as Burroughs called the stories in his novel) called “The Exterminator Does a Good Job,” has a line or two suggesting this idea of using a yellow bug powder, “yellow pyretheum powder,” for the secondary purpose of a heroin-like drug: “He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.” Then: “At one brief point of intersection I did exercise that function and witnessed the belly dance of roaches suﬀocating in yellow pyretheum powder (‘Hard to get now, lady … war on. Let you have a little.… Two dollars.’)”

Unlike the Lee of the novel, who starts off being chased by a cop for his drug abuse, leaving the US for Mexico and thence to Interzone, the Lee of the film comes off as a straight (in all senses), conservative man who likes his job, fears losing it and just wants to play by the rules. It’s his wife’s new bug powder habit that pulls him (back) into the marginalized life of the junkie, which in turn leads him to a life of generalized vice, including a sexual relationship with a gay teen boy named Kiki (played by Joseph Scorsiani) in Interzone. Lee has been transformed into a bug: unable to work, despised by society.

Apart from the bad influence of his slovenly wife, though, Lee’s reasons for his descent into the sordid world of drug addiction and pederasty are centred around his sense of alienation as a worker, and alienation from society in general. When his boss crabs at him about having run out of bug powder in the middle of a job, not yet knowing the lack of powder is his junkie housewife’s fault, Lee assumes that a Chinese coworker (whom everyone calls a “Chink”) gave him too little bug powder. In his and the other workers’ racism against the Chinese coworker, we can see one of many examples of worker alienation.

In another scene, Lee unsuccessfully tries to steal a container of bug powder from a coworker (whose voice will later be heard from the anus on the back of a large cockroach/typewriter) for his and Joan’s use. More antagonism and competition between workers for resources.

Lee earlier was tipped off about his wife’s new, peculiar habit by his two friends, Hank (played by Nicholas Campbell) and Martin (played by Michael Zelniker). Just as Lee represents Burroughs (and just as Joan Lee represents Joan Vollmer, Burroughs’s common-law wife, who was accidentally shot and killed by him in a drunken game of “William Tell” in Mexico City), so do Hank and Martin respectively represent Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.

Hank and Martin are introduced debating whether writing should flow spontaneously and without editing (Hank’s position), or if it should be thoroughly rewritten many times to consider every possible angle for it (Martin’s position). When Lee joins them and hears their reasoning, his choice of words is significant: “Exterminate all rational thought.” He also says he gave up on writing when he was ten.

These two points he makes give us insight into his mind. The strait-laced conservative we see in Lee is a façade hiding his repressed urge to be like Hank and Martin. (We never see this kind of conservative façade in the Lee of the novel.) He’s so preoccupied with his ‘good job’ that he uses the language of that job. He gave up his dreams of developing his literary creativity at an early age.

Of course, the greatest repression of all for Lee is his homosexuality. Marrying Joan is part of keeping himself in the closet, just as the extermination job is a conservative cover for the bohemian, radical things he’d like to do with Hank and Martin. As we learn from his having been apprehended by cops Hauser (played by John Frisen) and O’Brien (played by Sean McCann), Lee had a problem with drug abuse in the past, his current conservative façade being an attempt to put all of that behind him.

Now, Hauser and O’Brien do appear in the novel, towards the very end; but instead of finding a ‘reformed’ Lee, the cops find him in the act of shooting up in his home. He escapes their custody as he does in the film, but in the novel, he does so by shooting them, running off to find more dope with a friend; while in the film, Lee uses his shoe to crush a talking anus/cockroach in the police station.

His urge to put a (phallic) needle in his vein can be seen as a substitute for his unconscious gay wish to be anally penetrated by a man. Similarly, Joan’s shooting up of her husband’s bug powder represents her wish to be sexually penetrated by him, when he obviously isn’t doing it for her. No wonder we see Hank banging her when Lee comes home, Lee not caring at all. While this is happening, Martin is reciting something that sounds like it could be a passage from Ginsberg’s “Howl” (actually, it’s a passage right from NL).

The giant cockroach with the talking anus on its back, which later will also incorporate a typewriter keyboard on its face, is a fascinating image to psychoanalyze. Let’s start with all of the elements it incorporates and merges: a bug to be killed with Lee’s bug powder; a body part, typically sexualized by male homosexuals, elevated as a part-object to a kind of talking consciousness (connect this with the famous story of “The Man Who Taught His Asshole to Talk”), and speaking with the voice of one of Lee’s coworkers, Edward, the one he tried to steal the container of bug powder from (the voice being that of Peter Boretski); and the keyboard of what Lee would use to be an author.

In this creature we see a fusion of a number of Lee’s contradictory desires, a masterpiece of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment. There’s its existence as a reason for him to have ‘the best job he’s ever had’–accordingly, he crushes it with his shoe in the police station, and the typewriter version he has in Interzone is also taken from him and ‘tortured,’ rendered essentially unusable…though he’s more conflicted about the damage done to it, since as a writer and resident in Interzone, he is now dissociating from his pest exterminator job and more fully coming to accept his identity as a homosexual/junkie/writer.

Since the male anus is typically sexualized by gay men, it becomes fetishized as a part-object, the way the mother’s breast is for a baby (in the Kleinian sense), treated as a full object in its own right, as if a complete person–hence the talking anus that takes over the man’s body, as in the story (to be discussed in full below). Giving it Edward’s voice manages to merge the sexual wish fulfillment with the wish to remain employed by the extermination company.

The third part of the wish fulfillment, to be realized in Lee’s drug-hallucinations while in Interzone, is the incorporation of a typewriter keyboard on the giant cockroach’s face. Though Lee ‘gave up writing when he was ten,’ this was just a repression of something he deep-down needed to do. If he was truly not at all interested in writing literature, then why would Lee hang out with aspiring writers, Hank and Martin? Lee’s association with those two is the return of the repressed, in a form unrecognizable to his conscious mind, of his undying wish to be a writer.

Sprinkling the bug powder on the bug’s “lips”…later, on Joan’s lips…thus giving both of them the sensuous pleasure and the high of the drug, is again a fusion of wish fulfillments to give pleasure, sexual stimulation, and a high to both sexual objects (and satisfying Joan in a way Lee cannot do genitally), as well as killing them, since the bug powder is of course a toxin–he’s doing his ‘great job’ as pest exterminator, and he’s knocking off his wife (who feels like a Samsa-bug while high) so he can be free to be gay.

Killing Joan leads to the next important plot development. This ‘accidental’ shooting her in the head instead of the bullet hitting the glass on her head is a classic parapraxis, done shortly after Lee’s having seen Hank on top of her on the couch at home. The fact that the giant cockroach told him she is an enemy agent of Interzone, Inc., who must be killed, is another example of hallucinatory wish-fulfillment on Lee’s part. The cockroach suggesting that Joan isn’t even human is more wish fulfillment, making it easier for him to kill her.

Because of Lee’s newly-acquired habit of using bug powder as a narcotic, he has been given–by Edward–the name card of Dr. Benway (Scheider) to help him be rid of his addiction. Benway is seen only twice in the film: first, in his office and appearing as if a perfectly decent, normal man giving Lee something to end his addiction; then, towards the end of the film, in his Fadela disguise and more like the unscrupulous psychopath of the novel. Apart from these two appearances, Benway is only referred to a number of times in the film. In the novel, he appears on a number of occasions in person, demonstrating his sadism, among other things.

Just as Burroughs had to flee Mexico for having killed Joan Vollmer, so does Lee have to leave the US for killing Joan Lee. He’ll hop on a plane and go to Interzone, in North Africa.

In Interzone, where Lee will be free to indulge in drug use and gay sex, as well as to write what will eventually become the novel Naked Lunch (all in the guise of ‘reports,’ with him imagining himself to be an ‘agent’), he will finally be able to be his true self, no longer the false self of being an exterminator and a straight, married man. In this change of his character, we can see the meaning of Burroughs’s famous dictum from the section of NL that begins with “I can feel the heat closing in,” namely, this–“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: The Mark Inside.” (This is also quoted at the beginning of the film.)

The hustler, being a con man or addict, can make a mark–the victim of a con game–of anyone, that is, a hustler can manipulate or take advantage of anyone else. The hustler cannot, however, succeed in fooling the mark inside himself. Lee tried to pretend to be a straight, conformist American with a normal job and a wife. He was like a hustler trying to deceive the mark inside himself with his false self, and as a result of that deception, he lacked spontaneity and felt dead and empty behind his façade, as DW Winnicott had observed of such people. This is why Weller’s acting in the film shows a Lee largely bereft of emotion in the first act of the film. Only later on, as he returns to a sense of his true self in Interzone, does he start showing true emotions.

“Interzone” is based on the Tangier International Zone, where Burroughs lived in the 1950s and wrote NL. He went there in 1954, just after the publication of Junkie, his first novel. The appeal of the place for him lay in the fact that it had a reputation for allowing drug use and homosexuality, so his intention there was to “steep [him]self in vice.” Accordingly, he became severely addicted to Eukodal there, eventually using the drug every two hours, and he had a sexual relationship with a teen boy named Kiki, this relationship being one of the biographical elements of the film.

Another biographical element of the film is Lee’s friendship with Hank and Martin, all three of them representing Burroughs, Kerouac, and Ginsberg respectively, as I mentioned above. So when we see the scene in the film of Hank and Martin visiting Lee in Interzone and encouraging him to finish writing NL, this represents Burroughs having mailed early drafts of his novel to his friends Kerouac and Ginsberg. Similarly, Hanks says that the book he’s working on is as “American as football,” so he has to go back to the US and finish it there; presumably, the book he’s talking about is Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road.

While in Tangier, Burroughs noted the political tensions between the Moroccan nationalists and the French authorities. He tried to be politically neutral about the situation, but he was a vocal critic of the brutality of European imperialism on the one hand, while also worrying about how Islamic rule might limit individual freedom on the other. The film’s references to ‘enemy agents,’ and the novel’s discussions of “Islam, Inc.”, as well as Interzone’s four rival political parties–Liquefactionists, Senders, Divisionists, and Factualists–all seem to be NL‘s way of representing the political conflicts in the Tangier International Zone. (I’ll be discussing the four rival parties in the third section of this post, The Novel, below.)

Though I am probably oversimplifying here, Burroughs’s political views can be described as libertarian socialist and individualist anarchist. He hated capitalism, yet he also hated the state in all of its forms, whether right or left-wing. Overall, he hated all forms of power and control over people, so drug abuse as it appears in the novel and film, as well as the machinations of such villains as Dr. Benway, all are reflective and/or metaphorical of such systems of social control.

To get back to the film, we note the switch from bug powder to that of the Brazilian giant aquatic black centipede…the Black Meat. It symbolizes the ultimate, most destructive nature of addiction (the powder is given to Lee in the film by none other than Benway as a ‘cure’ for the bug powder addiction), but in its length and size, the centipede is also phallic and therefore linked symbolically with Lee’s homosexuality.

When Benway mixes the black centipede powder in with the yellow bug powder so that the black is unseen within the yellow, he tells Lee that the new, mixed powder is like an agent who has come to believe his own cover story, hiding there, in a larval state, waiting for the right time “to hatch out.” Of course, Benway is in part speaking of himself, since the character will appear in Interzone as Fadela (played by Monique Mercure), whose name sounds like an ironic pun on Fidelio, for Benway is anything but trustworthy.

In Interzone, apart from Kiki, Lee will meet Tom Frost (Holm), a character based on writer Paul Bowles, and his wife, Joan Frost (Davis again…could this Joan also be based on Jane Bowles?), who is a dead [!] ringer for Joan Lee. The thing about ‘typing reports’ as an ‘agent,’ which in Lee’s hallucinatory drug state is a cover for the fact that he’s really writing NL, is that writing is a kind of therapy, something Lee needs to do to heal from the guilt and trauma over having killed his wife. Seeing her ‘clone,’ as it were, in Frost’s wife just reinforces the trauma, hence his helping her type something in the Frost apartment, then making love with her there.

Frost seems to find writing and typing to be therapeutic, too, for when without a typewriter, he feels “desperately insecure,” and so when he’s been without his Martinelli typewriter for too long after having lent it to Lee, Frost goes to Lee’s apartment and demands to have it back at gunpoint. (In many ways, Frost is a double of Lee: both have a version of Joan as a wife, whom they unconsciously want to kill [recall the scene with Frost’s confessions to Lee about this unconscious wish while his moving lips are saying something else], and both use writing as psychological therapy. Frost even has a male Arab companion, as Lee has with Kiki.) Lee will eventually give Frost a special, new typewriter in the form of a Mugwump head…which leads me to a discussion of our next topic.

The Mugwumps of the novel and those of the film are quite different–in appearance, manner, and symbolism. Those of the film have big blue eyes, bluish skin, and are more humanoid than those of the novel, while still slick and alien-looking. Those of the novel have beaks, white oily skin, no liver, and are monstrous and non-human.

Both kinds of Mugwump secrete an addictive drug, “Mugwump jism.” In the novel, the ‘jism’ comes from a Mugwump’s penis, naturally. This of course would have been too much to show onscreen without the film being banned, so instead, the jism spews out of phallic tubes in the Mugwumps’ heads.

In the novel, Mugwumps represent pure degradation, exploitation, and the body horror of addiction. In the film, they seem more benevolent and likable, in spite of how addictive their jism still is, because here they’re more linked to sexual ambivalence (as Kiki points out to Lee) and creativity (recall the Mugwump head/ typewriter above) than mere addiction. Significantly, the film’s Benway/Fadela is promoting Mugwump jism like a mafia drug lord.

Let’s skip ahead in the movie to the scene when Lee is in a car at night with Yves Cloquet (played by Julian Sands) and Kiki, and Lee is telling them the famous story of “the man who taught his asshole to talk.” (In the novel, it’s Dr. Benway, in the section called “Ordinary Men and Women,” who tells the story.) Frank Zappa, not normally a great reader of literature (he was far too obsessed with his music to make time for it), found Burroughs’s story so amusing that he even asked for and got permission to read it aloud publicly.

What’s particularly interesting about the talking anus story, apart from how obviously amusing it is, is how it attempts to place one of the lowest, dirtiest, and most animalistic parts of the human body up among the highest parts, the mouth, associated with speech, the expression of ideas, and therefore linked with the intellect. It sounds absurd to hear that the asshole wants “equal rights” with the mouth, and to be loved, but we should consider the implications of that from a symbolic standpoint.

The mouth represents the bourgeoisie and the anus represents the proletariat–dirty, despised, and down below. At first, the talking asshole acts as a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy in an amusing act to be performed before a laughing audience. The asshole starts to take over the body, causing the mouth at first to try to make the asshole shut up, but ultimately failing.

This conflict between the mouth and the anus is representative thus of class conflict. When the asshole tells the mouth that it’s the latter “who will shut up in the end,” this would represent a proletarian revolution.

Now, as I’ve said above, Burroughs did have socialist sympathies, but of course he was no tankie, so he wouldn’t have liked the state Soviet system of the USSR or the Eastern Bloc anymore than the CIA did. So when the asshole fully takes over the body, creating, in effect, the equivalent of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the story starts to take an Orwellian, Animal Farm-like quality, with the mouth “sealed over.”

The man would have lost his head completely, except that the asshole still needs the eyes. However, “nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more.” The brain is trapped in the skull, sealed off. Then the brain seems to have died, and the eyes go out. So our story has an unhappy ending, with the asshole being an Orwellian version of Stalin, or Napoleon from Orwell’s novella.

Burroughs mentioned that the story is meant to be an allegory of the insidious effects of the ever-expanding bureaucracy. One should note, though, that no one in politics likes the meddlesome bureaucracy; not even Lenin or Stalin were happy with it–the problem is that it’s so difficult to get rid of it.

Being in Cloquet’s place now, he also being gay, he wants to get his hands on Kiki. While he’s having the boy, Lee drinks up from a little jar of Mugwump jism, having already gotten information from Cloquet that he’ll find Benway through Fadela. Lee will find Cloquet aggressively sodomizing Kiki in his bird-filled bedroom, but Lee’s drug-based hallucination will make Cloquet look like a giant centipede (with his head) behind the boy.

Lee is horrified to see the sight, and he runs out of the room. What he’s seen, though, is just a reflection of what he himself has done with the boy, his own pederastic desires. Only members of NAMBLA would find this using of Kiki to be at all defensible.

Upon finding Benway ripped out of his Fadela getup, Lee asks him to let him take Joan, who has been with “Fadela” since shortly after her lovemaking with Lee. Benway asks what Lee wants with “that purulent little cunt” (purulent is used several times in Burroughs’s novel…so is cunt, for that matter). Lee says he can’t write without her, so Benway allows him to take her, sending them to Annexia so the Mugwump jism business can be expanded out there.

Though Burroughs had been writing before he killed Vollmer, it was this accidental shooting that, he insisted, pushed him to become a writer (as a form of therapy, as I mentioned above). This is the meaning we can glean from the ending of the film, when Lee drives with Joan Frost to the border of Annexia.

The two guards, played by the same actors as those who played Hauser and O’Brien, but now wearing Soviet-style uniforms (a reflection not only of Burroughs’s anti-state socialist leanings, but also of the usual Hollywood liberal denigrating of the USSR as ‘totalitarian’), want proof beyond Lee’s mere ownership of a pen that he really is a writer. He reluctantly does a repeat of the William Tell routine with Joan (a case of the compulsion to repeat), and shoots her in the head. Full of grief, he is nonetheless allowed by the guards to enter Annexia, because it’s understood that shooting her signals his transformation into a writer.

III: The Novel

Since I’ve already mentioned a number of events from the novel in my comparison of it with the film, and since there’s far too much material to go over from the novel, such that this analysis would be transformed from a blog post into a book, I will be limiting myself instead to a discussion of what I consider to be some of its most noteworthy highlights…excepting the talking anus story, which of course has already been dealt with.

I don’t mean to bad-mouth Burroughs or his classic work, but the–to be perfectly frank–chaotic mess of its organization and the almost unreadable nature of so much of it force me to be selective of what to analyze, too.

I’ll start with some general comments. The wild disorganization of the novel suggests than Burroughs, in his throwing at us of one ‘routine’ after another, was less interested in crafting any kind of coherent story than just engaging in writing as a kind of psychotherapy, to deal with his pain and guilt over having killed Vollmer, among other things I’ll go into soon enough. In all of the use of four-letter words (something that would have been far more shocking back in the late 1950s than today), sexually explicit scenes, drug use, and violence, he seems to be trying to get a lot of painful emotional baggage out of his system, just throwing it all down on paper.

On the other hand, there is a bit of structure to the novel in the A-B-A form of first, Lee being chased by the cops, then a kind of descent into the underworld, so to speak, of drugs, sex, and all-around decadence, and finally a return to being pursued by the cops (i.e., starting with Hauser and O’Brien), leading to the chase from the beginning of the novel, giving it an overall cyclical form.

Burroughs, in the 1950s especially, was a man on the margins of society as both gay and a drug abuser. He would have felt the contempt of all of those of ‘straight America’ every day without any relenting. It’s only natural that he would have wanted to lash out at those who’d rejected him, and so he did it through the rough language, frank homosexuality, and in-your-face depictions of drug use. People were shocked at it back then, but we shouldn’t at all be surprised at a book chock-full of images of castration, sodomy, pederasty, and sadomasochism, as well as horror at the excesses of abuse of authority.

Such abuse of authority is singularly personified in Dr. Benway. There’s a scene in the “Hospital” section of the novel in which he’s operating on a patient, though it reads far more like him indulging in torture. He clearly demonstrates his sociopathic tendencies in ways not at all touched on in the film. Tellingly, he and his medical team are operating in, of all places, a lavatory.

Benway means to massage the patient’s heart with the rubber vacuum cup end of a toilet plunger; he washes it in toilet bowl water instead of properly sterilizing it. After his assistant has made an incision, Benway works the cup up and down on it, making blood spurt in all directions. When the patient has clearly died, all Benway has to say is, “Well, it’s all in the day’s work.”

Now, that’s what I call a talking asshole.

Benway as personifying the medical profession’s abuse of authority, as seen in his Rehabilitation Center, is a parody of the kind of doctors Burroughs would have seen while treated for his opioid addiction in the Lexington Medical Center.

Another routine I find worthy of mention comes a little further down in the “Hospital” section, in which a man sings “The Star Spangled Banner” with a slight lisp. As the tenor begins singing, his voice breaks into a high falsetto. Hating how obviously, stereotypically homosexual he sounds, the Technician has him fired and replaced with a “sex-changed Liz athlete,” who is “a fulltime tenor at least.” The Lesbian belts out the national anthem with “a tremendous bellow.” Having stereotypical gays and lesbians sing the anthem is clearly meant as a ‘screw you’ to a country so hostile to them.

Another amusing routine, in the section titled, “A.J.’s Annual Party,” involves the watching of a porno film. A young woman named Mary tells her young lover, Johnny, to get naked. She wants to give him a rim job, so first she washes his ass clean.

After the rimming, she straps on a dildo called the “Steely Dan III from Yokohama.” (There were two Steely Dan dildos, briefly mentioned to have been previously used by her; of course, the American rock band from the 1970s was named after the dildo.) Mary fucks Johnny in the ass with the Steely Dan III.

After she’s done with him, a boy named Mark arrives, gets naked, and fucks Johnny in the ass on a bed. After their sex, the two boys and Mary go to a gallows, where Mark puts a noose around Johnny’s neck. As he’s hanged and dangling, he has a full erection, which she puts inside herself. She screams at Mark to cut the rope to let Johnny down, which Mark does. Then Mary starts biting off pieces of Johnny’s face: she sucks out his eyes, bites off his lips, nose, “great hunks of cheek,” and his prick.

After Mark aggressively fucks Mary, she wants to hang him, but he hangs her instead, having transformed into Johnny. Then they immolate themselves…etc, etc, etc.

Anyway, I find the fucking of Johnny with the Steely Dan by Mary, as well as her biting off of his face, to be allegorical of a feminist reversal of sex roles, a turning of the tables, rather like the “Happy International Women’s Day” scene in Deadpool. The hangings are rather like autoerotic asphyxia, only without the auto-. The immolation seems symbolic not only of the fiery passion of lust, but also of the destructive effects of pornography in general.

The reversal of sex roles is analogous to the reversal of roles of the anus and mouth in the talking anus story, as allegorical of the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, as I described above. Indeed, shortly after Benway’s telling of that story, there’s mention of an Arab boy in Timbuktu “who could play a flute with his ass.”

Next, we can deal with a section called “Islam Incorporated and the Parties of Interzone.” The notion of an “Islam, Incorporated,” for which Lee works in Interzone, is an interestingly paradoxical one. A corporation named after the Muslim faith? Corporations are what capitalism leads to if the businesses are successful…and they’re successful if they can do a lot of maximizing of profit…at the expense of their toiling workers.

Islam, on the other hand, is a religion ideally devoted to helping the poor and doing other good works, quite antithetical to capitalism. Also, capitalism, in the form of imperialism, has done more to cause misery, suffering, and oppression to Muslim-majority countries over the past hundred years or so (i.e., Zionism) than anything else.

Burroughs’s use of “Islam, Incorporated” seems meant as a critique of the authoritarianism of both religion and capitalism, as going against the individual rights that he so cared about protecting. The point is that he saw such restriction on individual liberties in the bourgeois government, religion in general, and bureaucracy.

He was once asked in an interview if he supported libertarianism and the Libertarian Party, which of course advocates the “free market.” Burroughs said he didn’t even know what ‘libertarianism’ is. The interviewer described the ideology merely in terms of having as few laws as possible, which Burroughs whole-heartedly agreed with. Had the interviewer mentioned the pro-capitalist aspect of the party, I rather doubt that Burroughs would have agreed with the ideology all that much; as with Rush in their early, naïve, pro-Ayn Rand years, advocating “small government” was about individualism, not giving a free pass to unaccountable corporate tyranny.

With that out of the way, let’s now look at the four political parties of Interzone: the Liquefactionists, the Senders, the Divisionists, and the Factualists, this last one being the one Burroughs favored, for “The Factualists are anti-Liquidationist, anti-Divisionist, and above all anti-Sender.”

The Liquefactionists want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity. The Divisionists subdivide and replicate themselves, and the Senders want to control everyone through telepathy. In other words, all three of these parties act, in their own specific ways, to undermine, negate, and stifle individual freedom.

Scholars of NL have debated whether the references to drug abuse are meant to be taken literally, at face value, or meant to be taken as a metaphor for broader forms of social control. I’d say it’s both: certainly the metaphorical interpretation is implied when it says, towards the end of this section about Interzone’s political parties, that “sending can never be a means to anything but more sending, like junk.” (Burroughs’s emphasis) Sending, as in what the Senders do, and junk, as in what junkies abuse.

Furthermore, Burroughs calls the Senders “The Human Virus,” and that “Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, [are] all symptoms of The Human Virus.” Note how all of these are also symptoms of capitalist government.

IV: Conclusion

The excesses of drug abuse and sex in NL should not be viewed as mere self-indulgence on Burroughs’s part, nor as mere shock-value for its own sake. They are a comment on a sick society in which people try to cope by escaping into a world of superficial, physical pleasure that is ultimately unsatisfying.

Consider how many people today try to escape their unhappy lives through drugs, pornography, OnlyFans, doomscrolling on social media, etc., among other addictions, instead of doing the difficult work of organizing and rising up against our oppressive, genocidal governments.

After all, people might fear that all that hard work could just lead to such dangers as are allegorized in the talking anus story or the violent goings-on in that porno film with Mary, Johnny, and Mark. All the same, we have our own versions of political parties that are, at best, mere variations on the same ideology: keep everyone under control, assimilated, and conforming, without an ounce of real individuality.

We need to build our own ‘Factualist’ party, if you will. If not, we’ll just keep on doping and letting the bourgeois government shove a Steely Dan III up our asses.

Analysis of ‘The Last House on the Left’

I: Introduction

The Last House on the Left is a 1972 rape and revenge film written and directed by Wes Craven, his directorial debut. It was produced by Sean S Cunningham, who helped create and who directed the first Friday the 13th film. TLHOTL stars Sandra Peabody and Lucy Grantham, with David Hess, Fred J Lincoln, Jeramie Rain, Marc Sheffler, and Martin Kove.

The movie is a kind of modern retelling of Ingmar Bergman‘s Virgin Spring, which in turn is based on the Swedish ballad “Törres döttrar i Wänge.” TLHOTL was cut many times for the MPAA to get an R rating; as a result, there are many different versions of the film on DVD and VHS reissues, and it’s difficult to get a completely uncut version of the film. Some incomplete scenes include a forced lesbian sex scene between the two victim girls in the woods, Mari (Peabody) in her room naked while reading birthday cards, and Mari raped by Sadie (Rain) in the woods. As we can see, TLHOTL is a rather “vulgarized” version of Bergman’s film, as the Christian Science Monitor News Service called it.

TLHOTL got largely negative reviews on release, but its critical reputation improved somewhat over the years, with some praising the narrative and Peabody’s and Hess’s performances. It’s now considered a cult film, and it was nominated for AFI’s 100 Years…100 Thrills in 2001. A remake was made in 2009, though it’s generally considered inferior to the original.

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

You might be wondering, Dear Reader, why I have chosen to do an analysis of this film rather than of The Virgin Spring, TLHOTL‘s inspiration, and artistically a far superior film. The fact is that it is the very vulgarity of TLHOTL that I find important to discuss, as well as the sadism of it, not only in the sexual abuse of the two girls, Mari and Phyllis (Grantham), but also in the violent revenge that Mari’s parents take on the gang who rape, degrade, and murder Mari and Phyllis.

The reason that I am so intrigued by this vulgarity and sadism is that I see a way to watch so unsettling a film, a way that makes it relevant to some of the horrors we’ve been learning of in recent years. Just as films like Salò and Eyes Wide Shut have been related to the Epstein crimes, so can TLHOTL in a way, and this latter film can also galvanize us, if watched in the right frame of mind, to push for justice for, if not outright revenge on, the rapists of those then-underaged girls whom the Epstein criminals had (Mari, while played by an older actress, has just turned 17 in the story).

It should be infuriating to all of us that so little has been done about the Epstein scandal, so watching Mari’s parents, normally mild-mannered, bourgeois people, carrying out as violent and sadistic a revenge against a gang of sadists could help galvanize us to do what’s necessary to get justice for Epstein’s victims.

II: Comparing TLHOTL, The Virgin Spring, and the Epstein Crimes

*TLHOTL*	*The Virgin Spring*	Epstein Crimes
Mari and Phyllis go to the city to attend a rock concert.	Karin and servant Ingeri take candles to church.	Underage girls go to, and are groomed by, the Epstein criminals.
Sadie assists “Weasel” and Krug in their degradation of Mari and Phyllis.	Ingeri, envious of Karin, “wills” her to be raped.	Ghislane Maxwell, Naomi Campbell, and Hillary Clinton are involved, in one way or another with (i.e., grooming for, winking at, if not outright participating in), the Epstein crimes.
Phyllis is gang-raped by “Weasel,” Sadie, and Krug, then Mari is raped by Sadie and Krug. Both are murdered. Junior watches and does nothing.	Two herdsmen rape and murder Karin. A boy who’s with the herdsmen watches and can do nothing.	Epstein, Trump, et al sexually abuse the underage girls. There are also killings, including by cannibalism, allegedly. Most others who personally knew Epstein and about the crimes have generally done nothing to help the victims find justice.
Two incompetent cops can do nothing to help the girls or Mari’s parents.	No law enforcement involved.	Law enforcement so far has been pretty much slack, if not useless, in seeking justice for the victims.
Mari’s parents brutally kill the rapists/murderers.	Karin’s father, Töre, kills the herdsmen and the boy.	What is to be done? Revolution is not a dinner party.

III: The Opening Act of TLHOTL

A postman notes all the birthday cards being sent to Mari, who is then seen taking a shower. Her mom and dad are uncomfortable about her going to the big city at night with only Phyllis to accompany her, and especially with Mari not wearing a bra; still, they let her go.

Their house is way out in the woods, isolated, hence the name of the film. We see the two girls out there for a while, enjoying themselves; our sense of sympathy for them is being established. We also get a sense of Mari’s budding sexuality, too, which will be turned into something tragic and horrifying soon enough.

In the city that night, Mari and Phyllis hope to buy some marijuana. Meanwhile, Krug Stillo (Hess), his illegitimate son, Junior (Sheffler), Fred “Weasel” Podorowski (Lincoln), and Sadie are on the lam from the cops after Krug and Weasel broke out of prison. The girls have heard a news report about the criminals on the car radio, but they don’t show much concern. They meet Junior by the building where the gang is hiding out for the moment; he promises he can get them some weed if they go up to his room with them. Once inside the room, the girls are abducted.

IV: Juxtapositions of Good and Bad

What’s interesting at this point in the movie is how scenes of the gang terrorizing the girls in that room alternate with scenes of Mari’s mom and dad preparing her birthday party (decorations, birthday cake). The hideous and the innocent are so closely juxtaposed here. This is significant given how later, the girls will be further abused and murdered in the very same woods that lead to Mari’s parents’ house, where the killers will later go for accommodations, since their car broke down, the telephones often aren’t working, and Mari took the family car into town. It’s a small world, isn’t it?

The point is that there’s a kind of providential proximity of the ‘heaven and hell,’ as it were, in this movie. As a result, karma comes swiftly.

There is, however, an odd incongruity between the film and its musical soundtrack…from time to time, at least. This incongruity was intentional, apparently, as a conscious break from conventional horror movie music scores. The writers of the music, Stephen Chapin and Hess (who also plays Krug, recall), used a mix of folk rock and bluegrass for the movie. Synthesizer noises tend to be used during violent moments, though.

The incongruity between the narrative and the music is at its sharpest in the scene when we see the gang take the girls, bound and gagged, from the apartment and into the trunk of their getaway car. While this is happening, we hear what sounds like an inappropriate choice of music: an upbeat, bluegrass instrumental called “Baddies Theme.” During what should be a great moment of terror, we hear music that, if anything, sounds flippant in attitude to the situation. A hint to the intention is in the music’s title: from the point of view of a psychopath, one who regards people as mere toys to play with, this moment of terror is sheer fun.

Indeed, there are many examples of a juxtaposition of good and bad, including extremes of these. Mari is a sweet, innocent 17-year-old virgin, yet she isn’t wearing a bra (to the consternation of her parents), and she and Phyllis hope to score some weed before going to a rock concert, the band having the name of “Bloodlust.” It’s an ill omen for them.

Her parents are the typical “nice” people, even willing to accommodate a group of strangers; then, when these strangers turn out to be the murderers of their daughter, the parents immediately plan a vicious revenge, and thus become murderers themselves. Their home is by a beautiful, serene forest, yet here is where Mari and Phyllis are degraded, raped, and murdered.

The house is a place of safety for Mari, but a place of death for her killers. The killers are perfectly safe to kill her and Phyllis in the forest, but they’re anything but safe in the house.

The cops are supposed to protect the community, but the two in question are so incompetent, they can’t even arrive at the house on time to stop Mari’s parents from killing the gang.

V: Doublings

Apart from these juxtaposed opposites, there are also a number of doublings in TLHOTL. Two girls are raped and killed, rather than the one in The Virgin Spring. Two parents avenge their daughter, rather than the one father in TVS. There are two bumbling cops.

We see Mari naked in the shower at the beginning, then she’s naked and victimized later. After her murder, we see Sadie washing the blood off of herself in the lake, then she’s killed at the end of the film. Both Mari and Sadie, when killed, are seen floating head up in water (the lake, and the family’s swimming pool, respectively).

The girls can’t find any weed and Junior never gets a “fix” for his heroin addiction. There are two families: Mari and her parents, and Junior and his abusive father, Krug.

VI: The Middle Act of TLHOTL

To get back to the story, the gang is going in their car with the girls in the trunk, but they have car trouble, and they have to stop it on the side of the road by the forest near Mari’s house. They can’t fix it, so they take the girls out of the trunk and go into the woods.

Meanwhile, Mari’s parents at home are talking with the two cops (the sheriff played by Marshal Anker and the deputy by Kove) about how Mari is missing and their worries about her. The juxtapositions of good and bad continue when Mari, though terrified and crying over what’s to happen to her and Phyllis, also sees her family’s mailbox and therefore knows she isn’t far from home, thus giving her hope. Also, when the cops leave Mari’s home, they drive past the mailbox and the gang’s abandoned car. The deputy suggests they find out whose car it is and help them, but the sheriff says they have more important things to do (helping Mari, in all irony!), so they drive away–so close to saving the day, yet so far away from it.

When the gang gets the girls out of the car, Phyllis bites Krug’s hand, making him want to hurt “that bitch.” With the girls in the middle of the forest now, Krug wants to get his revenge by humiliating Phyllis. He tells her to piss her pants right in front of the laughing gang. After seeing Weasel cut Mari’s finger with his switchblade for not doing as she’s told, Phyllis pisses her pants with a frown. Then they make her take her soiled pants off in front of them and make her hit Mari. Then the two girls are forced to get naked and engage in lesbian sex in front of them, Mari weeping the whole time.

VII: TLHOTL and Epstein

The degradation that Mari and Phyllis are being subjected to can be compared to what Epstein’s victims were put through. Mari is only 17, reminding us of the underage Epstein victims. There is the sexually perverse nature of what both the fictional and the real victims have suffered. There’s also the impotent law enforcement, who have the crimes practically before their eyes, yet they are either unable or unwilling to do virtually anything about it.

There is, however, one crucial difference between the gang in the movie and the Epstein perpetrators: the former are common criminals, lacking in money and political power, while the latter have these in abundance. Small wonder the law enforcement today cannot or won’t properly investigate and prosecute the wealthy offenders, for to do so would have to be so extensive as to bring down so many, if not virtually everybody in power, that the entire system would come crashing down like a house of cards.

I mentioned above that one of the lost scenes was of Sadie raping Mari. (Ghislaine Maxwell not only enabled the Epstein sexual abuse, grooming the girls, but also participated in the sexual abuse herself.) We may frown on the use of such language today, but–during the scene of Phyllis’s attempted escape from the gang, and upon Sadie’s catching of her, she’s hit by Phyllis with a rock–Phyllis’s calling Sadie a “stupid dyke” is understandable.

VIII: Two Shakespeare Allusions

There’s one moment in the film with a possible Shakespearean allusion, and another one with a definite allusion to the Bard. The possible one is from Othello, and the definite one is from Hamlet.

While Phyllis is running from Weasel and Sadie, and Krug has gone away to the car, Mari is left alone with Junior, who is being trusted to keep her from escaping. She hopes he’ll help her get away, though, to her nearby home, and even promises him he’ll get a “fix” (some Methadone, since her dad is a doctor). Trying to win his friendship and trust, she starts calling him “Willow.”

This sounds to me like an allusion to the “Willow scene” in Othello, in which Desdemona tells her maidservant, Emilia, about her mother’s maid, Barbary, who was in love with a man who went mad and forsook her. Barbary would sing “a song of willow” to express her heartbreak, and she would die singing it. The song is full of imagery from nature, including “a sycamore tree,” “a green willow,” and “the fresh streams,” all fitting imagery to be associated with Mari in the woods.

As for Junior, or “Willow,” he could be seen as analogous to the man Barbary loves, for “Willow” is going mad from his heroin withdrawal (to say nothing of his intimidation from being constantly bullied by his father, Krug), and he–in not sufficiently helping Mari to escape out of fear of Krug killing him–will forsake Mari, too.

She will die from a gunshot in the back from Krug as she walks in the lake, dazed in her trauma from having just been raped by him (as well as having his name carved into her chest). She’ll float head up, her body surrounded by plants, like Ophelia in Hamlet. She, too, was forsaken by the Danish prince, who also, it seemed, proved mad. If I’m right about the Othello allusion, then these two allusions are yet another doubling in TLHOTL.

IX: Bionian Psychoanalysis and TLHOTL

Please indulge me, Dear Reader, while I go off on a tangent for a moment. I’ll relate this tangent to TLHOTL soon enough.

Object relations psychoanalyst WR Bion had an application of Melanie Klein‘s notion of projective identification in which it’s not just about projecting feelings and manipulating others into embodying those feelings. For Bion, projective identification is a primitive, pre-verbal form of communication.

Such communication–originally between a baby and its mother, and later, between a (psychotic) patient and his psychoanalyst–is Bion’s theory of containment, which is normally about the mother or analyst (the container) soothing and processing the unbearable agitations of, respectively, the baby or patient (the contained). It’s normally a positive experience, helping the baby or mental patient to grow in the ability to think, learn from experience, and build a stable identity.

Bion’s notion of container/contained, represented by the female/male symbols of ♀︎/♂︎, implies a sexual symbolism of phallus (the contained) in yoni (the container), or the act of coitus. I find this symbolism extremely useful in analyzing TLHOTL, for sometimes the container/contained relationship is a negative one, -♀︎/♂︎, in which the container cannot process or manage the projections, a problem represented in the movie with the rapes, stabbings, carving of Krug’s name in Mari’s chest, him shooting her in the back, and later, with her parents’ revenge–her mother biting Weasel’s dick off and slitting Sadie’s throat, as well as Mari’s dad shooting Krug in the shoulder and finishing him off with the chainsaw.

Because of the psychopathic nature of the gang, their pain cannot be soothed or processed–it cannot be contained. Here, containment is not the quietening of a baby’s crying and soothing it to sleep; containment isn’t a psychiatrist soothing and helping to process the ranting and raving of a mentally ill man.

With the gang, the contained is a raping phallus, a switchblade stuck in Phyllis’s back, the knife cutting Krug’s name in Mari’s chest, and a bullet in her back. The container is the violated yoni of either girl, the stab wound in Phyllis’s back, the knife wounds on Mari’s chest, and the bullet wound in her back. The same goes for her parents’ revenge: the phallic contained is her mother’s teeth on Weasel’s dick, the switchblade going through Sadie’s throat, the bullet from Mari’s dad’s shotgun, and the chainsaw blade entering Krug’s flesh. The wounds that the gang received were all the yonic containers. These are all negative, destructive forms of containment, -♀︎/♂︎, for no one can process or manage such painful projections.

That we can see two perfectly straight, bourgeois parents immediately consumed with violent hate for their daughter’s murderers demonstrates projective identification utterly, even if the gang never intended to project their violence onto the doctor and his wife. The parents have become as violent and murderous as their daughter’s attackers.

X: The Final Act of TLHOTL

I said it above, and I’ll say it again: it is most extraordinary to see two straight, nice people transformed into not only killers, but bloodthirsty ones, and so quickly.

It is emphasized from the beginning of the film how straight, conservative, and nice Mari’s mom and dad are. They are uncomfortable with her wearing no bra, saying “tits,” and going to a rough area of town to attend a rock concert by a band called “Bloodlust.” Still, they’re laid-back enough to let her go.

We later see the two innocently preparing her birthday party in scenes alternating with those of Mari and Phyllis being terrorized by the gang in that apartment. They’re full of worry as they trust the two incompetent cops to find their daughter.

Mari’s parents are so nice and straight that they even give accommodations to a group of strangers, not knowing they’re Mari’s rapists and killers. They provide a nice dinner for them, Sadie gluttonously drinking their wine. They’re given Mari’s bedroom to sleep in; here, naturally, is where the gang sees photos of the girl they’d just raped and killed, and they know they must be careful of what they say with her parents potentially in earshot…though they’ll fail to be careful enough.

First, Mari’s mother picks up on clues: Junior is wearing a Peace necklace Mari’s dad bought and gave her as a gift at the beginning of the film; Junior’s heroin withdrawal and bad dreams of the murders cause him to shout out “Sorry!”, which causes more suspicion; then, her mom finds the gang’s bloody clothes in their luggage; then, she overhears the gang talking in Mari’s room about her body floating in the lake, prompting her mom and dad to go outside and find it there.

As I said above, what must be emphasized here is the sadism of the revenge that the parents get on Mari’s killers. The father doesn’t just get a shotgun and shoot all four of them, then plan to tell the cops he did it in self-defence. His and the mother’s revenge is out of unmitigated rage…stemming, ironically, from a deep love of their daughter.

The father sets up an electrocution booby trap by the back door of the house, having sprayed a slippery white cream on the floor by the door of Mari’s room, where the gang is sleeping. The mother pretends to seduce Weasel by taking him outside by the lake, and she even deliberately catches his penis in his zipper and calls it “little,” before beginning oral on him and biting it off, then leaving him to bleed to death there.

Krug fights with the father and has the upper hand until still-remorseful Junior threatens his dad with a pistol. Just to get a sense of how psychopathic Krug is, we see him manipulating his own son into pointing the gun at himself and blowing his brains out, which Junior does. Meanwhile, Mari’s father sneaks away to the basement and gets the chainsaw.

As explained above, the mother slits Sadie’s throat with the switchblade after a brief scuffle outside by the swimming pool, and the father kills Krug with the chainsaw, the cops having arrived too late to stop him. The film ends with the grieving parents knowing there’s no way they can pretend that their revenge was out of self-defence. Surely, though, they regret nothing.

XI: Conclusion

TLHOTL is a disturbing film to watch–no doubt. Knowing what the Epstein criminals did is even more disturbing, especially when we consider what little, if anything substantive, has been done about it (Were Epstein and Maxwell apprehended, or was that faked to placate us all?).

I think that a good use can be made of this movie by watching it while thoroughly identifying with 17-year-old Mari’s parents. We must imagine the Epstein victims as if they were our own daughters in order to build up the kind of rage we need to have to fight for justice (and this is just after International Working Women’s Day, as of the publication of this article)–instead of just passively accepting the crimes, imagining nothing can be done about them because the criminals in question are too rich and powerful to stop.

Just as Mari’s parents were just two ordinary people filled with rage over what was done to their daughter, driven to revenge without a thought as to how much stronger the killers were, so should we, on watching TLHOTL, be filled with a sufficient rage to rise up against the much more powerful pedophile ruling class, overthrow them (not necessarily in a sadistic manner, of course, but in a decisive one), and establish a just society.

For our law enforcement is little better than those two incompetent cops.

Analysis of ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’

The Serpent and the Rainbow is a 1988 horror movie directed by Wes Craven. The screenplay was by Richard Maxwell and Adam Rodman, loosely based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Wade Davis (for a comparison of the book with the film, which added the political element, go here). The film stars Bill Pullman, with Cathy Tyson, Zakes Mokae, Paul Winfield, Brent Jennings, Michael Gough, and Paul Guilfoyle.

Roger Ebert gave TSATR three out of four stars, praising Pullman’s performance and the “stunning” visuals, while also noting the the story took the religion of voodoo more seriously than most horror movies, which merely used it as a “gimmick.”

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

Davis, on whose character the anthropologist Dr. Dennis Alan (Pullman) is based, is an ethnobotanist and anthropologist whose book recounts his experiences in Haiti as he investigated what happened to Clairivius Narcisse–on whose character Christophe Durand (played by Conrad Roberts) is based–who was allegedly poisoned, buried alive, and revived with an herbal brew that made him into a “zombie.” A practitioner of voodoo allegedly did this to Narcisse, making him into a slave.

Though TSATR is marketed as a horror film, Craven saw it as more of a political drama with an exploration of the voodoo religion. The one who poisoned and enslaved Narcisse was a bokor, or Haitian Vodou priest “practicing for both good and evil” and creating “zombies.” In the film, Christophe is made into a zombie by Captain Dargent Peytraud (Mokae), commander of the Tonton Macoute–the secret police of right-wing Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier–and a bokor, thus making him the villain of the film. The screenwriters’ creation of Peytraud is the one on whom the added political element of the film is centred.

Christophe is made into a zombie because, though a mere grade school teacher, he spoke out for the people, for freedom, and this of course was a threat to Duvalier and Peytraud. The terror of the bokor poisoning, live burial, and zombification of dissidents and political agitators like Christophe is how the right-wing dictatorship of Haiti keeps the people intimidated and well under control.

According to Haitian legend, the Serpent represents Earth (how like the Midgard Serpent of Norse myth, which bites its own tail while circling the Earth!), and the Rainbow is Heaven. We all live and die between the Serpent and the Rainbow. Because we have souls, though, we can be trapped in a state between life and death, the zombie-state that Christophe suffers because Peytraud has stolen his soul. Live burial is also part of that hell of being between life and death, which leads me to my next point.

TSATR exploits a deep fear many of us have, taphophobia, the irrational fear of being buried alive. The history of this fear in the West is well-documented in the book Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, by Jan Bondeson, which gives examples of many who were so afraid of being accidentally pronounced dead and unintentionally buried alive that one would have strings attached to bells above ground that the buried living could ring by pulling the string going all the way down into the coffin.

Peytraud’s live burials, of course, are not accidental, but as I said above, are a cruel act of intimidation and control. They make their victims experience a kind of living death, as does Peytraud’s stealing of the victims’ souls. In our experience of not only imperialism but also its boomerang now affecting the imperial core, we too–that is, the global proletariat–experience a living death of wage slavery while elites get away with atrocities…they’ve stolen our souls.

This ‘living death’ idea brings me to a discussion of a recurring theme in this film: duality and the merging of opposites. Apart from the unity of life and death, there are also the unities of the First World and the Third World, of white people and people of colour (not just the blacks of Haiti, but also the Amazon shaman seen towards the beginning of the movie), of houngans and bokors (respectively, good and evil voodoo priests, for the purposes of this film–namely, Lucien Celine [Winfield] and Peytraud), body and soul, the Serpent and the Rainbow (earthly and heavenly existence), Catholic ‘monotheism’ and voodoo ‘paganism,’ science and religion, Erzulie and the Virgin Mary (as Mater Dolorosa in particular), tyranny and revolution, even genius and idiocy.

These opposites merge, overlap, and interact with each other in a yin-and-yang, dialectical way. White Dr. Alan, an American from Harvard University, goes to the Global South (first, to the Amazon, then to Haiti) to get local drugs and bring them to the First World for use as medicines and anesthetics. It’s said that he and the people he finds the drugs for (e.g., Dr. Andrew Cassedy [Guilfoyle], head of Boston Biocorp, a pharmaceutical company, and Dr. Earl Schoonbacher [Gough], a consultant for the pharmaceutical company) have only altruistic motives in providing these drugs for the world–saving countless numbers of patients on the operating table from death because of anesthetic shock. Let’s be frank, though: in their use of these Third World drugs, the pharmaceutical businesses of the First World hope to rake in huge profits. Alan’s explorations are for exploitation.

When Schoonbacher wonders if the Haitian “zombie drug” could give proof of the existence of the soul, Alan scoffs at the idea, asking where in the ‘car,’ if you will, of the human body the soul resides, and insisting it “begins and ends with the brain.” When in Haiti, in conversations with Dr. Marielle Duchamp (Tyson) about the voodoo faith–in which she sees no conflict between religion and science–Alan hears that the Haitian God isn’t just up in heaven, but also in their bodies, their flesh (in the Serpent as well as in the Rainbow, in other words). When found in the graveyard at night, Christophe tells Alan that the zombie drug is a powder blown on people’s faces: it runs through the skin to the soul. Body and soul are one–the latter is indeed in the physicality of the brain, as Alan atheistically intuited.

Many Christians like to contrast their faith as sharply as possible with that of pagans, though the places of comparison and similarity are obvious. This close connection is even more obvious in how, as Duchamp tells Alan, “Haiti is 85% Catholic, but 110% voodoo. For [them], Erzulie and the Virgin Mary are the same.” Erzulie is a family of loa, or spirits, in Vodou. They are feminine, and Erzulie Fréda Dahomey, a spirit of love and beauty, is often identified with the Mater Dolorosa. Note that Mary is chaste, but Erzulie is flirtatious and seductive of both sexes. Mary suffers, but Erzulie has fun. Lust and chastity are one, as are desire and suffering (as the Buddhists would also observe of the latter pair). It’s significant that, immediately after Duchamp immerses Alan in the spirituality and culture of voodoo, the two make love. Not long after their lovemaking, Alan will be terrorized by Peytraud, with that nail in the scrotum.

To pursue that topic further, Haitians are being tyrannized and terrorized by Peytraud’s government precisely because the country is on the verge of revolution, and therefore of ensuing freedom (Could this be the near future of the US?). It’s always darkest before the dawn, a resurrection after death–like Christophe’s…and Alan’s.

In a Haitian man aptly named Louis Mozart (Jennings), we see the dialectical link between genius and idiocy. He’s brilliant enough to know the exact procedure to make the zombie drug, but when he unsuccessfully tries to con Alan out of hundreds of dollars for a fake drug, Alan–not one so easily conned–calls Mozart “an idiot” to his face, thus pushing Mozart to show Alan the process of making the real drug.

Later, when Alan is forced to leave Haiti on a trumped-up murder charge, while he’s on the airplane and ready to take off, Mozart comes up to him and gives him a jar of the powder for free (and a watch), foolishly hoping Alan will make him famous by telling the world he is the maker of the zombie drug. His foolish helping of Alan will in turn lead to him being beheaded by Peytraud’s men.

Let’s return to the death and resurrection theme. Note the apt naming of Christophe, Peytraud’s ‘dying and resurrecting’ victim. Since TSATR is at least as much a political thriller as it is a horror film, it’s useful to put its Christ symbolism in its proper political context, as I did in my analysis of the Christ myth. Please look at that article for the full argument of that political context, as a complete repetition of it is beyond the scope of this article. In brief, the point is this: the Jesus of history never intended to create a new religion with himself worshipped as divine; he was a Torah-adhering Jew who, seeing himself as the Messiah in the Jewish sense, tried to rise up in revolution against Palestine’s Roman oppressors and failed.

Christophe’s speaking up for the rights of the Haitian people also ended in failure, with him being drugged with the zombie powder, pronounced dead, buried alive, then revived, a Christ-like death and resurrection of sorts. As Duchamp tells Alan, Christophe once inspired courage, but now as a ‘zombie,’ he only inspires fear.

Jesus’ followers were similarly demoralized upon knowing of his arrest and crucifixion, losing all hope until believing in his resurrection. As I argued in my article on Christ (link above), we leftists can see in the Christ myth an allegory in which His death and resurrection represent failed attempts at revolution that then are revived with new hope and ultimate success. In TSATR, we can see similarly crushed and revived hopes in Christophe’s live burial and revival, then Alan’s, and the final defeat of Peytraud and revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier, freeing all of Haiti.

Interactions in TSATR between the First and Third Worlds, and between whites and blacks, are interesting enough to warrant further discussion. Imperialist incursions into the Global South to extract resources and exploit them for the benefit of the rich countries is common enough, of course, and Alan’s forays into the Amazon and Haiti for this purpose are no exception. An interesting irony, though, is in how we see a lone white man in a country of blacks, we see him terrorized by their government, and his home country is even ‘invaded,’ as it were, through Peytraud’s possession of Cassedy’s wife (played by Dey Young) at the dinner table–during the party after Alan’s return to the US. Peytraud’s attack thus is a kind of ‘inverse imperialism.’

In Dr. Alan’s first meeting with Peytraud, in his office outside of which one can hear the groans of the tortured enemies of the regime, Alan is given a simple warning not to continue nosing around Haiti with “a radical” like Duchamp, or inquiring about Christophe. Peytraud talks about the volatile political situation in Haiti, and how setting things off could return the country to slavery, as it had been with the French. We’re thus reminded of the successful black slave revolt in Haiti that sent shockwaves throughout the Western imperial world at the time, on an island just southeast of the then-slave-owning United States.

To justify his iron-fisted rule of Haiti with Duvalier, Peytraud tells Alan that the US government would like to see anarchy in Haiti (thereby giving them a pretext to take over the country and rule it with an iron fist of their own). He reminds the American Alan that Haiti isn’t Grenada, where US imperialism in 1983 crushed the people’s revolution, established in 1979 as the only Marxist-Leninist government in the British Commonwealth.

The American government under Reagan was content to have right-wing, anticommunist Duvalier ruling Haiti, for obvious reasons. If the Haitian poor were to liberate themselves from him and the likes of Peytraud, their revolution would soon backfire and lead to even worse oppression from the white West, as Peytraud reasons–hence, the ‘necessity’ of his rule with an iron fist.

So in the references to the Haitian Revolution, the Grenada revolution and counterrevolution, and the current oppression of Haitians under Duvalier, Peytraud, et al, we can see the intermingling of white imperialism in Haiti with the black Haitian pushback against it, even to the point of Peytraud’s magic going all the way to the US, infiltrating the dinner party with Alan, Schoonbacher, and the Cassedys, a kind of ‘inverse imperialism,’ if you will.

Just as I spoke of the merging of opposites in TSATR (like that of imperialism and anti-imperialism mentioned in the previous paragraphs), so is there lots of just plain duality in the film. Its very title evokes duality (heaven and earth), as does that of Romeo and Juliet, which incidentally also involves a drug to make her seem dead, and thus also involves a live burial.

Alan seeks out two drugs: one from the Amazon shaman at the beginning, then one from Mozart in Haiti. There’s the historical Haitian Revolution Peytraud alludes to, and the final Haitian revolution at the end of the movie. There’s Christophe’s live burial and zombification, and there’s Alan’s. There’s the dual Catholic/voodoo syncretic religion. There’s the nail piercing Alan’s scrotum, and there’s the revenge nail piercing of Peytraud’s crotch. There’s the good voodoo priest, Celine, and the evil priest, Peytraud. There’s Alan’s lovemaking with Duchamp (in bed, as it were, though not literally), and there’s him in bed with Christophe’s decapitated sister. There are two women momentarily possessed by spirits: Duchamp dancing in Celine’s tourist nightclub, and Mrs. Cassedy attacking Alan with a knife at the dinner table.

The duality of the nail piercings in the crotch need closer attention now. The P, t, and r of Peytraud come across almost as a pun on one of the possible inflections of pater–that is, patri, patre, etc., or “father” in Latin. The nail piercing of Alan’s scrotum is symbolically castration, reminding us of the punitive father of Freud‘s castration complex, or the father who threatens his son with castration for wanting his mother.

I’m not saying that that’s what’s going on between Alan and Peytraud, either literally or symbolically. The point of the association I’m making here is that Peytraud’s authoritarian bullying of Alan and the Haitians is like that of a cruel, tyrannical father, a Kleinian bad father, as opposed to the good father as seen in Lucien Celine.

Another point of comparison with Peytraud as the bad father is with the primordial sky-father king gods of Greek myth: Ouranos and Cronus in particular. Ouranos had his children imprisoned in a secret place in Gaea‘s body; Cronus ate his children. These two gods, fearful of being overthrown and losing their power, oppressed their children just as paternalistic Peytraud oppresses the Haitians and Alan–anyone who is a threat to him.

But just as a father can be castrating (literally or symbolically), so can a son. As I explained in my analysis of the Ancient Greek creation myth, not only did Cronus castrate his father, Ouranos, while liberating his imprisoned Titan children, so–according to an uncensored version of the story as recalled by Freud (page 469), John Tzetzes, and Robert Graves–did Zeus castrate his father, Cronus, upon freeing the eaten Olympian gods. These violent but liberating acts can be paralleled with Alan’s vengeful driving of the nail into Peytraud’s groin and the liberation of Haiti from Duvalier.

The point I’m trying to make here is that associating Peytraud with a cruel father reinforces, in a psychological sense, how oppressive he is to Alan and the Haitians. He attacks Alan and Christophe, like God the Father (in an evil Demiurge sense) sending God the Son to die, be buried in the tomb, then resurrected. Peytraud attacks them because he is threatened by them, the way a man with the Laius complex is afraid of being supplanted by his son.

Peytraud is so threatened by Alan, a white American and therefore of the imperial core, that even with him kicked out of Haiti and back in the US, he must be terrorized all the way back there, too. I mentioned above how Peytraud fears an American intervention if the Duvalier government is overthrown and the country descends into anarchy. He feels he must coax Alan back into Haiti so he can make a zombie out of him. Hence, what happens at the dinner party with Schoonbacher and the Cassedys. Part of the irony I mentioned above, of the ‘inverted imperialism’ of Peytraud’s possession of Mrs. Cassedy, is how at the dinner party there’s a black servant, Albert, who speaks with a Caribbean accent. The whites are his master, yet Peytraud is the whites’ master there, too. The imperial boomerang goes both ways.

Yet another merging of opposites occurs in how, at the very darkest (quite literally so) moment of the film, Alan’s live burial, the revolutionary overthrow of Duvalier also happens. The Christian symbolism is powerful: Alan is experiencing a kind of harrowing of hell, not just in the terror of being in that blackness (like those hellish near-death experiences many talk about), gasping and screaming upon reviving from the zombie drug, but also in his zombification, Peytraud’s stealing of his soul. Yet this is just when the salvation of Haiti begins. It’s like Satan knowing he’s lost upon Christ’s death on the Cross.

Could we now, upon learning of the total depths of depravity of our global ruling class, be–in our boiling collective rage–on the cusp of a revolution? Could the bitten tail of the ouroboros of our current oppression soon dialectically switch over to the biting head of our liberation? Could my oft-used symbol of the dialectical unity of opposites, that auto-cannibalistic serpent, be leading us to a rainbow?

Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Friday the 13th’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Phantasm’

Phantasm is a 1979 supernatural horror film written and directed by Don Coscarelli. It stars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, and Angus Scrimm. The film was independently produced, being financed by Coscarelli, his father, and local investors; the cast were mostly amateurs and aspiring professionals.

Following its expanded theatrical release, Phantasm would become a box office hit, grossing $22 million internationally. It got mixed reviews from critics, but in the years since its release, Phantasm has become a cult film. It’s on several critics’ lists of the best horror films, being praised by film scholars for its surrealistic qualities and themes of mourning, loss, and sibling relationships. JJ Abrahams is a fan of the movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here are links (<<< this second one’s really bad) to the full movie, and here is a link to the (only first nine chapters, unfortunately, of the) novelization.

Since mourning and loss are major themes in the movie, I think it’s useful to go into the psychoanalysis of mourning. It’s also useful to examine the difference Freud saw between mourning and melancholia. In mourning, the painful process of dealing with the loss of a loved one is eventually gone through, and the mourner can redirect libido to objects other than the lost one; we can see Jody Pearson (Thornbury) largely getting over the loss of his parents and redirecting his feelings towards friends, bandmates like Reggie (Bannister), and women.

Things haven’t been so easy for Jody’s 13-year-old kid brother, Mike (Baldwin), who I would say is experiencing a repressed, unconscious form of melancholia, which involves not only a failure to accept the loss of his and Jody’s parents, but also involves the absorbing of their lost parents into his ego to make them internal objects (which in turn is the basis for object relations theory).

Furthermore, this internalizing also involves taking in those aspects of Mike’s parents that he doesn’t like, and so since those aspects are in him now, he dislikes himself for those aspects. His way of dealing with those disagreeable parts is to split them off and project them into the external world. These expelled objects would be what Melanie Klein called the bad father and the bad mother, those aspects of one’s parents that are frustrating and withholding of gratification.

These would be the Tall Man (Scrimm) and the Lady in Lavender (Lester), symbolically speaking, of course. Her sexual allure is symbolically in the Oedipally-desired parent, and his creepiness is symbolically in the Oedipally-hated parent. Since both are aspects of the same phantasm, they can also be seen to represent Klein’s notion of the combined parent figure, in which a child sees or imagines, in the primal scene, his mom and dad engaging in violent sex, which traumatizes him.

These phantasies (or phantasms) are the unconscious basis of all of the terror that Mike is experiencing as he continues failing to accept the loss of his parents. He’s been having nightmares ever since they died. Since part of him felt the usual frustrations any kid feels towards parents who don’t always do as a kid wishes, he imagines that he somehow ‘willed’ their deaths, and so he’s racked with guilt and self-hate over having ’caused’ their deaths–hence his being terrorized by the Tall Man, or the internalized bad father object, as his punishment for having ‘wished for’ the deaths of his parents. The terror he’s going through is all in his head.

Note that “phantasm” can mean both “spectre” and “fantasy,” or “figment of the imagination.” The Tall Man can be understood in both of these senses. He is a ghost terrorizing the Oregon town in which the film is set, and he is a fantasy in Mike’s mind. That fantasy comes from the internalized object of the bad father in Mike’s mind.

His conflict (and to a lesser extent, Jody’s conflict) with his mom and dad stem from the universal, narcissistic trauma of his love/hate relationship with them. They drove him crazy (presumably with their list of dos and don’ts) while alive, and now he can’t bear to lose them, now that they’re dead. He keeps them present and alive in his mind, in the unrecognizable forms of the Tall Man and the Lady in Lavender, for such is the way that repression works: feelings are pushed into the unconscious mind, then they return to consciousness, but in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight.

What’s good and bad in Mike’s parents is split, in what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (“schizoid” referring to this splitting). The Tall Man, as Mike’s bad father, terrorizing him represents the persecutory anxiety the boy feels (“paranoid”) as a result of having rejected (and, as he imagines, having unconsciously wanted the death of) his father.

As with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm blurs the distinction between dream and reality. Because of this blurring, we can see the supernatural horror and the surrealism of Phantasm as being an allegory of the inner workings and conflicts of the unconscious mind. The dreamlike state that permeates not just this film, but also its sequels (generally regarded as inferior), explains to a great extent their many plot holes and inconsistencies.

The film begins at night, with a young man named Tommy making love with the Lady in Lavender in Morningside Cemetery. She takes a knife and stabs him to death, then changes into the form of the Tall Man. The juxtaposition of sex and death (or of Eros and Thanatos), as well as of the Lady in Lavender (or bad mother transference) and of the Tall Man (or bad father transference) allegorizes and personifies the unconscious processes described above.

Tommy has not just had the Oedipally-desired mother transference, he’s also experienced the combined parent figure, whom he penetrated and was penetrated by with a phallic knife (Indeed, in the novelization, the stabbing is described thus: “Quickly she sank [the knife] as hard and fast into his heart as he had plunged his body into hers.”). He later can be understood to be a kind of brother-figure for Mike, the way Reggie will be understood to be by the end of the film when we learn of Jody’s death, since we learn that Jody, Reggie, and Tommy were supposed to be a kind of Crosby, Stills, and Nash-style band of singers and guitar strummers (“It’s a hell of a way to end a trio,” Jody says of Tommy’s death to Reggie on the day of the funeral). The togetherness of the three young men suggests a tripling of Jody for Mike.

Because of the trauma Mike has suffered from his and Jody’s parents’ deaths, the boy has terrible fears of abandonment, and so he follows his older brother everywhere around town. Jody in fact plans on leaving Mike in the custody of his aunt, which of course the boy will hate, but Jody wants his freedom to pursue making music with Reggie, and leave that dull town.

Part of Mike’s fears of losing Jody the way he lost their parents can be seen as expressed in nightmare form: the stabbing of Tommy, and later of Reggie, the two victims being symbolic brothers. Mike’s unconscious mind is thus displacing the status of brother onto two men who aren’t his biological brothers, in order to ease the anxiety of facing up to the loss of his actual brother, Jody.

Mike’s melancholia, expressed musically through the haunting synthesizer theme in E minor, demonstrates the self-hate Freud wrote about in his paper on the subject (link above) in how the boy subjects himself to dangerous situations. His hanging out in the cemetery at night where the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves are, his going in the mausoleum, and even his rather precocious (for a 13-year-old) riding around on a motorbike (and, at one point, driving Jody’s car) all demonstrate at least potentially self-destructive behaviour, indicative of Freud’s death drive, something people who hate themselves might do, because they have bad internal objects haunting them.

After Tommy’s funeral, his death understood (but not believed, according to the novelization) to be a suicide, and it’s understood just how heavy his coffin is, Mike comes to the cemetery and sees the Tall Man pick up, carry, and put the coffin in a hearse all by himself. Mike is so amazed at the mortician’s superhuman strength that he whispers, “What the fuck?” and wants to tell a local fortune teller (played by Mary Ellen Shaw) about it. The height and strength of the Tall Man (especially as compared with the height of his dwarves) reinforces him being representative of the bad father, who from the point of view of a child, is much bigger and stronger.

The fortune teller, who has reassured Mike that if Jody leaves, they’ll go together, is an old lady. As such, she is as much a symbolic mother to Mike as the Tall Man is a symbolic father. (Her granddaughter, played by Terrie Kalbus, is a symbolic sister.) That the fortune teller is amused at Mike’s fear from feeling his hand trapped and hurt in a magic box indicates that she, like the Lady in Lavender, is a bad mother figure, too.

That the box seems to be taking away Mike’s hand and is scaring him (the losing of his hand would have been a symbolic castration) is indicative of castration anxiety, and castration at the hands of the bad father (or here, of the bad mother) can in turn be representative of corporal punishment. To overcome his melancholia, Mike must overcome his fear and unconscious hate of his dead parents. Only then will their bad internal objects stop tormenting him. Hence, the granddaughter (Sarah in the novelization) tells him not to be afraid, and only when he controls his fear does the box, a yonic symbol, release his hand.

The old and young women want Mike to understand that it’s fear itself that is his problem. A funny thing, though, happens soon after, for the granddaughter goes to the cemetery and enters the mausoleum; and when she finds a room in it with containers holding the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves (as we’ll eventually learn), she finds herself overcome with terror, and screams. We don’t see or hear from her again. The fear she warned Mike about became her very problem.

While she’s at the cemetery and mausoleum, Jody is at home, singing and playing his electric guitar on his porch, and Reggie arrives in his ice cream truck with his acoustic guitar and joins in playing the new song Jody has been working on. He’s singing of his lady having left him, and I can’t help linking that idea with how his parents’ death must have felt like an abandonment (hence, Mike’s fears of abandonment). The unconscious Oedipal attachment to Jody’s mother could have easily been displaced to his lady leaving him (his local girlfriend [see the novelization], or his coming sexual encounter with the Lady in Lavender). An expression of his displaced grief in song is one way Jody has been successful in overcoming his grief and loss–something Mike can’t do.

The novelization points out in Chapter Two that Tommy sang and played guitar just like Jody and Reggie–hence I say their trio would have been like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, especially judging by the mellow style of the song we hear the surviving two musicians working on. They only need to work out the vocal harmonies, which would have been three-part had Tommy still been alive, like the harmonies of CSN. As a trio, they would again be a tripling of brothers for Mike, an unconscious wish-fulfillment for a boy so scared of losing any more of his family.

When Jody and Reggie finish playing the song, Reggie takes out a tuning fork and strikes it, then touches it with his fingertips to stop the ringing sound. Immediately after that, we see Sarah, the fortune teller’s granddaughter, walking through a hall in the mausoleum towards the door to the room with the dwarf containers, where she’ll scream.

We learn towards the climax of the movie, when Jody, Mike, and Reggie find that room, that there’s a pair of metal bars sticking up from the floor. These look like a giant tuning fork, but without the connecting bottom. Mike will put his hand between the bars and see it disappear, just as when his hand disappeared in the box; he’ll discover what Sarah must have seen–a hot, hellish world of slave dwarves toiling away for the devil Tall Man. Reggie later will touch the tops of those bars, just as his fingertips touched the tuning fork. This causes a vacuum in the room from which he narrowly escapes.

We are left wondering what connection there could be between the tuning fork, the bars, and the box. Since as I said above, the events of Phantasm are an allegorizing of the goings-on of the unconscious mind, there will be an association of various images that we see, all signifiers of some kind meant to represent certain mental concepts. Since the magic box is a yonic symbol, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as phallic. Putting one’s hand in the box or between the bars makes the hand disappear, a symbolic castration.

Touching the tuning fork or bars, and putting one’s hand in the box, is symbolic masturbation. The threat of castration, symbolic of corporal punishment, is parental discipline against a child’s indulgence in forbidden pleasures.

Furthermore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as both phallic and yonic, the spaces in between the “phalli” being yonis; therefore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be associated with the combined parental figure. That Mike’s hand disappears in the in-between “yoni” as well as that of the magic box indicates the vagina dentata of a punitive bad mother, one every bit as threatening as the bad father of the Tall Man, disciplining a child for his Oedipal urges. Recall how the Lady in Lavender, knife in hand, is ready to stab Jody just outside the mausoleum as Reggie is about to touch the bars and cause the vacuum in the room and the storm outside.

All of these elements in combination reinforce the idea that Phantasm is all about unconscious paranoid anxiety that the hated, internalized mother and father are out to punish Mike and Jody for wanting them dead and gone, however repressed that wish may be.

We learn from Chapter Seven of the novelization that Jody doesn’t want to take over his father’s bank. One can imagine some nasty argument between Jody and his parents over whether or not he should pursue a career in music rather than take over the family business. Jody’s wish to be free of his parents’ dictates surely contributed to an unconscious wish on his part to be rid of them…and so their deaths would have been a source of unconscious guilt for him as well as for Mike.

While Jody is visiting the bank in Chapter Seven of the novelization, he’s in the suit he had on during Tommy’s funeral, and apart from giving the management of his dead father’s bank to George Norby until Mike is old enough to take over, Jody also has a brief, intimate moment with Suzy, an employee there who likes him in that suit and, being of a traditional woman’s mindset, hopes her boyfriend will be the new boss of the bank. One of the film’s outtakes shows her with him in the office that was his dad’s.

Being an aspiring musician, though, Jody doesn’t want to be part of the money-obsessed, capitalist world. As I said above, I imagine his dad being upset with him for not wanting to do that. This conflict can be linked to the later scene of Mike seeing the slave dwarves in that hellscape beyond the metal bar portal in the room with the dwarf containers. Jody doesn’t want to be a slave to capitalism, angering his father, and so his and Mike’s unconscious is showing them the infernal punishment their devilish bad father (the Tall Man) has planned for them.

You see, Jody has a bit of paranoid anxiety of his own, though it’s not as intense as Mike’s is. Jody, too, has a nightmare, one of dwarves grabbing him and pulling him away into hell, just as Mike has a nightmare of the Tall Man standing over his bed with his arms out, ready to grab the boy, and the dwarves all then do.

With the blurring of the line between dream and reality, we don’t know for sure how much of Phantasm is actually in waking life. For all we know, it’s all a great big, unending nightmare, Dante’s tour of the hellish unconscious with Virgil. For this reason, I feel free to interpret any and every character as an extension of Jody’s and Mike’s family.

Thus, Suzy can be an extension of Jody’s unconscious Oedipal feelings for his mother (with Dad dead, he can have her, provided he’s willing to carry on with the family business). If not, though, he’ll be with the Lady in Lavender that night in the cemetery, taking his chances with the bad mother instead of having the good mother transference in his dad’s office in the bank.

Indeed, because things have gone sour between Jody and Suzy (she representing the good mother), he’ll go that night to the local pub and pick up the Lady in Lavender. Mike will be following Jody, as usual. The two lovers going at it in the cemetery represents a fusion of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives.

Mike, of course, will be in the cemetery, too. He’ll be scared by the presence of those dwarves, making him scream for help and distract Jody from her…also saving his life without him even realizing it.

The whole point of the Oedipus complex, properly understood in its expanded sense to include the jealous wish to hog the Oedipally-desired object to oneself (be this object the mother, father,…or really anyone), is that it’s a universal narcissistic trauma expressing hate and hostility to anyone who wishes to share that object and not let one hog him or her to oneself. This is what we see when Mike is following Jody everywhere, not wanting his older brother to be free to live his own life (e.g., to be with the Lady in Lavender). Saving Jody from her knife is thus a justification of Mike’s narcissistic wish to hog his brother all to himself, and is thus a wish-fulfillment. Remember how all of Phantasm could just be Mike’s ongoing dream, all an expression of his unconscious.

The next day, Mike is downtown, and across the street he sees the Tall Man walking up to Reggie’s ice cream truck. The cold of the truck seems to affect the Tall Man negatively. Indeed, we come to understand that the antagonist, being a devil of the hottest hell, has a strong aversion to heat’s diametrical opposite.

Later, Mike is in the garage, tinkering with a car. His precocious talent at fixing cars seems to reflect a wish to know how to bring things back to life, as it were. If only he could bring people back to life, like his parents. Dwarves scare him again, and he tells still-disbelieving Jody about them.

That night, Mike will go with a knife to the mausoleum to figure out what’s going on there. As he’s hiding in a coffin, he sees a caretaker looking around. This is another middle-aged man, like the Tall Man, so as far as Mike’s unconscious is concerned, the man is yet again representative of the bad father that the boy has internalized and whom he wishes he could be rid of.

Note how in all of Mike’s fear of the Tall Man and his dwarves, the boy still ventures out to the places that are the sources of his fear. This willingness to go out there demonstrates his self-destructive nature, which in turn demonstrates the self-hate he feels from his having internalized his bad parental objects, the source of his melancholia in the Freudian sense. He hates himself because he hates them, who are now a part of him.

Still, he keeps trying to project them outward, hence he has to confront them in the forms of the caretaker and the Tall Man. The coffin he hides in is a yonic symbol, representing his forbidden Oedipal desire, which as I said above is much more than just the wish to have his mother incestuously; but in the more expanded sense, it means he wants to hog all desired objects (her, the good father, Jody, and other brother-figures–Reggie and Tommy) all to himself.

Lacan‘s Non! du père forbids Mike to hog everyone just to fulfill his personal wishes, though: Mike must enter society and share everyone with everyone else; he cannot be the symbolic phallus for the mother, which represents the wish to be the desire of the Other. This inability to be that phallus is thus a symbolic castration, which is a recurrent motif in Phantasm.

Mike struggles with the caretaker, even biting his hand…and we’ve seen how a hurt or disappearing hand is symbolic castration. Mike wants the frustration of his wishes to be projected onto others. Immediately after the biting of the hand comes the flying ball with the blade, which stabs the caretaker in the head and kills him. This flying testicle and phallic blade are both castrated and (symbolically) castrating in their mutilation of the man’s face.

Right after this struggle, Mike has to confront the Tall Man, who chases him into a room, with Mike bolting the door to keep the mortician out, his hand slipping through the crack. Mike uses his knife to slice off the Tall Man’s fingers, yet another symbolic castration and Mike’s wish-fulfillment to project the frustration of his desires onto his bad father internal object. This wish-fulfillment is a form of revenge against his father’s frustration of his desires, which led to his unconscious wish for his parents’ deaths, which in turn led to his guilt and melancholia over their actual death. Instead of human blood, the severed fingers drip yellow ichor (the blood of the Greek gods), fittingly the colour of piss and therefore it reinforces how the fingers are phallic.

Mike takes a finger, puts it in a little box [!], and takes it home to show Jody the proof that he isn’t going crazy. Later on, the finger turns into a horrible, black flying insect that attacks Mike and then Jody and visiting Reggie soon after. Its ugliness, and the revulsion that the insect causes, are the diametrical (and dialectical) opposite of the beauty of Aphrodite, who emerged nude from the foam of the sea into which the severed genitals of Uranus were thrown. Indeed, the original sky-father god was castrated by his son, Cronus, in a reversal of the fear of the castrating father of Freud’s conception (Freud, on page 469 of his Interpretation of Dreams, wrote of a variation in which it’s Zeus who overthrows and castrates Cronus in revenge for devouring all of his children.).

The insect is shoved into the kitchen sinkhole, just as the Tall Man will be trapped in a hole going down into an abandoned mine shaft. Apart from being more yonic symbols, these traps also represent attempts at repressing traumatic memories…and of course, neither of them will last long or be effective. Reggie’s seeing of the insect means he too will be involved in doing something about the Tall Man.

Jody is the next to go to the mausoleum alone, and he’s attacked by the dwarves, one of which then chases him in a hearse, it being too short for Jody to see it through the car windows. It turns out that, once Mike has arrived in Jody’s car to help and that the dwarf has been stopped, that it was a crushed, shrunken version of Tommy.

Jody and Mike come to realize that the Tall Man has been killing people in the town (including their parents), and he has been crushing the bodies down to dwarf height, reanimating them, too, in order to do his bidding. As Mike later learns through the twin metal bar portal in that room with the dwarf containers, the dwarves will be the Tall Man’s toiling slaves.

On a symbolic level, this all means that the bad father wants to infantilize Jody and Mike (i.e., to shrink them down to size), and thus make them obey their dad’s every command (e.g., continue to run their father’s banking business, and so abandon their dreams of a music career, etc., and be good slaves to capitalism) without question. Another thing to consider is how the dwarves, as symbolic children, are projections of Mike’s self-loathing. He screams in terror at them because they are him; they’re what Wilfred Bion called ‘bizarre objects,’ hallucinated projections of Mike.

As Jody tries to confront what’s going on in the mausoleum, he tries to keep Mike out of it, in a misguided attempt to protect him. The Tall Man will go after Mike in the house, anyway. Jody trying to lock Mike up in his bedroom just makes Jody into yet another bad object, frustrating Mike in his wishes to be involved with confronting the Tall Man. Mike, in his frustration as Jody is carrying him upstairs to his bedroom, struggles and screams, calling Jody a “goddamn bastard!” and fearing that Jody will abandon him forever.

Mike manages to break out of his bedroom, and the Tall Man, all fingers intact again, abducts him and puts him in a hearse to take him to the mausoleum. Mike has a pistol, though, and he shoots his way out, making the hearse crash and go up in flames. He goes in the mausoleum and finds his father’s coffin, as Jody has already done.

Just before opening the coffin, Mike says, “I’m sorry, Dad, but we had to”…do what? Wish for his and Jody’s parents’ deaths? He’s horrified to see his father’s corpse gone. A bladed ball flies at his head, but Jody intervenes and shoots it with a shotgun. Instead of being mad at Mike for disobeying and escaping his bedroom, though, Jody hugs him. Jody is thus a good object again.

They’re pleased to run into Reggie again, knowing he isn’t dead (after having assumed that he and a couple of young women were killed earlier by the dwarves). Mike is especially pleased, of course, since Reggie’s another brother-figure. They go in that room with the dwarf-containers and the portal. Mike calls the other world, the one he’s almost fallen into, another planet, but I think it’s supposed to be hell, where the Tall Man and his dwarves are all evil spirits.

Finally, with everyone outside the mausoleum again, Reggie, thinking he’s helping the Lady in Lavender, is stabbed by her, just as Tommy–another brother-figure to Mike–was. Then Jody devises his plan to lure the Tall Man into the mine shaft and trap him there.

Mike has to confront the Tall Man yet again at home, the mortician calling him “Boy!”, like a harsh, disciplinarian father. He chases Mike out to the mine shaft, where he falls in the hole, one which Jody then drops boulders from on high to trap the Tall Man in. Jody seems like a triumphant hero.

Mike wakes up in bed. It was all just a dream…wasn’t it?

As it turns out, it was Jody who died…in a car wreck, and not Reggie from a stabbing. Mike knows those rocks won’t hold the Tall Man for long (if he could survive the fire from the crashing of the hearse into the pole, surely he can get out of that trap): of course not–Jody’s trap is merely symbolic of repression in the unconscious. We know Mike has been having nightmare after nightmare ever since his parents’ deaths, and now he’s having even more of them after Jody’s death.

Has the whole film been a dream, on and off?

We see Mike and Reggie in the living room of the house, with a fireplace burning behind them. It looks almost like a romantic setting. I don’t mean to say that Reggie is being a pederastic predator, or that Mike is welcoming such predation in his unconscious; but rather that these overtones are symbolic of Mike’s deep need to have the (platonic) love of a brother-figure, a need that would be particularly intense now that he’s just lost Jody. His feelings of abandonment are overwhelming.

Since Mike has been frustrated as well as loved by his now-all-dead objects, the bad versions of them, including that of Jody now, will all be internalized by the boy. He’ll need Reggie as a good object and brother-figure. Fittingly, Reggie picks up his acoustic guitar and begins humming and strumming that song he played earlier with Jody, the one about his woman leaving him. The film is all about loss, mourning, and a feeling of abandonment.

When Mike is in his room to begin packing for the road trip he and Reggie have planned, he sees the Tall Man again, in the mirror. Seeing the bad father, instead of himself, in the specular image is a reminder to us that the boy’s demons are all inside himself, internalized, not out there somewhere and so he’d be safe from them.

Like a stern father about to spank his son, the Tall Man calls out “Boy!” again, and the dwarves’ arms crash through the mirror glass, grab Mike, and take him screaming away. The childlike dwarves, about Mike’s height, get him because, like the Tall Man, they are him.

Analysis of ‘Christmas Evil’

Christmas Evil (originally titled You Better Watch Out, and also known as Terror in Toyland) is a 1980 horror film written and directed by Lewis Jackson. It stars Brandon Maggart and costars Jeffrey DeMunn. The film has gained a cult following since its release, with praise from John Waters.

Tom Huddleston from Time Out, who rated it 4 out of 5 stars, said, “In contrast to most slasher flicks, this isn’t about anything as simple as revenge. Jackson’s concerns are bigger: social responsibility, personal morality, and the gaping gulf between society’s stated aims at Christmastime – charity, hope, goodwill to all men – and the plight of those left on the outside: the children, the mentally ill, the ones who don’t fit in. It’s a great looking film, too: one shot of a suburban street lined with glowing reindeer looks more like Spielbergian sci-fi than low-budget horror. Bizarre, fascinating, thoughtful, and well worth a look.”

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

I’d say that Christmas Evil is not so much a horror movie as it is a character study. There are only a few killings sandwiched in the middle of a story about a mentally disturbed man, Harry Stadling (Maggart), who has a Santa Claus fixation. Going about everywhere in a Santa suit, Harry hardly looks scary, but rather clownish, sad, and pathetic–a victim of an alienating modern society in which consumerism has spoiled a once merry holiday.

The value of the film can be seen in its critique of that society, rather than its ability to give us chills. When I say that Harry is “sad and pathetic,” I mean it in both the derisive and sympathetic sense, with a great emphasis on the latter. He is a truly sympathetic slasher, a lonely man who has no friends and gets no respect form his coworkers at “Jolly Dreams,” a toy-making company he manages, and who idealizes Santa as an escape from his cold and empty life.

The stark contrast between what Christmas ought to be versus what it is can be seen in the otherwise dull title of the film, an obvious pun on Christmas Eve, though only a relatively small part of the film takes place on that day. Christmas is supposed to be a time of togetherness, community, and love, but in our modern capitalist society, all that’s left of the holiday is crass consumerism, materialism, and the annoyance of such things as spending time with relatives we can’t stand. It’s enough to make a Grinch out of the warmest-hearted Who.

So in a sense, Harry’s descent into madness can be seen as allegorical of the heartbreak we all feel as we see our childhood innocence fade away, to be replaced with adult cynicism. It’s an eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge–paradise lost. Harry can’t accept the shift from songs of innocence to songs of experience, so he protests and rebels against it by trying to keep his childlike naïveté alive as Santa. His is a protest against the pain of reality.

The story all starts on a Christmas Eve in 1947, when little Harry and his younger brother, Phil (the adult version of whom is played by DeMunn) are with their mother on the stairs by the living room in their home, watching “Santa” (actually the boys’ father) come down he chimney, eat the milk and cookies provided for him, and leave presents for the family under the Christmas tree. Phil, though a kid, has the sense to know that it’s their dad dressed as Santa, but Harry is captivated by the sight.

There’s one detail from this scene that ought to be paid close attention to: the boys’ mother is beautiful…and by beautiful, I mean she’s smoking hot! I’m not trying to be a creep here, for I believe that there is significance to her attractiveness, as far as Harry’s psychology is concerned. It should be obvious to you, Dear Reader, what I’m getting at–especially obvious if you’ve read my other blog posts.

Yes, I know I harp on about the Oedipus complex a lot here, but I feel justified in doing so, since as Don Carveth has defended it, the Oedipus complex is a universal narcissistic trauma. A child has to learn that he or she cannot hog the Oedipally-desired parent all to himself or herself forever, but must instead share the mother or father with the other parent, with everyone else, and must allow the desired parent to have a life of his or her own. It’s about the painful realization of sharing people, not greedily keeping them to oneself and treating them as a mere extension of oneself.

Now, the Oedipal feelings for the desired parent don’t have to be sexual and incestuous, as in the classical Freudian version of it, but in little Harry’s case, I’d say they are, to consider how beautiful his mom is. That he has such feelings for her, however repressed and unconscious they would undoubtedly be, is made apparent when we see how upset the boy is to see “Santa” later sexually groping her leg, with her garter showing. It’s akin to the primal scene. She’s enjoying the groping, giggling. Combined with little Phil’s insistence that “Santa” is their dad–Father Christmas, as it were–the experience traumatizes little Harry, who wants to be Santa in order to be his father and thus have her…of course, this wish is repressed.

Now, there’s something we have to understand about the unconscious mind and the repressed: what is repressed returns to consciousness, but in an unrecognizable form. Psychoanalysts don’t use the word “subconscious,” as the pop psychologists do. What is repressed isn’t hidden somehow ‘underneath’ consciousness–it isn’t ‘below’ what is known…it is simply unknown, unconscious, hidden in plain sight, because it has reemerged in a form one cannot consciously recognize as such, and therefore it won’t cause one guilt, shame, and anxiety.

This kind of repression is what has happened to Harry. It’s inconceivable that he would recognize his desire to take his father’s place and have his mother: to recognize his incestuous desires as they really are would horrify him. Therefore, they must be repressed and must come back into consciousness in a form that seems totally unrelated to the incestuous fantasy–he wants to be Santa Claus.

It’s significant that we never see Harry’s and Phil’s father not dressed as Santa Claus: the point is that the father is equated with Santa, at least in Harry’s mind. By the end of the film, Harry complains to Phil that he said it was their dad dressed up as Santa, rather than the real Santa. But Harry doesn’t seem to remember “Santa” groping his mom. The first reason for this forgetting is, as I’ve implied above, motivated by Oedipal jealousy; the second reason is that Harry can’t bear to face the reality that the world isn’t the innocent place he wants it to be.

Little Harry is so upset to see “Santa” being “dirty” with his mom that he smashes a snow globe and cuts his hand with the jagged edge of some of its broken glass–this is symbolically his narcissistic scar. Later in the film–when he as an adult realizes that a coworker has tricked the “schmuck” into working his shift for him in Jolly Dreams so the liar can go off for a few beers in the local pub, rather than spend time with his family as he claims is his plan–Harry holds a toy in his hand and crushes it, a similar expression of his narcissistic injury. He hates all acts of naughtiness in our corrupt, adult world.

Christmas is his only escape, into innocence, from this world, hence at home, he’s often in Santa-like clothes (the red hat, etc.), he hums Christmas songs all the time, and he has Christmas decorations all over the place. He’s doing this sort of thing even before the arrival of Thanksgiving.

Now, lots of people annoyingly get into the Christmas spirit long before December, but with Harry, it’s truly pathological. His fixation on Santa perfectly personifies how far too many people out there idealize holidays–not just Christmas, but also Halloween, Chinese New Year, etc. It’s truly sickening how, just after Thanksgiving, so many Americans go insane shopping on Black Friday; how quickly one forgets one’s supposed gratitude with what one has, in a mad dash of acquisitiveness for sales of more and more stuff.

My point is that way too often, we have an unhealthy attachment to ‘special occasions’ like Christmas and birthdays, then revert back to our miserable ordinary lives as soon as those special days are over. We need instead to find a way to make our everyday lives happier, more charitable, and more communal. Harry’s pathology represents that excessive attachment to only one day as the ‘happy’ and ‘innocent’ one.

In his Santa fixation, again, long before Christmas has come, Harry spies on the kids in his neighbourhood with binoculars. No, he isn’t a sex pervert: he’s far too sexually repressed and insistent on maintaining a sense of innocence to have any sexual interest in anyone, let alone children. Like Santa, he’s checking to see which children are being naughty, and which are being nice. In fact, he gets quite angry to find one boy, Moss Garcia (played by Peter Neuman), lying on his bed and looking at nudie pictures in a Penthouse magazine! Harry immediately goes back home and writes in his book of ‘Bad Boys and Girls’ that Moss is having “impure thoughts.”

We often see Harry standing in front of a mirror at home, sometimes clearly in a Santa attitude with either shaving cream on his face to look like a Santa beard, or wearing a fake Santa beard. This use of the mirror is undoubtedly Lacanian: Harry’s ideal-I is Santa, so he sees himself as Santa in the reflection, hoping he can live up to that moral ideal, all while the real Harry looking at the specular image is fragmented and alienated from himself.

About forty years of age, Harry has no woman, as does his brother, Phil, a married father. Harry’s coworkers treat him with no respect. He cancels going to Phil’s house to have Thanksgiving dinner with his wife and kids, causing him to be all the more worried about Harry’s increasingly erratic behaviour. We see Harry go to Phil’s house the night before the cancellation, looking through the front window sadly and watching Phil and his sons playing on the sofa. Trapped in his narcissistic idealization of and identification with Santa, Harry cannot leave that dyadic child/parent world and enter the society of many Others.

He makes a Santa suit, wig, and beard for himself, and he decorates his van with a painting of Santa’s sleigh. He’s set up everything to aid in his delusion that he’s really Santa Claus, come to rescue us all from the cynical, depressing adult world and bring it back to the sweet, innocent, childlike world he so misses.

He walks down his neighbourhood and hears the kids there tell him their wishes. When Moss says he wishes for a lifetime subscription to Penthouse magazine, Harry is infuriated. At home, he looks in his book of ‘Bad Boys and Girls,’ and sees the page with the list of Moss’s sins; he decides that the naughty boy needs to be punished.

Harry goes to the boy’s home at night. He smears mud on his face and hands, mud from the side of the Garcia house, and he puts hand prints of the mud on the outer wall by a window. He’ll hide in the bushes and attempt to grab Moss as he’s about to leave home with his mom, who’s already angry with him for not wanting to go with her. When the boy tries to explain to her how a “monster” in the bushes tried to get him, she–fed up with his non-compliance–slaps him. This is the kind of lack of innocence, Moss’s and his mother’s, that Harry cannot tolerate in the world.

The root of Harry’s problem is in what Melanie Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position. It’s ‘schizoid,’ because Harry’s world is split between the white of innocence (the white of snow, or of Santa’s beard) and the black of our corrupt world (the black of that mud, or of the dirt he fills bags with to give to naughty kids–like Santa’s coal gifts–or the dirt Harry gets on his Santa suit, since despite all of his efforts, he cannot split off and expel the bad from himself…after all, he’ll kill people). It’s ‘paranoid,’ because Harry will feel the persecutory anxiety of the expelled badness coming back to him, in such forms as the torch-bearing mob who pursue him for his crimes at the end of the movie.

Harry cannot reconcile in his mind the black and white of our world into the grey of what Klein called the depressive position, an acknowledgement of how everyone is really a combination of good and bad, of innocent and guilty. Such an acknowledgement would be truly depressing for Santa-worshipping idealists like Harry, but his much healthier brother, Phil, can do it, hence Phil’s entrance into society, marriage, and fatherhood. Harry will remain in his lonely, narcissistic, infantile world of seeing Santa in the mirror, though.

The next disappointment Harry has to deal with is how capitalism can poison even what should be the festive and charitable spirit of Christmas. He attends a Christmas party for all the staff of Jolly Dreams, where he sees Mr. Wiseman (played by Burt Kleiner), the owner of the company, on a TV there saying that Jolly Dreams will donate toys to the children of the local hospital if production increases enough and the workers contribute their own money. The profit motive is always prioritized over kindness.

Harry is introduced to the man who devised the donation scheme, new training executive George Grosch (played by Peter Friedman). Though Harry as manager is supposed to be on the executive side of things now, and therefore be sympathetic to the need for “good business,” he feels as alienated from the company’s big brass as he is from the workers he left behind in his promotion, those unionized workers who have no respect for him.

Deciding he’s had enough of this cynical world, Harry steals bags of toys from the Jolly Dreams factory, fills other bags with dirt for the naughty kids, and on Christmas Eve, he glues a Santa beard to his face and goes into a fugue state in which he believes he really is Santa Claus. In a Santa suit, he goes around town giving gifts, first to Phil’s house, then he gives a bagful of dirt to naughty Moss, then gifts to the hospital, where a guard is annoyed with him, but soon after, the hospital staff appear and show him their appreciation for his generosity.

You’ll notice that none of this is particularly scary. It’s just a character study of a lonely, alienated man who’s been driven over the edge by an uncaring society.

Next, Harry goes to a church where Midnight Mass is being held, and Grosch is at a pew next to another Jolly Dreams executive, one who is nodding off. Both men are bored there; they’re clearly there only out of social obligation and with no real charitable intent. Harry is outside, at the bottom of the steps, waiting for the people to come out.

It seems that he knows that the Jolly Dreams executives are there, for he has a toy soldier with a spear on it, and he has a hatchet, both of which he’ll use as weapons, presumably on the two men he despises. Instead, though, the first of the people to leave the church and come down those steps to address him are some young adults, presumably of the upper classes. These snobs taunt him a bit, so he uses the weapons to kill them instead of the executives, leaving the dead to lie in their blood on the snowy ground.

Harry rushes off in his van to get away from the screaming others. The executives and their wives look down at the carnage from the top of the steps, and I’m guessing that they recognize their Jolly Dreams toys have been used as murder weapons. Finally, we’ve had a real slasher movie moment, over fifty minutes into the film.

The next place Harry goes to is another Christmas party, one in a restaurant. The overdue buildup to horror has just been deflated. Instead of more suspense, tension, and eerie atmosphere, we see ‘Santa’ being invited into the party by a pair of tipsy men. Harry has been looking in the window, watching all the partiers, and in his loneliness wishing he could be a part of the merriment, and now he can, in spite of his shy reluctance to.

Meanwhile, the police are starting their search for him.

At the party, Harry enjoys being welcomed and accepted by the people there, especially the sweet little kids. He dances with them, and he tells the kids they have to be good if they want good gifts instead of something…”horrible.” In this moment, he’s able to enjoy some of that coveted innocence as well as to promote it among the kids.

He leaves the party, and as he’s riding away in his van, he imagines himself calling out to Santa’s reindeer, each by its name, as if he were riding Santa’s sleigh in the sky. That party just indulged him in his delusions. We hear dissonant piano notes in the soundtrack to remind us that Harry is still not well.

He’s also thinking about Frank (played by Joe Jamrog), the coworker who made Harry work his shift so he could go out and have beers at the local pub. Enraged at his having been used and humiliated, Harry wants revenge, so he goes to Frank’s house to kill him.

Harry gives us yet another example of how pathetic he is when he tries to enter Frank’s house through the chimney. He may not be as fat as Santa, but in his delusions he still doesn’t realize he lacks Santa’s magical abilities, either, so it takes a while for Harry to snap out of it and accept that he cannot fit in the chimney. Again, this absurdity deflates any possible sense of building the tension one should find in a horror film.

He enters the house through a side window by the ground (and ridiculously, he neglects to close it, letting all the snowy cold in the house). He leaves gifts for Frank’s kids under the Christmas tree, then goes up to the bedroom to kill Frank, first by trying to smother him with his bag of gifts, then by slitting his throat with a sharp end from a Christmas star from a tree by the bed. His wife, beside him in bed, wakes and screams at the sight of his bloody body as Harry runs out of the house.

Meanwhile, on Christmas Day, Phil has learned from the TV news about the killings, and not knowing where Harry is, he worriedly suspects his brother of the crimes. Harry’s Santa suit is fittingly getting dirty. He goes to the Jolly Dreams factory and, annoyed with the poor quality he sees in the toys on the assembly line, he destroys them.

The police round up men in Santa suits from all over the city to see if any of them is the killer, which of course none of them are. (One of the police, Detective Gleason, incidentally is played by Raymond J Barry, who was the grumpy, insensitive police captain in Falling Down, who didn’t like Sgt. Prendergast [played by Robert Duvall] because he never cursed.)

To get back to Harry, he’s on the phone with Phil, who is “sick to [his] stomach” worried. Harry tells him he’s “finally found the right notes,” and he “can play the tune now.” This is “the tune everybody dances to.” Phil, of course, has no idea what deluded Harry is talking about, as didn’t a coworker at the Jolly Dreams Christmas party when Harry mentioned “the tune” there. He tells Phil he’ll play his tune, everybody will dance, and Phil won’t have to worry about him anymore. Harry hangs up.

Now, what Harry means by “the tune,” apart from being a Christmas song like “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” (presumably), isn’t any clearer to us than it is to Phil or that coworker, but I imagine it to be symbolic of the idea of the music of the spheres. A literal, audible music is not believed to be heard, as Johannes Kepler imagined, but it represents what was believed to be the underlying order and harmony of the universe, that innocence and goodness that Harry craves.

In the ancient, prescientific world, the heavens and therefore space (the sun, the moon, stars, and planets) were perceived to be perfect. It was only here on Earth that imperfection, sin, existed because Satan was “the god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4), or of this present age. This Pythagorean view was adopted by the ancient Church, and the innocence of this belief was challenged by later astronomers like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, who introduced such models as elliptical orbits and sunspots. Such fantasies of perfection would be most appealing to Harry.

The perfection of heaven, up in the sky where we imagine God and the angels to be, is also where Santa is supposed to be flying in his sleigh with the reindeer, up there with the moon, too. It’s an idealized fantasy world to which we can escape from the miserable reality of our lives down here on Earth, and that’s why Harry wants it to exist so badly. It’s the heavenly, innocent world of children, for to enter the kingdom of heaven, one must be as a child (Matthew 18:3).

In connection with the Christian associations of Santa Claus, we of course know him to be derived from St. Nicholas, who gave children gifts back in the fourth century, back when the Pythagorean cosmology was still the dominant one. Harry in his narcissism would like to think of himself as a saint, full of nothing but goodness, which is a reaction formation against his hostility and violence, as well as against his repressed Oedipal feelings.

While I’d say that Christmas Evil is subpar by horror movie standards, it does also have its virtues. Apart from its important themes of the tension between innocence and sin, and its character study of a lonely, troubled man, the movie is gorgeously filmed, with vivid colours and bright lights, as can be seen especially in the scene when Harry, having got his van stuck in some snow, walks into a neighbourhood at night with beautiful decorations and bright lights. He sees many decorations of glowing Santas on sleighs, as well as glowing Frosty-the-Snowmen. He must think he’s in Christmas heaven.

There’s a huge full moon in the sky. Harry gazes at it in his ongoing delirium, which is fitting for this lunatic. It’s a bright, circular light in the darkness, a Pythagorean island of innocence in a sea of sin, his little bit of Christmas in all of the evil around him. He is similarly dazed by all of the bright decorations of reindeer on the houses he’s walking by.

A group of kids run up to him, imagining he’s as much the ‘real’ Santa as he thinks himself to be. One would think this might be a terrifying moment in the film, but it’s been established that he won’t kill children; the worst he’ll ever do to a naughty boy or girl is give him or her a bag of dirt.

A sweet girl among the kids notices how dirty his suit is; he tells her it’s because of all the pollution in the world, his way of once again symbolically splitting off the bad in himself and projecting it out onto the world. The parents of the children arrive, and they’re terrified for their kids, knowing who Harry must be.

The father of the little girl takes out a knife and prepares to defend her from Harry, but the kids, having received gifts from ‘Santa,’ don’t want the man to attack Harry, so they stand in front of ‘Santa’ to defend him. Since Harry is truly no threat to the kids, we can see in this scene the ironic wisdom of the kids’ naïve innocence versus the folly of the adults’ cynical view of the world.

Indeed, we see more irony in the little girl’s…innocent disobedience…of her father when he tells her to return his switchblade to him after he’s dropped it in the snow. She gives it to Harry, who cuts her father with it when he tries to stop Harry from escaping. The parents help form a torch-bearing mob to chase him. As he runs, he falls into a pile of garbage, getting his suit even dirtier: the evil he tries to project keeps coming back to him, symbolically and literally, soiling his ‘innocence.’

We next see a group of lit torches floating in the black of night, a dialectical, yin-and-yang contrast to the white of his Santa suit that has been blackened with dirt. He’s practically weeping with fear at being chased by the mob; this is the persecutory anxiety that is part of the paranoid-schizoid position, for the evil that he splits off and projects will always come back to him…it’s always part of him, and it cannot be removed from him.

He manages to get back to his van, get it out of the snow, and drive away from the mob. Then he goes to Phil’s house, where he’ll confront his brother about having said the “Santa” of their childhood was really their dad, and how this memory traumatized little Harry, at a time that included “Santa” doing something with the boys’ mother that was anything but innocent…not that Harry seems to remember.

He complains to Phil that he’s failed to get the people to accept his “tune,” to accept the innocence and purity of the music of the spheres, his purity that results from splitting off and projecting everything bad. Phil, exasperated with his brother’s mental health issues and horrified that he’s killed people, strangles Harry until he loses consciousness.

After Phil puts Harry back in his van, he wakes up and punches Phil, then drives off. The mob is still chasing him, and he drives off a bridge.

Now, we naturally should expect the van to crash below, with Harry badly injured and soon to be apprehended by the police (or beaten to death by the mob), if not killed in the accident. Instead, we see the van flying up toward the moon (his lunatic, Pythagorean home) as if it really were Santa’s sleigh, and we hear a voice-over reciting the ending of “The Night Before Christmas,” just as we’d heard the beginning of the poem at the beginning of the movie.

We the audience are sharing Harry’s delusion. Reality has become much too painful to bear. We are also splitting off and projecting the bad, and indulging with Harry in his innocent fantasies. Like Norman Bates, in police custody at the end of Psycho and fully deluded that he’s his mother, Harry fully believes he’s Santa.

The real horror of Christmas Evil is not in the killings and blood. It’s in the witnessing of a lonely, unhappy man losing his mind and escaping to a childish fantasy world, a regression to an innocent time, because our real world has become too evil to endure…even at Christmastime.

Analysis of ‘Peeping Tom’

Peeping Tom is a 1960 horror film directed by Michael Powell and written by Leo Marks. It stars Carl Boehm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, and Maxine Audley, with Esmond Knight, Pamela Green, and Miles Malleson. With Psycho, Peeping Tom is considered to be one of the very first slasher films, both films having been released within months of each other.

The film’s lurid content made it controversial on releasee, and the negative critical reaction to it caused severe harm to Powell’s career as a director. Peeping Tom, however, has been reappraised over the years, and it is now considered not only a cult film, but also a masterpiece by many, with its psychological themes of voyeurism and the link between sexuality and violence. The British Film Institute named it the 78th greatest British film of all time, and a poll of 150 actors, directors, writers, producers, and critics for Time Out magazine ranked it the 29th best British film ever.

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

Since voyeurism as a paraphilia involves being sexually aroused by covertly and non-consensually watching people undress or engage in sex, to call Mark Lewis (Boehm) a “peeping Tom” seems to be a misnomer. When he murders women with the concealed blade on a leg of the tripod of his camera, they are generally neither undressing, nor nude, nor having sex without knowing or consenting of his watching. Nor does he seem aroused. It isn’t about gaining sexual satisfaction: it’s about seeing the terror on the women’s faces as they see themselves in a mirror attached to the camera, knowing they’re about to be stabbed in the neck with the blade. He isn’t a ‘sex pervert’; he’s a psycho killer.

Indeed, his scoptophilia isn’t of a sexual nature, even though his victims are generally sexualized women: a prostitute (Dora, played by Brenda Bruce), a dancer (Vivian, played by Shearer), and a soft-porn pin-up model (Milly, played by Green). He is fixated on capturing the women’s fear on camera, then watching his freshly-made ‘snuff films’ in the darkroom in his apartment.

Any kind of sexuality in all of this is secondary, at best, to the idea of seeing others in general, in seeing their fear. Now, we could use another word for this fear, anxiety, which leads to my next point.

Jacques Lacan spoke of anxiety as being a kind of expectant dread, the “sensation of the desire of the other.” We feel anxiety when we face another person and cannot know how the other views us or know what he or she expects of us. Such a fear that Mark’s victims feel can be seen to represent Lacan’s concept of anxiety.

To illustrate his concept, Lacan used the example of two praying mantises confronting each other. After mating and copulating, the female praying mantis is known, in most cases, to bite off the head of her male partner. In Lacan’s example, one may imagine oneself facing a female praying mantis while, being the same size as her, wearing the mask of a male or a female praying mantis. One doesn’t know what sex the mask is that one is wearing. Will she, or will she not, bite the mask-wearer’s head off? This is how Lacan’s notion of anxiety works: we do not know what she wants of us, or how she sees us, and that is what frightens us so much.

With the sexes reversed, Mark and his victims can be seen to be in essentially the same situation. What’s with that blade on his tripod leg (which is obviously phallic)? Why does he keep getting closer and closer to her with it? Why that maniacal look on his face? Oh, my God! He’s going to kill her! As with the mating and sexual cannibalism of the praying mantises, we can see the link between sexuality and violence in Peeping Tom.

Since Mark’s fixation is on seeing the fear in the women’s faces, rather than on surreptitiously seeing the secrets of their naked anatomy, we need to know what has caused him to have this fixation.

Mark meets Helen Stephens (Massey), a young woman who is clearly the sweet and innocent opposite of those ‘bad girls’ he keeps killing (a contrast that feminists would have a field day analyzing in terms of the old Madonna/whore dichotomy), during her birthday party, and she would love to watch one of the films he’s made. Naturally, he won’t show her one of his snuff films, so instead he shows her films of him as a boy, filmed by his father.

In these films, we and Helen see the root cause of Mark’s psychopathy. As his father filmed him, he would agitate the boy in bed by flashing a flashlight in the sleeping boy’s face or throw a lizard on the bed (the father, a psychologist, wanted to study fear). These agitations are, of course, the diametrical opposite of how a parent should soothe a child, which brings me to my next point.

In the psychoanalysis of Wilfred Bion, we learn of how infants need their parents to process agitations for them before they can learn to do it themselves. The sensory agitations, or beta elements (as Bion called them), are processed through alpha function and turned into alpha elements, or stimuli that can be tolerated. A primary caregiver, traditionally the mother, of course, does this soothing and processing of the agitations in what Bion called maternal reverie. Go here to learn more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts.

Bion also called the parent, as the soother and processor of these agitations, the container of them, which are the contained. He used feminine and masculine symbols, respectively, for these two concepts, which in turn can be respectively represented as yonic and phallic. So the containing, soothing, and processing of agitations, turning them into tolerable alpha elements, results in what Bion called K, for knowledge, and learning from experience, resulting in a mature, emotionally healthy individual.

The opposite, of course, is what happened to little Mark.

Those agitations he was subjected to–the flashlight, the lizard, and even the premature exposure to the man and woman kissing on the park bench–would have resulted in -K, or the rejection of knowledge and learning from experience. It was negative containment, as represented in Bion’s symbols as -♀︎/♂︎: here, instead of, for example, an infant’s fears of dying being soothed, they turn into a nameless dread (Bion, page 96), resulting in Mark’s psychopathology.

Making matters worse for the boy, his mother died, she being presumably the one who, through maternal reverie as mentioned above, would have soothed him in his fears, turning the beta element agitations (e.g., the flashlight and the lizard) into tolerable, processed alpha elements. Even worse than her death is how her bed hadn’t even turned cold before she was replaced with “her successor,” whom his father married a mere six weeks after his mother’s funeral, strongly implying that this woman had already been his father’s mistress for quite some time (we first see her in a bikini on the beach).

The boy must have hated his mother’s “successor” from the very beginning. He would surely have idealized his mother as a Madonna-like figure, and abominated her “successor” as a whore. That we see him in his old film as a child reluctantly holding the hand of the “successor,” and receiving his camera as a gift in the same scene of the old film, is significant, for his killing of the “whores” while filming them suggests a wish-fulfillment of killing and filming the “successor.” She films him getting the camera in that scene.

Now, when one has an accumulation of unprocessed agitations as Mark has, one has to have a way of splitting them off and expelling them. In Mark’s case, it’s the Lacanian anxiety of his father’s agitating him with the flashlight, the lizard, and the camera always eyeing him, and whatever else his father may have bothered him with that we haven’t seen on any of Mark’s old films.

With all of this childhood trauma, Mark must split off and expel it, through projective identification, by forcing his victims to experience that fear of dying. This is why he kills those “whores” in the exact way that he does: they are stabbed in the ‘container’ neck with a ‘contained’ phallic blade (implying a “slut” performing fellatio on him); he sees the terror on their faces just before they die, thus projecting his own fear and anxiety onto them; and in having them see their own terrified faces in the mirror attached to the camera, he ensures that the transfer, the projection, of his trauma onto them is complete.

When his father was provoking his anxiety by agitating him with the flashlight, the lizard, and the intruding, voyeuristic camera, little Mark must have been wondering, Why, Father, are you doing this to me? What do you want from me? Idealizing his father as he did his mother, Mark forbade himself from hating him, so he displaced his hate onto the “successor,” then transferring that hate onto his “whore” victims, he made them similarly wonder, in the anxiety he provoked from them, what he wanted from them.

The taboo against hating his father is so great that he must repress it. Any repression, nonetheless, must return to consciousness, though in an unrecognized form. In Mark’s case, it will come back in his identifying with his father, since now Mark is the cameraman who terrifies others. Thus, he hates himself instead of his father.

His Madonna/whore complex is problematic, as is his choice of only female victims, but he isn’t a woman-hater per se, for he won’t kill any woman just because she is a woman. He sincerely comes to love sweet Helen, for in her he has a mother transference. When he and Helen watch the film of his mother on her deathbed, we see him as a boy touching her, and at the same time adult Mark touches Helen on the shoulder and says the woman in the film is his mother; he’s obviously indicating a link in his mind between Helen and his mother. He also knows that Helen lives in the room his mother once occupied (Mark rents out rooms of his father’s house, now his, to tenants like Helen); he tells Helen this immediately after looking at the bed there.

Because of his love for Helen, he cannot bring himself to kill her…or her blind mother, Mrs. Stephens (Audley), who is full of suspicions about him. Indeed, the mother’s blindness is a kind of superpower, for Mark cannot use visuals to terrify her, then kill her in her terror. In fact, Mrs. Stephens even has, on her walking stick, a sharp end for stabbing anyone who might try to take advantage of her blindness and attack her. The sight of the sharp end of her cane arouses Mark’s guilt, as does her snooping around in his room to figure out what kind of a man he is. As the mother of his Oedipal transference, Mrs. Stephens is Mark’s bad conscience.

This guilt of Mark’s ties in with a larger theme in Peeping Tom: the link between men’s lustful gazing at sexually desirable women and doing violence to such women. While, as I said above, Mark himself is neither a misogynist nor a lecherous watcher of pornography (there’s nothing inherently sexual about his snuff films–the women are dressed), his actions, as the film’s title implies, certainly are representative of those of a violent male lecher, as well as the guilt feelings and shame such a man must have.

We can see another manifestation of this theme early on in the film, when an elderly customer (Malleson) goes into the newspaper store (on the second floor of which Mark takes pictures of the softcore porn pinup girls) to buy pornographic photos (“views”) from Mark’s boss; the man is unavoidably sheepish about it, especially when a girl walks into the store.

Another example of this theme is when, on the second floor with Milly, Mark is about to have another girl model for him. She’s scantily-clad, but won’t let us see the right side of her face until much later, when we see why: she has a horrible bruise and swelling on her right upper lip; presumably, a man slugged her hard there–I don’t think it’s a deformity.

What’s interesting is that Mark is not repulsed by her disfigurement. Does he see an unconventional kind of beauty in it…or is he fascinated by the fear he sees in her eyes, an anxiety that he’ll be repulsed by it? I assume it’s the latter. In any case, his interest in filming these ‘bad girls’ is not particularly erotic. He likes to see their vulnerability, their fear, just as his father liked to film his when he was a child, so now he wants to project that fear and vulnerability onto women he associates with his mother’s “successor.”

A striking parallel between Mark’s obsession with seeing fear in a woman’s eyes and filming it is with that of a movie director, Arthur Baden (Knight), with whom Mark is working as a focus puller. Baden is a Stanley Kubrick type in that he is a perfectionist who is frustrated with a beautiful but not-so-talented actress (Baden’s ‘Shelley Duvall,’ if you will) named Pauline (played by Shirley Alice Field), for never being able to do a believable faint. She only faints for real after exhaustion from the interminable reshoots, and then showing real terror upon discovering Vivian’s body in a prop trunk.

Though Baden, in his frustration with Pauline for having fainted in the wrong scene (her terror caught on film surreptitiously on Mark’s camera, while Baden doesn’t yet know of Vivian’s murder), calls her a “silly bitch” (I’m curious how they got that past the censors back in 1960), he’s also kind enough later to provide a psychiatrist to counsel Pauline and soothe her trauma. This psychiatrist (played by Martin Miller) will have a chat with Mark about Mark’s father’s work and about scoptophilia. He notes, significantly, while talking to the police that Mark has “his father’s eyes.” The police will thus begin to suspect Mark in their investigation of the murders of Vivian and the other women.

They’re disturbed and fascinated with the aggravated terror they see in the eyes of these victims…a far greater terror than just that of seeing a madman coming at them with a sharp instrument to kill them with. As we know, it’s the terror of seeing themselves in Mark’s camera-mounted mirror, seeing themselves about to die and seeing this terror.

That the (all-male) police, Chief Inspector Gregg in particular (played by Jack Watson), are so concerned with this look of terror on the women’s faces just before being stabbed in the neck (a symbolic rape, just like Marion Crane‘s in the shower scene in Psycho) should make it clear that it is the film’s attitude that, while there are certainly many men who are pathologically fascinated with seeing women in a state of vulnerability (naked, scared, etc.) and who enjoy harming them out of some quest to feel powerful, other men aren’t like this. Other men are decent people.

Peeping Tom is a social critique of the former kind of men. With the film’s title as an expression of the shame associated with the male voyeur, it is clear that screenwriter Leo Marks was not telling a story to celebrate psychopaths like Mark. The point would not need to be made except for the fact that some people, some among those preoccupied with idpol, imagine all men to be utterly bereft of empathy for women.

Another striking feature of the film is its music (composed by Brian Easdale). Instead of the more usual orchestral score, we hear tense, dissonant piano playing (by Gordon Watson), like something Bartók would have composed. This music is heard especially during the moments leading up to a murder. A solo musician playing, as opposed to a group of musicians in an ensemble, suggests the loneliness and isolation that Mark suffers, a conflict raging in his mind.

His growing relationship with Helen is a ray of hope for him, a chance to escape his loneliness and alienation. The mother transference he gets from Helen is certainly in aid of this cure. Her wish that he not take his ever-present camera with him on their dinner date is also in aid of that, for it means that–just for a moment–he won’t be in the persona of his cruel father.

Furthermore, while his mode of artistic expression is visuals and images, hers is writing. He is stuck in the narcissistic world of Lacan’s Imaginary Order, with his victims mirroring back to him the fear he projects onto them, and then in turn seeing their fear mirrored back to themselves from that camera-mounted mirror. He has formed his ego through this mirroring, projection, and identification with his father. The horror of the killings, so impossible to verbalize and so traumatic, are of Lacan’s Real Order.

Helen’s writing of short stories for children, on the other hand, reflects her engagement with language and therefore with the linguistic, sociocultural world of Lacan’s Symbolic Order, that of interacting with other people, as opposed to Mark’s lonely world of seeing the other as only a reflection of himself. In this sense, she is also a potential cure for him. She’d accordingly have had him join her and her friends in her birthday party, but of course the loner wouldn’t have it.

In the end, though–in his addiction to seeing women’s terror and killing them in that state–he aims his camera blade at her throat and has the camera-mounted mirror there for her to see her terror. She won’t look at it, though, and for the brief moment that she does, she sees a distorted image of herself in it, so he doesn’t kill her. She isn’t pulled into the trap of the Imaginary, of seeing the other-as-oneself. Instead, with the police arriving to arrest him, Mark stabs himself with the blade. He’s done what, deep down, he always wanted to do: kill his father, by killing the film-making father inside himself.

Mark has always taken around with him his father’s gift of a camera, because he’s never been freed from being filmed. Throughout his life, from his childhood to his present adulthood, his father’s house has been wired for sound. His father had 24/7 surveillance of the house in this sense; Mark never had privacy. Big Father was watching him…and listening to him. Mark projects that surveillance onto his female victims because doing so is the closest he can come to freeing himself from that very surveillance. His suicide, however, frees him in a way that his projected surveillance never can.

	Sean P Carlin on Cake
	Mawr Gorshin on Cake
	Sean P Carlin on Cake
	Mawr Gorshin on Cake
	Sean P Carlin on Cake