Analysis of ‘Kin-dza-dza!’

Kin-dza-dza! is a 1986 Soviet film directed by Georgiy Daneliya, and written by him and Revaz Gabriadze. A dystopian science fiction black comedy, it stars Stanislav Lyubshin, Levan Gabriadze, Yury Yakoviev, and Yevgeny Leonov.

In 2016, the British movie magazine, Little White Lies, described Kin-dza-dza! as a cross between Mad Max, Monty Python, and Tarkovsky, saying the film is still relevant. The same year, Russia Beyond said that Russians still love the film. Three years earlier, an animated remake of the film was done by Daneliya, called Ku! Kin-dza-dza! The cartoon won Best Animated Feature Film in the 2013 Asia Pacific Screen Awards.

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

I see this film as not only relevant for our times, but also prophetic in how the planet Pluke, in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy–to which the Russian and Georgian protagonists, respectively Vladimir Mashkov, or Uncle Vova (Lyubshin), and Gedevan Alexandrovitch Alexidze, or the Fiddler (Gabriadze), are teleported–is representative of the capitalist world, as contrasted with the Soviet world from which the two originate.

Now, as of the making and release of Kin-dza-dza!, which had been achieved by December of 1986, Mikhael Gorbachev had not yet implemented his policies of perestroika and glasnost as an attempt to put an end to the ongoing economic stagnation that had begun during the Brezhnev years; but he had spoken of the two reform concepts in his report to the 27th Congress of the Communist Party, which occurred from late February to early March that same year.

Gorbachev had given a speech the previous year about the slowing economy, and the perestroika reforms that would come by the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s included the return of “free market” economics and private property. When Yeltsin took over, not only were these reforms all the more aggressively and brutally implemented, plunging millions of Russians–hitherto used to a planned economy that had provided for their basic needs–into poverty, but attempts to resist the reforms were ruthlessly suppressed.

I bring up this history to show how the film can be seen to have predicted, in allegorical form, the economic and political disaster that the bringing back of capitalism would cause. Despite the economic problems that the Soviet Union was undoubtedly going through in the mid-1980s, most Russians wanted to keep the Soviet system intact; indeed, majorities of Russians since the dissolution of the USSR have consistently said that life was happier then than it’s been since the return of capitalism, and a referendum had been held in 1991, the results of which said that the majority of Russians had wanted to keep the Soviet system.

So, when Russians in the mid-1980s were hearing Gorbachev’s talk of economic, market reforms, the instincts of many of them must have been warning them of the danger of his reactionary talk. Recall Stalin’s words in this connection: “What would happen if capital succeeded in smashing the Republic of Soviets? There would set in an era of the blackest reaction in all the capitalist and colonial countries, the working class and the oppressed peoples would be seized by the throat, the positions of international communism would be lost.”

Such is the political background in which we should understand what Kin-dza-dza! is trying to say to us. Uncle Vova’s thoughtless tapping of a button on the teleportation device of the barefoot, alien stranger is like Gorbachev and his followers foolishly allowing themselves to be influenced by the Western capitalists and bringing about the “new world order” that has led to all of our economic and political problems today. For it is that very pressing of the random button on the teleportation device that sends Uncle Vova and the Fiddler from the city centre on Kalinin Prospect in Moscow to the dystopian, desert wasteland of planet Pluke, with its glaring class inequalities.

The story begins with Uncle Vova returning home from work as a construction foreman. He chats with his wife, Lucya (played by Galina Daneliya-Yurkova), about mundane troubles at work. She asks him to go out and buy some bread and noodles, which she earlier forgot to buy, so he goes out to do that.

He arrives at the city square to buy he food, and there he meets the Fiddler, who tells him about the unshod alien traveler with the teleportation device. What should be noted is that, up until our two protagonists’ unwitting teleportation to Pluke, that the world we see around them, Moscow, is a perfectly normal society, without Pluke’s deprivation. Furthermore, the alien traveler, barefoot, scruffy, and as lost as a fish out of water, makes one think of a homeless man, which is fitting given that, as an outsider to the Soviet Union, he is representative of the capitalist world.

Now, the sight of our two protagonists stuck in a strange desert, actually a desert planet, reminds me of R2-D2 and C-3PO on Tatooine. The arrival of Uef (Leonov) and Bi (Yakoviev) in their flying vehicle suggests the Jawas, though these latter two have little, if anything, in common with the short, hooded droid thieves.

I’m not saying that the filmmakers intended these similarities with the early scenes of the first Star Wars movie, but the coincidental parallels between Pluke and Tatooine are meaningful in how they illustrate that the two desolate, desert planets are reflective of how capitalism sucks the life out of a place’s ecology. On Tatooine, Luke helps his uncle and aunt use moisture vaporators to produce water; on Pluke, fuel is called “luts,” and it’s made from water, so drinking water is a rare and valuable commodity.

The two droids unwittingly land on Tatooine to escape from the Galactic Empire, and they’re chased by imperial stormtroopers. Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have been thrust upon Pluke, and they’ll have to deal with the planet’s “ecilopps” (police, spelled backwards), whose bullying nature reminds one of the skeletally-armoured stormtroopers (after all, ACAB). Not yet knowing where he and his Georgian friend are, Uncle Vova comments that they must be in “a capitalist country” when they meet Uef and Bi for the first time, seeing the two Pluke inhabitants do their customary squatting and opening-out of their arms in an act of obeisance to say “ku” (“good”).

This act of obeisance is the first of many signs of a society structured around class lines, hence Uncle Vova’s assumption that it’s “a capitalist country” is not far off the mark. Money, known on Pluke as “chatls,” is hard to come by (note how chatl sounds virtually identical to chattel).

There are two kinds of people who live on Pluke–Chatlainians, and Patsaks; Uef is one of the former, and Bi is one of the latter. A hand-held device called a “visator” determines which of the two kinds of people you are: an orange dot of light on the visator indicates a Chatlainian, or a person of higher social status; green indicates a lower-status Patsak, of whom Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are also determined to be by the visator. Our two Earth visitors consider this discrimination to be outrageously racist; but had they all been on a Patsak-dominated planet, the Chatlainian/Patsak discrimination would have been reversed.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are hoping for a ride in Uef’s and Bi’s vehicle, and they offer some of their things (coats, a hat) in exchange for it, since they lack money, chatls in particular. But Uef and Bi begin to fly away in their vehicle without our two protagonists, until Uncle Vova uses a match to light a cigarette, making Uef and Bi want to return. We learn that matches, called “ketse” on Pluke, are among the most valued of commodities.

Since the society of Pluke is a dystopian one, it’s interesting to note that it, as being also a capitalist one, has a number of things in common with the society as depicted in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The people of Pluke have a limited vocabulary, typically saying “ku” for whatever is good, or saying “kyu,” a mild swear-word for whatever is bad. These two words, as well as such words as have already been discussed above, make up the bulk of their vocabulary. Similarly, in Orwell’s dystopia, the development of Newspeak involved eliminating words in order to limit thought, including ideas potentially dangerous to the Party, such thoughts as being revolutionary. (On Pluke, though, this limited vocabulary seems unnecessary as such, for a plot device in the film gives the planet’s inhabitants telepathic abilities that, conveniently, allow them to converse in Russian and Georgian with our two protagonists!)

Furthermore, where the world of Orwell’s hell is led by Big Brother, a mysterious figure we never directly encounter in the story and who, for all we know, may not even exist, the leader of Pluke, named “Mr. P-Zh,” or “PG” (played by Nikolai Garo), is harmless and simple-minded, as it turns out. The film thus seems to be predicting such incompetent, ineffectual heads of state as Biden.

Now, such comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four are useful, since many in the capitalist West would dismiss Kin-dza-dza! as mere Soviet propaganda, while conveniently ignoring Orwell’s novel, as well as the deluge of such things as late twentieth-century Western movies, like Rocky IV, as blatant Cold War anti-communist propaganda. Western propaganda is “the truth,” apparently, not Eastern. How convenient.

That something as mundane and non-extraordinary as “ketse,” or match-like sticks, are among the most valuable commodities on Pluke is a satiric comment on the absurdity of our slavery to pieces of paper that, in essence, are IOUs. Furthermore, “luts,” fuel made from water, which makes drinking water so valuable, sounds like a comment on the petrodollar, as well as one on the ruthless destruction of the environment for the sake of profiting off of fossil fuels. In a fully communist society, there would be products as use values without exchange for money.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler, however, have no choice but to exchange commodities–their ketse–with Uef and Bi if the former pair are to get the help of the latter pair to get back to Earth. Our protagonists try to exchange ketse for drinking water from some people who run off with the ketse, cheating them.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler eventually get the idea to perform music in order to earn chatls. Though he’s referred to as “the Fiddler,” he doesn’t actually play the violin he carries around with hm. He was originally trying to find the violinist who’d forgotten to take his instrument when leaving. When the two perform their music, it’s actually Uncle Vova who ends up playing the violin…worse than a child violinist with no ear for music at all. In the Fiddler-as-non-fiddler, we see a satiric comment on Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker from his labour.

The song that the two men sing, which sounds like some simple Russian folk song of some sort, includes such lines as, “Mama, Mama, what is to be done?” as well as “Winter is no fun,” “I don’t have a coat to keep warm,” and “How shall I live?” The song is all about a needy child asking his Mama for help, like a proletarian making a clamour about his needs.

The performing is typically done in small cages, or, on one occasion, on one’s knees, which should tell you something. The worker struggling to make enough to survive is, essentially, putting on an absurd performance, being an actor trying to please those who pay him, a wage slave caged in the world of capitalism, brought down to his knees. And the acting is all fake, and often it’s not performed very well, as we see of Uncle Vova and his scraping violin bow and his and the Fiddler’s bad singing. The alienation referred to above is enough to explain the poor, insincere ‘performances’ of the working class.

A physical indicator of lowly Patsak status is the wearing of a small nose-bell called a “tsak.” (Note in this connection that “Patsak” is backwards for “katsap,” a derogatory term for a Russian.) Bi would have Uncle Vova and the Fiddler each clip a tsak on his nose, which the two of course do with the utmost reluctance. The wearing of a tsak looks like the film’s commentary on the Nazis making the Jews wear the Yellow Badge, or German gay men wear the pink triangle.

Another indicator of class differences on Pluke is the wearing of differently colored pants: yellow, pink, etc. Uef covets them because, if he can wear those of the higher social classes, Patsaks and Chatlanians will have to do the “Ku!” squat of obeisance for him, the ecilopps can’t beat him up, etc. These colored pants are a social commentary on one’s preoccupation with social status as attained through high fashion.

At one point in the story, when Uef and Bi have enough ketse in their vehicle to buy what they need to get to Earth, they fly away and leave Uncle Vova and the Fiddler with nothing in return. Furious, our protagonists want to send the ecilopps after the two cheats; but they don’t have forty chatls to pay the ecilopps, so Uncle Vova lies that Uef and Bi failed to “ku” in obeisance to P-Zh’s image.

In these acts of dishonesty, we see how a world where money talks results in alienation. When Uef and Bi are apprehended, though, Uncle Vova quickly repents of his false accusation and hopes Uef and Bi won’t be imprisoned, which is particularly unpleasant, since instead of being put in a cell, they are locked up in a small metal box with barely enough room to hold the two of them inside. Given the dreadful state of prison life in the US, especially now, when corporations make practical slaves of the inmates, whose population outnumbers that of the Gulag (and even the CIA back then acknowledged that Gulag conditions weren’t anywhere near as bad as Western propaganda portrays them), we can see Pluke’s form of imprisonment as a comment on life in prison in a capitalist country.

Uncle Vova and the Fiddler are reunited with the barefoot alien they first met on Earth, the one with the teleportation device; he gives our two heroes a chance to return home immediately. Uncle Vova, however, feels guilty about causing Uef and Bi to be incarcerated, and he wants to pass up his chance to go back to Earth in order to help those two unfortunate ones.

Even though Uef and Bi double-crossed Uncle Vova and the Fiddler and made them wear those ridiculous bells on their noses, our two heroes want to help them, even to the point of giving up their chance to go home. While the capitalist world of Pluke teaches selfishness and alienation, leading to Uef’s and Bi’s double-crossing, the socialist world of the Soviet Union taught selflessness and solidarity. Though Kin-dza-dza! might be considered Soviet propaganda, it doesn’t teach its viewers to loathe and despise the citizens of capitalist societies (it may portray them as buffoonish and silly, but Uncle Vova and the Fiddler have their own foibles, too). In contrast, consider the malevolent scowls you see, for example, on the faces of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), his wife (Brigitte Nielsen), and his trainer and promoter (Michael Pataki) in Rocky IV.

Indeed, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler postponing their return to Earth–even returning to Pluke after a brief trip to other planets on the way home, and going back in time–to rescue Uef and Bi both from their incarceration, and later their fate on planet Alpha to be turned into plants is a kind of selflessness that would remind one of that of the bodhisattva, who postpones entering nirvana upon attaining Buddhahood and returns to samsara to help all other living beings, however unenlightened they may be, to attain nirvana together, a liberation for the entire Earth. Such is the selflessness of the true socialist, who would ultimately share liberation from capitalism with the whole world, not just hog it in his own country.

The planet Alpha is an interesting topic in itself. The people of Alpha have a method of dealing with Uef and Bi–whom they consider miscreants–that may seem cruel (turning them into cacti). Still, since Uef and Bi are governed by “vile desires,” rather like those of us caught up in samsara, then perhaps being transformed into plants, without human sense perceptions and the pain associated with them, is a kind of nirvana for them.

That buffoonish pair might be best left not to decide their own fate (as Uncle Vova would have it), since if left to do so, they’d choose foolishly; still, bodhisattva Vova would leave the nirvana of Alpha and postpone his return to the Pure Land, so to speak, of the USSR and help those two Pluke bumpkins.

After going back in time and back to Pluke, and helping those two, Uncle Vova and the Fiddler reunite with the barefoot man and his teleportation device, and our two heroes finally get sent back to Moscow. We see a repeat of the beginning of the movie, as if their time on Pluke never happened: Uncle Vova comes home from work again, and his wife sends him out to buy groceries.

Back in that city square, he meets with the Fiddler again, but the latter doesn’t tell the former about the barefoot alien this time, because he isn’t there. Our two protagonists don’t even recognize each other: it’s as if they’d never met, let alone got stranded in the Kin-dza-dza galaxy. As we soon learn, though, what happened is really just a repressed memory.

They see a tractor with a flashing orange light pass by. This triggers their by-now-instinctive attitude of submission to the Chatlainian colour, and the two men do their “ku” squat of obeisance.

Their return to the socialist world of the Soviet Union does not render them immune to the classism of the capitalist world as represented by Pluke. This is why reactionary instincts must be guarded against; old attitudes have a way of coming back if we aren’t careful. Just recall how those former Soviets became Russian oligarchs.

Still, one good thing has come from Uncle Vova’s and the Fiddler’s relapse: they now recognize each other, and exchange smiles like good old friends. Uncle Vova then looks up at the sky and hears the voices of Uef and Bi saying “ku” and singing the “Mama” song. They feel united, if only in spirit, with their Chatlainian and Patsak friends once again. Whatever good or ill may happen to us, being reunited with friends is above all else in importance.

Analysis of ‘Frantic’

Frantic is a 1988 film directed by Roman Polanski and written by him, Gérard Brach, and Robert Towne. It stars Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, with Betty Buckley, John Mahoney, and Yorgo Voyagis. Ennio Morricone wrote the film score.

The film was a box office disappointment, except for in countries like France, but it was a critical success. Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 77% positive reaction, based on 43 reviews. Siskel and Ebert, though critical of aspects of it, gave it “two thumbs up.”

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a transcript of the dialogue.

The film begins with Dr. Richard Walker (Ford) and his wife, Sondra (Buckley), in a cab going from the airport to their hotel in Paris. From San Francisco, they’re here because he has to do a medical conference (they also had their honeymoon here twenty years before). One normally associates a trip to France with the height of romance, but a business trip like this tends to deflate those feelings of excitement for a return to the place of one’s honeymoon.

What’s more, so much of Paris has changed since the last time the Walkers were here that it’s hard for him to rekindle those romantic feelings through nostalgia. The sky is grey and overcast. Their cab even gets a flat tire.

A shower and a sleep are all the jet-lagged husband and wife want when they get to their hotel room. He speaks as if he’s going to ride her like a stud when they’re in bed, to which she coolly replies, “Promises, promises.” Indeed, after years of marriage and a few kids, it’s hard [!] to imagine a rekindling of the embers of the old fires of passion.

Even worse, she picked up the wrong suitcase, something that will have huge significance later. Though she thinks he should have lunch with Dr. Maurice Alembert, a colleague, since she thinks the latter knows that she and Richard have arrived early enough for them to have lunch together, he doesn’t want to go, so averse is he to extending the business aspect of his trip to Paris. She wants Walker to give her a note she can use to contact Alembert about the lunch, but he’s so opposed to it that he eats the paper.

Walker calls their kids at home and finds out that there are worries over there, too. Somebody has called for Sondra…from Paris (more significance about this will come later), and their teen daughter, Casey, is on a date that night all of a sudden. All of these concerns just add to the atmosphere of a very non-gay Paree.

Walker takes a shower and shaves, and during this time, Sondra has put on a tight red dress and left their room without his knowing. When he realizes she’s gone, he assumes that she’s just stepped out for the moment. Room service has given both of them a meal. He lies on the bed and takes a nap.

When he wakes up, this is when his worries really begin to grow. Things aren’t dull any more.

It’s interesting that he slept before the excitement has begun. I’m not saying that the rest of the movie is a dream. I’m not about to describe what literally happens in Frantic, but rather what I feel is the symbolic meaning of what happens, from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Walker sleeps…perchance, to dream. And as Freud pointed out, “the interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” This association, of Walker having a brief sleep, dreaming, and therefore his unconscious expressing itself, is sufficient in itself for my purposes here.

His trip to France, so far, has been one disappointment after another, one annoyance after another. He wants some excitement in his life, and he’s about to get it…whether he likes the form that excitement is about to come in, or not.

One of the chief things we need to understand about the unconscious is that it’s all about conflict. One part of the mind wants to do one thing, while another part of the mind wants to do something else. Part of Walker wants his wife back, of course…but another part of him wants to get rid of her.

Sure he loves her–there’s no doubt about that; but she’s getting older, and it’s common for married men his age–especially in romantic Paris–to have the seven-year itch and want to chase young women, as morally objectionable as that may be. He’s a strait-laced, conservative family man, but he’s also a handsome, successful doctor, the kind of man many young women would find attractive and see as a good catch.

Surely Walker is aware of how potentially appealing he must be, including to sexually appealing young women like Michelle (Seigner), so he must be feeling the temptation to cheat on Sondra while she’s gone. It doesn’t matter that he never ends up cheating on her–the point is that he feels the temptation, and part of what’s making him so…frantic…about finding Sondra as soon as he can is his wish to make impossible any more opportunities to cheat.

What we see in Walker is the classic manifestation of the id, the ego, and the superego. His id, to put it perfectly bluntly, wants to fuck Michelle’s brains out. His ego knows that jeopardizing his marriage, a divorce from which would probably mean losing custody of his kids, makes an affair out of the question. Yet even if he can get away with sleeping with Michelle while Sondra’s missing, and she never learns about his adultery, Walker–being the strait-laced, conservative man that he is–has a superego that would plague him with guilt over doing such a naughty thing…especially while his wife is being held for ransom!

So the events as they unfold in the film give him his adventure, while resolving the conflict between to do or not to do (Michelle). The girl helps him find his wife, there are a few sexy, suggestive moments between them, and he gets Sondra back physically unharmed, though having had a big scare. In short, Frantic is wish-fulfillment for Walker…though because of his conflicted feelings, it’s also a nightmare.

As he’s trying to get help from such people as the hotel management and the American embassy, it is suggested one or two times that Sondra may have sneaked away to have an affair of her own. After all, she changed into that red dress just before leaving the hotel. Walker, of course, is offended at the idea of his wife betraying him; yet in his unconscious, this betrayal could also be a wish-fulfillment for him, since it now allows him to fool around with a clear conscience. In Eyes Wide Shut, Dr. Bill Harford (played by Tom Cruise) has similar thoughts, and therefore similar temptations.

Now, it can be argued that, with his wife out of the picture for the moment, Walker in his unconscious thoughts can explore homosexual possibilities as well as heterosexual ones, as is suggested when he asks about “the good-looking guy” working at the hotel desk to see if he knows where Sondra went. This man is later found in a gym, exercising and lifting weights, so his muscle tone is clear to see through the T-shirt he works out in.

Of course, Walker doesn’t make advances on this “good-looking guy” any more than he does on Michelle, but that isn’t the point. In his unconscious thoughts–allowed to come out with fewer inhibitions while he’s in a drowsy state of jet lag–his id explores the possibilities while his ego rejects them as unrealistic and his superego morally condemns their very contemplation.

The adventure and excitement aren’t limited to sexual possibilities. There’s also the contemplation of doing drugs. In a bar called The Blue Parrot, Walker is looking for a man named Dédé Martin (played by Boll Boyer). He meets a Rastafarian there who intuits that he’s desperately looking for “the white lady.” While Walker assumes the Rastafarian is talking about Sondra, he really means cocaine, a sample of which he gives Walker to snort in a toilet stall in the bar’s washroom.

Now, of course Walker doesn’t want–in his conscious mind–to be high on cocaine while he’s searching for his wife, so he washes it out of his nose as soon as the Rastafarian leaves. His acceptance of “the white lady” up his nose for the moment, however, is only out of politeness on the conscious level; unconsciously, he’d love at least to give coke a try, so he resolves his conflict about it by having it up his nose briefly, then washing it away.

Mistakenly equating “the white lady” with Sondra also rationalizes his indulgence with the drug, however brief it may be. [Later, when Michelle is helping him and they’re in her car, she snorts a line of “the white lady”…until he angrily stops her from doing it. Again, there’s a brief indulgence in it (his id projected onto her), then his ego and superego stop it.]

Walker asks the Rastafarian to give him Dédé’s address, which he gets from Michelle at a table farther off in the bar; so Walker and Michelle, maybe, see each other ever so briefly, without thinking much of it. Her distinctive leather jacket and hat make her more recognizable to him than vice versa, but her recognizing him seems to have more significance when we consider her liking of a particular song by Grace Jones: “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango).”

Walker finds Dédé in his apartment with his throat cut. Michelle goes there at a later point, when Walker’s also there, and they meet right when she’s trying to process the shock of seeing Dédé’s body. She initially assumes Walker’s the killer, and she must be thinking that she’s seen his face before, him having asked the Rastafarian about Dédé’s whereabouts.

Now we can begin to understand the significance of the Grace Jones song as it relates to Michelle’s experiences of the plot of the movie. Walker isn’t “hanging ’round [her] door,” but rather Dédé’s; still, since Walker has accosted Michelle, frightening her in her already traumatized state upon having seen the corpse, he’s “like a hawk stealing for the prey,” as she imagines him.

Walker “shadows [Michelle] back home,” that is, he goes back to her apartment [his spastic crawling on the roof of which–with the suitcase–reflects his conflict over being with her vs resisting the temptation], because she mistakenly took Sondra’s luggage, and he needs to find out what’s in Michelle’s (which has been in his hotel room), to get what’s in it to exchange it with the kidnappers and get Sondra back.

What Grace Jones says in French sounds like something Michelle wants to say to Walker: “What are you looking for, meeting with death [i.e., Dédé’s corpse]? Who do you think you are [i.e., sticking your nose in my business]? Ah, you also hate life [i.e., your disappointing trip to France and your dull married life and work routine].”

Towards the end of the film, Walker and Michelle will “dance in bars and restaurants” (one in particular, called A Touch of Class, and they’ll dance to this song in particular). Before that, she’ll be “home with anyone who wants” to be there with her: namely, two Israeli agents who are also looking for what was smuggled in her luggage (a krytron), and later on, Walker will be there.

Michelle finds Walker “standing there alone” with “staring eyes” that “chill [her] to the bone,” because in spite of his conservative restraint, she–as an extremely desirable young woman–can sense that he wants to have her. His desire both scares and excites her. Indeed, she offers him plenty of opportunities to have her: in her apartment the first time, she changes shirts, being briefly topless and allowing him an opportunity to check her out; later, she gives him a peck on the cheek in his hotel room; and when she dances with him, she undulates seductively in a provocative red dress [!] that accentuates her curves.

Grace Jones’s next words in French seem, for the purposes of this movie, to be equating “Joël” with Walker; for he is in his hotel room with his suitcase (or Sondra’s, or Michelle’s, whichever). His hotel room has been ransacked by those trying to find the krytron, so he’s looking at his clothes, among other things lying all over the place. There are photos of Sondra that he’s used to help him find her; Michelle notices how happy his wife looks in one of them. The idea that he left without regret or melodrama sounds like irony or denial, since he slammed the door and stormed off.

Leaving Paris without regret or melodrama, while having also slammed the door of his hotel room and stormed off, sounds like his attempt at reconciling his unconscious wish to have an adventure without Sondra while consciously fearing for her life the whole time.

To continue discussing the events of Frantic as a symbolic expression of Walker’s thought processes, as I said above, Michelle changing her shirt in the bedroom of her apartment is such an example. While she’s briefly topless, he’s in her bathroom; he sees her and promptly closes the bathroom door. In his actions we can see him resolving his conflict of ‘to see, or not to see’ in this brief look and closing the door.

Not convinced that he secretly wants her? Later, he returns to her apartment with her suitcase (i.e., that clumsy entrance I mentioned above). Having sneaked through the bathroom window, and hearing her being questioned aggressively by the two Israeli agents, Walker gets naked and lies in her bed. He interrupts the interrogation, pretending to be her boyfriend; she goes along with it and sits on the bed with her arms around him.

He gets out of bed with only a stuffed animal to cover his groin. She’s standing behind him as he threatens one of the Israelis, giving her a clear view of his bare ass. Why the need to be nude, except as part of a wish to have a sexual relationship with her? His id wants him to be nude, while earlier, his superego closed the bathroom door.

In another scene earlier in the movie, Walker and Michelle are at the airport getting the suitcase, and they run into some old American colleagues of his, one of them–“Peter”–played by David Huddleston. Though nothing sexual is going on between Walker and Michelle, it must look that way to Peter and the other colleagues. The worried look on Walker’s face can be easily misconstrued as guilt, since the colleagues know Sondra…but in Walker’s unconscious, he really does feel guilty, not just worry that they’ll be gossiping about him and Michelle later.

In his hotel room with Michelle–and the French authorities and hotel staff are with him investigating his wife’s disappearance, since he knows the kidnappers will kill Sondra if he involves the cops–he gets rid of them by claiming he wants to be alone with Michelle, implying he’s having an affair with her, and also claiming they were right to think Sondra was also having an affair with someone. Again, on the surface, this is just an excuse to get rid of all of them; but unconsciously, he’d really like to be with her. He must have enjoyed her peck on his cheek.

To get back to the krytron, it’s hidden in, of all things, a statuette of the Statue of Liberty, which was in Michelle’s suitcase. How ironic it is that something used as a switch for a detonator for nuclear weapons has been put inside a symbol of ‘freedom.’

There’s a terrible fear of Arabs getting their hands on nukes (and Sondra’s kidnappers are Arabs, still routinely portrayed in movies of the time as villains); but the US created the first atomic bomb, and is the only country to have used nukes to kill people, yet we in the West don’t worry about American possession of nukes. France also has nuclear weapons, and while the Israeli government likes to keep to a policy of ‘deliberate ambiguity’ about having them, they most certainly have many.

The men at the American embassy (one of them played by Mahoney) are eager to get their hands on the krytron, as are the two Israeli agents, as if it would somehow be ‘safer’ in their hands. All Walker knows it that it’s the key to Sondra’s survival. To Michelle, as the smuggler of the krytron into France, it’s something she should have asked a lot more money for.

After a failed attempt to give the krytron to the kidnapper (Voyagis) in a parking lot to get Sondra back, Walker and the kidnapper agree to meet in A Touch of Class to arrange another exchange, this time, on the Île aux Cygnes. During Walker’s sexy dance with Michelle in that tight red dress, and Grace Jones is singing “I’ve seen that face before,” there are Arab men in the bar looking at him.

On the surface, Walker’s fearful face on the dance floor would seem to be because he thinks the watching Arabs are working with the kidnapper (lots of Arabs frequent A Touch of Class, as Michelle has remarked earlier), and that Sondra’s life is in their hands. On an unconscious level, though, Walker’s nervousness is really his guilt over dancing with Michelle while his wife’s in danger. He’s uncomfortable because he’s enjoying himself. When they walk into the bar, he politely says she looks nice; he’s really thinking that she looks hot.

The exchange on the Île aux Cygnes is next to the Paris replica of the Statue of Liberty. Recall the juxtaposition of an electronic detonator of nuclear weapons encased in a statuette of “Lady Liberty.” Now, the dangerous exchange of Sondra for that detonator is near another replica of “Lady Liberty.”

Just as there’s the paradox of fantasizing about an extramarital affair mixed with guilt over such thoughts, so is there the paradox of the ideal of democratic freedom mixed with coercion (the kidnapping) and the threat of using a weapon of mass destruction. A surface of goodness (marital fidelity, bourgeois democracy) hides the darkness inside us all (affair fantasies, ambitions of global imperialist dominance through nuclear deterrence).

Though Walker finally gets Sondra back, and it’s interesting to see both her and Michelle in those tight red dresses as they pass each other in the exchange, Michelle complicates the exchange by demanding payment from the kidnapper for having smuggled the krytron into France. A gunfight ensues, because the two Israeli agents arrive, demanding they hand over the krytron. In the struggle, Michelle is mortally wounded from a gunshot in the back from the pistol of the kidnapper, who’s been shot by one of the Israelis.

She puts the krytron in Walker’s pocket as she’s dying in his arms. The parallels between her and Sondra continue: where Sondra was in danger of being killed by the kidnapper, Michelle actually is killed by him. As she’s dying, Walker calls her “baby,” just as he was calling Sondra “babe” a number of times at the beginning of the film.

The point is that the second woman in a red dress has been a double for the first, having replaced her for a time. Now that Sondra is back, though, her appealing double is no longer needed in Walker’s unconscious fantasy world. His calling Michelle “baby” implies his wish, however unconscious, for her to be his new lover.

Siince all the Arabs are killed, the two Israelis approach Walker and Sondra for the krytron. He shows his contempt for them and their coveting of such a dangerous device, which has caused so much trauma and death, by throwing it into the Seine. The preoccupation with the krytron over human lives, a preoccupation on all political sides–American, Israeli, and Arab–as opposed to our sympathetic protagonist’s disregard for it, is meant to represent that old liberal “there’s bad on all sides” position on contentious political issues, a stance that ignores how there’s typically much more bad on one side (the US and Israel) than there is on the others (the Arabs and Soviets).

The movie ends with Walker and Sondra in a cab on their way out of Paris, paralleling their entrance into the city at the beginning. Where in the beginning, the couple were jet-lagged and bored, in the end, they’re emotionally scarred.

On the surface, those scars are from the scary kidnapping and killings they’ve witnessed; unconsciously, though, there’s guilt over fantasies about affairs–did Sondra have such unconscious thoughts, too? Is the fear of violence and death a cover for such guilt? Is that what everyone’s so…frantic…about?

In his review, Ebert criticized Frantic for having a number of ‘unnecessary’ scenes, such as the dance scene. As I’ve tried to show in my psychoanalytic interpretation, though, those scenes are very necessary. For the kidnapping is really a camouflage for unconscious fantasies of tossing aside one’s spouse to have an affair. The fear is really guilt.

Analysis of ‘The Crying Game’

The Crying Game is a 1992 film written and directed by Neil Jordan. It stars Stephen Rea, Miranda Richardson, Jaye Davidson, and Forest Whitaker, with Adrian Dunbar, Ralph Brown, and Jim Broadbent.

While the theme of the marginalization of race, sex, and sexuality is placed at the forefront of this film, another issue, the right for the self-determination of nations, is also there, but it’s…well, marginalized, as I’ll discuss in more detail in the paragraphs below.

The Crying Game was a critical and commercial success, having won the BAFTA Award for Best British Film and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It also got Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Rea), Best Supporting Actor (Davidson), and Best Film Editing. The British Film Institute named The Crying Game the 26th-greatest British film of all time in 1999.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the complete film (minus the credits).

The proper political and historical context of The Crying Game is to be seen in the Northern Ireland conflict, also known as “The Troubles,” which went on for about thirty years, from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. Mainstream Western culture generally looks on the IRA as a bunch of fanatical, cold-blooded terrorists who indiscriminately killed out of a frenzied, passionate nationalism. What is ignored in this kind of judgement against them is the centuries of brutal British imperialist rule that provoked Irish resistance all the way up to the Troubles that began in the late 1960s.

The Crying Game, as well as The Cranberries’ song “Zombie,” are bourgeois liberal portrayals of the IRA as mindless, violent killers rather than embodying legitimate armed resistance against a colonial oppressor, which is recognized in international law and the UN. Ireland was England’s first colony. The Emerald Isle has been invaded again and again from as early as the 12th century, with the Anglo-Norman invasion. Indiscriminate massacres of the Irish, including women and children, went on countlessly. Just as the Palestinians have a legitimate right to armed struggle against Zionist settler-colonialism, so have the Irish had that right against British imperialism.

To go into more detail about this issue would be beyond the scope of this analysis; the links provided above and below should help with the details left out here. Still, I needed to bring this issue up and give it proper attention because The Crying Game fails to do so; just as blacks and transgender people are marginalized in the real world, so is Irish liberation tossed to the side and ignored, in the real world and in this film.

Granted, it is perfectly legitimate to sympathize with blacks and transgender people when they suffer prejudice and bigotry. The problem with The Crying Game is how the film uses these otherwise justified sympathies as forms of identity politics to keep us on the side of imperialist, colonial British rule. The fact remains that, in order to ensure and maintain the liberation of such marginalized groups as blacks and transgender people, the first thing that must be done is to overthrow the capitalist, imperialist system that uses marginalization as a weapon to keep the working class divided; and the IRA, with their leftist ideology, are one of many groups dedicated to that very overthrow.

One of the things the IRA does in The Crying Game, though, is something that very much divides the common people, in this case, the sexes–they have pretty Jude (Richardson) lure a British soldier named Jody (Whitaker) with a promise of sex, in order to kidnap him and threaten to execute him if an imprisoned IRA member is not released by the UK in three days. Jody curses at Jude for being such a Delilah to him. Well, what can I say? The capitalist/imperialist system must end first, then we can work on ending the social divisions.

As I said above, the real aims and purposes of the IRA are not properly explored in this film. As far as The Crying Game is concerned, these people are just a bunch of “extremist,” terrorist bad guys. Jody will be shot in three days, just because the UK authorities won’t free a fellow IRA man. Towards the end of the film, they want to assassinate a British judge: they don’t care who he really is–he’s just “a legitimate target.” As you can see, the IRA are portrayed as killers for the sake of killing, not as freedom fighters.

Note that the film came out in 1992, just after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, and thus neoliberalism could really get going without a leash on its neck. All sympathy for the poor and marginalized would be given within a liberal, non-socialist framework.

As Jody is held by the IRA for the last three days of his life, he cleverly establishes a bond with Fergus (Rea), a Provisional IRA member with long hair (I’ll get into the significance of that later). Jody talks about his girlfriend and his love of playing cricket. This bonding will make it harder for Fergus to shoot Jody when the inevitable third day comes, for the UK government will deem Jody expendable, anyway. From the point of view of the film, and the anti-IRA/pro-British imperialist message it’s trying to convey to audiences, this bonding will humanize Jody for us, making us want to sympathize with him, and therefore with the British side.

One of the ways he gains our sympathies is by complaining about the frank, blunt racism of the Irish that he, as a black man, has to put up with while stationed among them as a British soldier. This otherwise legitimate problem is used to distract us from another legitimate one: UK rule over Northern Ireland. Stereotyping the Irish as crass racists also camouflages their victimhood.

One could relate this racism, the using of a woman to lure a man into a trap, and even Irish collaboration with the UK, to Jody’s story about the Scorpion and the Frog, and how doing what’s against one’s interests is nonetheless in one’s nature.

Jody, as a member of the proletariat no less than Jude, Fergus, or Peter (Dunbar), should be concerned with the interests of the global working class (including other blacks, of course) over those of empire; instead, he chooses the job of British soldier for easy remuneration, and gets stationed in a place where not only will he be openly taunted as a “nigger,” but also where he’s at risk of being kidnapped and killed by the very kind of people who would otherwise be contributing to the fight for the kind of world in which that slur won’t be used anymore. Jody chooses easy money over liberation and safety, though, because it’s in his nature to choose what’s easy over what’s hard.

Jude, in going along with the plan to use her body to lure Jody in, rather than use some other, non-objectifying method, is going against her own interests as a woman, thus having to endure hearing Jody’s slurs of “bitch” and “whore.” Recall how, above, I compared her to Delilah (I’ll go into more Samson symbolism later); her name suggests another Biblical betrayer. Still, being a woman who can’t help having internalized the sexist attitudes of her society (including having to serve Jody, the man who now hates her, food and drink), she can’t help it: it’s in her nature.

The Northern Ireland Unionists, generally Protestant and therefore worried that a unified Ireland–being mostly Catholic–would marginalize them, side with the UK and its terroristic atrocities on the Irish in the hopes of preserving their version of Christianity (or so they rationalize). Instead, by siding with the IRA and its leftist agenda, they could help deal a blow to imperialism–which thrives on such forms of divisiveness as racism, sexism, and religious intolerance–which could lead eventually to a kind of world that would do away with such divisions and liberate us all. Still, it’s in one’s nature to choose the quick and easy solution over the long and hard road of ending capitalism.

Fergus, too, chooses the quick and easy solution of sympathizing with Jody, and later, Dil (Davidson), over sympathizing with his fellow Irish. This latter sympathizing would, as I explained above, ultimately lead to the liberation of everyone, including transgender people, if it were to succeed on a global level. Such a path, though, is long and hard, and Fergus can’t help it–it’s in his nature–to reject such a path, leave the IRA, and even go to jail for Dil’s murder of Jude.

To get back to Jody’s clever manipulating of Fergus to win his sympathy, Jody goes beyond just telling him the story of the Scorpion and the Frog, but he also tells Fergus about his girlfriend, Dil, back in London. He has Fergus take out his wallet so Fergus can see a photo of her, to see how pretty she is. By doing this, Jody humanizes both himself and Dil for Fergus. To humanize himself even more, Jody actually has Fergus take his penis out of his pants so he–his hands tied behind his back–can take a piss!

All of these tactics, of course, make it well-nigh impossible for Fergus to shoot Jody in the woods when the dreaded day comes, for the UK authorities–the ‘good guys,’ recall!–have no intention of saving Jody, only of finding the IRA hideout and killing all of the resistance.

Ironically, it’s the British forces who end up killing Jody by hitting him with an armoured vehicle on the road that he accidentally runs out on. They don’t mean to kill him there, but that doesn’t matter: they’ve never taken seriously the need to save one of their own. As I said above, they consider Jody to be expendable: such an attitude is proven by how the UK flies planes over the IRA hideout and reduces the entire shelter to flames, without a thought that Jody could be in there somewhere.

This moment of British viciousness gives us a taste of the might of Western imperialism, hinting as to why the IRA is resisting them in the first place…if we’d pay close attention. Still, the liberal slant of The Crying Game would have us see this viciousness as an example of how ‘there is bad on both sides.’ Little consideration is given to the fact that one side is much more powerful than the other, and that that powerful side has historically caused much more killing than the other. This same false moral equivalency is used in the worsening situation in Gaza, which is characterized in the mainstream media as a ‘war’ between the IDF and Hamas, rather than as an ongoing genocide of unarmed Palestinian civilians.

Fergus, keeping his promise to Jody to go to London and find Dil, has left the IRA–assuming that Jude and Peter are dead–and renounced their revolutionary ways. He changes his name to Jimmy, and he has his hair cut short, symbolic of Samson losing his strength when Delilah has a servant cut his own hair short. Fergus’s haircut thus can be seen to symbolize his giving up of his strength, a symbolic castration, his renouncing of solidarity to Ireland. His changing of his name only reinforces his turning his back on what he once believed in, as well as lying to Dil that he’s Scottish when she gives him a trim in her hair salon. Really: if he was so half-hearted about the IRA, then why did he join in the first place?

Along with losing his strength, “Jimmy” seems to have lost much of his intelligence, too, for he follows Dil to a gay bar, being attracted to her as a cis-woman, and never cluing into what anatomy she might have under her clothes. Though he falls in love with her, he gets a big surprise when her clothes come off as the two of them are about to be intimate, and his reaction is…as we on the left would say…reactionary.

Some might consider these elements to be coincidental, but leaving the IRA (an example of something that Mao would have called backsliding into liberalism), then being a creep and following a girl at night from her place of work to the local bar, and hitting her when he realizes she’s a transwoman…some of us see a meaningful connection here. This sort of thing is why some of us don’t think that liberals have the best solutions to dealing with marginalized people. When he tells Jody not to take being called a “nigger” seriously, that was bad enough. Look at how far he’s fallen since then.

“Jimmy” gets a job in London as a day labourer, and while he’s had dreams of Jody playing cricket, and he tries to identify with Jody by imagining himself playing the game while on the job as he sees other men playing it, he has to put up with a nagging boss, Mr. Deveroux (played by Tony Slattery), who hardly sympathizes with his apparent athletic aspirations. You chose to sell out to the capitalist world, “Jimmy”; you made your bed–you lie in it.

It’s remarkable after his having come to this gay bar, The Metro, and presumably having seen men with men, and women with women, and he needs the bartender, Col (Broadbent) to tell him that Dil is a transwoman (though Col never gets around to telling him). Dil is onstage, singing “The Crying Game,” a song fittingly covered by Boy George on the movie soundtrack.

“Jimmy” has to help Dil get rid of an abusive boyfriend named Dave (Brown, who you may recall played Danny in Withnail and I, and who also appeared in Alien 3 and Star Wars: Episode I). One night in Dil’s apartment with “Jimmy,” they hear Dave outside on the street calling up to her as if he were Stanley Kowalski calling “Hey, Stella!” Dave isn’t so lucky though: instead of her coming back to him, Dil throws his clothes and his goldfish out the window.

“Jimmy” is touched by how she keeps Jody’s old things: his clothes and old photos of him. As we can see, Jody is still being humanized even after his death. Even though “Jimmy” is initially repulsed to learn that Dil is a transwoman, he still has feelings for her, and so in his conflict over her, she is still being humanized for us. No humanizing of the IRA is anywhere to be seen, though.

She appears at his place of work, walking on the field where the cricket games are played, and therefore reinforcing in his mind the association of her and Jody when he sees her coming. The other workers are whistling at her: I doubt they’d be doing that if they knew what’s under her clothes. He breaks a window frame in his shock at her arrival, angering Mr. Deveroux. It’s interesting how LGBT issues can intersect with other leftist issues like labour (“Jimmy” will be docked pay for the damage), yet not with anti-imperialism.

There’s such mutual alienation between “Jimmy” and Deveroux that the latter calls the former “Pat.” (I suppose that the Irishman can be comforted that at least his boss isn’t calling him “Mick.”) Fergus is thus doubly alienated from himself with these two false names. Deveroux’s sexist attitude to Dil the “tart” is enough to make “Jimmy” want to stand up for her–fair enough–but centuries of British oppression of Ireland aren’t enough for Fergus to stand up for his people. Bonding with Jody is all it takes to make him end his commitment to Irish liberation.

So, “Jimmy” manages to reconcile himself with a transwoman, but he can never reconcile himself with the IRA…and this is when Jude suddenly comes back into his life–Delilah with a new hairstyle of her own. Her new, “tougher look” makes us dislike the IRA all the more–how fitting, for the purposes of this movie.

Her hair isn’t much shorter, though, so she still has her strength–aptly shown when she takes out her phallic pistol. Her hair has gone from blonde to a dark red; her clothes are also darker, all of which reinforces our sense that she’s one of the ‘bad guys.’ Her implicit threat on Dil’s life, if Fergus doesn’t comply with the IRA’s plan to assassinate the judge, also reinforces our sense of antagonism to her.

From here on, we’re meant to see the IRA as not just a bunch of nationalists who are a little too militant for their own good, not just one of ‘two bad sides,’ but as just pure, unmitigated evil. The evil side of the Western empire isn’t even to be considered as such: they’re just ‘mainstream society’ now; in the neoliberal new world order that just defeated the Soviet Union, this globalizing capitalist ‘rules-based order’ is just the way things are. If you try to rebel against it, you won’t just be killed, you’ll be forgotten by most people; history will vilify and blacken your name, and you’ll be marginalized in ways that not even blacks and LGBT people are these days.

The man Fergus is supposed to hit is an aging, arthritic judge. He’s to be shot on the street as he’s struggling to get out of his car and go with his security men into a building. His weakness is again to elicit our sympathy for him, as Jody was sympathized with. We’re not meant to feel any sympathy for, say, the unarmed Irish protestors who were gunned down on Bloody Sunday, for that sort of thing is never mentioned in the film.

Because he wants Dil to be unrecognizable to Jude (who’s seen him with her), Peter, and any other IRA members, Fergus takes her to her hair salon and cuts her hair short. He’d have her without makeup and dressed in Jody’s old cricket clothes. This removal of her feminine trappings thus strips her of her sexual power, not only depriving Dil of the femininity she wants to be able to express to the world, but also of what makes her feel desirable to him, thus making her feel especially insecure and vulnerable to his leaving her.

There is thus more Samson symbolism here, in Dil’s loss of power through her haircut from her–as she suspects–male Delilah, for she fears that he’ll betray her and leave her. In another reversal of sex roles, her dressing like Jody is what, from a transwoman’s point of view, would truly feel like cross-dressing. Still, her dressing like Jody must feel like, from Fergus’s point of view, his successful protecting of Jody where he previously failed to do so.

This Samson and Delilah symbolism brings up some important themes in The Crying Game, including loyalty vs betrayal, and having vs lacking the strength to fight one’s enemies. Samson eventually grows his hair back, the source of his strength, and defeats his enemies. He’s betrayed by Delilah, as Jody is betrayed by Jude, and Dil–jealous that Jude is about to steal “Jimmy” from her–fears his betrayal. But the greatest betrayal of all, though not properly reflected on by the average viewer of this film, is Fergus’s betrayal of Ireland, and his weak caving in to the UK through Jody and Dil, as symbolized by his haircut.

Fergus finally tells Dil, who’s drunk and in her flat, about the IRA plot to kidnap and kill Jody, and Fergus’s involvement in the plot. So betrayed does she feel by “Jimmy” that, while he’s asleep on her bed, she ties his hands and feet to the bedposts; she also takes out a pistol. Since he can’t shoot the judge now, Peter does it instead and gets killed by the judge’s security. Jude goes over with her pistol to Dil’s flat to confront Fergus.

Dil is in a most ironic situation here: a transwoman dressed like a man and thus feeling symbolically (though, of course, not literally) castrated, that is, having lost her sexual power. Still, with that phallic pistol in her hands and pointing it at Jude, she’s as much a phallic woman (!) as armed Jude is in a symbolic sense.

Knowing that Delilah-Jude used “those tits and that arse” to lure Jody in, Dil shoots and kills her. Fergus, however, takes the blame for the murder and goes to jail so Dil can go free.

It’s interesting how, in this confrontation between Dil and Jude, we see a case of strong women–be they cis or trans, it doesn’t matter–as part of a camouflaging of and a distraction from anti-imperialist struggle, just as the issues of prejudice against blacks and LGBT people have been used as such camouflage in this film. As I said above, eradicating capitalist imperialism–and its alienating divisiveness–is the best way to ensure an enduring protection for these people against these prejudices, but liberals wish to maintain the privileges of that imperialism while pretending to care about eradicating those prejudices–hence, this film.

Indeed, how does the film end?…with an Irishman in jail for a murder of an Irishwoman committed by a UK citizen. His sacrifice is seen by Dil as a Christ-like love (John 15:13), and Christ was crucified for having attempted to rise up against Roman imperialism, by the way. As far as other relevant Biblical references are concerned, when Dil visits Fergus in jail several months later, we see her hair growing back, like Samson’s–she’s getting her power back.

Now, remember, a British armoured vehicle is what actually hit and killed Jody, not any of the IRA, who were fighting to liberate Ireland from British imperialism. All the IRA agents in the film are dead. Fergus has given up his liberty to save that of a Brit.

The real crying game of this film thus is how sympathy is generated for marginalized people–blacks and LGBT people–which is in itself perfectly warranted, but done so here at the expense of an historically victimized people whose side of the story is never told, not even in passing. The Irish are the truly marginalized people in The Crying Game: denigrated, vilified…never heard.

Analysis of ‘Chinatown’

Chinatown is a 1974 neo-noir vilm directed by Roman Polanski and written by Robert Towne. It stars Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, with John Huston, Perry Lopez, John Hillerman, Diane Ladd, James Hong, and Burt Young.

The film is based historically on the California water wars from the early 20th century, by which LA interests secured water rights in the Owens Valley. Chinatown was also Polanski’s last American film.

It received critical acclaim, having been nominated for eleven Oscars, with Towne winning Best Original Screenplay. The AFI placed Chinatown second in its top ten mystery films of 2008, and it is often considered one of the best films of all time.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to Towne’s screenplay (its third draft).

One of the central themes of Chinatown is jealousy, and this theme is established right at the beginning of the film, when Curly (Young) is heartbroken at seeing photos of his wife in an affair with another man. The man responsible for getting the photos to prove her infidelity is private investigator JJ “Jake” Gittes (Nicholson). The setting is LA in 1937.

Gittes’s next job will be another investigation into a possible adultery, so more jealousy–though who the jealous one actually is will be revealed much later on. For now, though, it seems that a woman (Ladd) who calls herself Evelyn Mulwray suspects that her supposed husband, Hollis Mulwray (played by Darrell Zwerling), is seeing another woman, and she wants Gittes to get proof of this through photos, as he’s done for Curly.

Hollis is chief engineer for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Gittes goes to City Hall, where the former mayor, Sam Bagby (played by Roy Roberts), is arguing the case for building a dam and reservoir for Alto Vallejo. Hollis, however, is against building the new dam, since a previously constructed one on his watch gave way and claimed the lives of over five hundred people.

This issue in the story was inspired, of course, by the California water wars as mentioned above. It also links the various strands of the story together, as we shall see. These strands include the above-mentioned theme of jealousy, the schemes of the rich to build a kind of empire based on control of the water, and the way Chinatown is a kind of modern-day adaptation of Sophocles‘ Oediups Rex, as first proposed by Wayne D. McGinnis in his article in a 1975 issue of Film Quarterly.

Indeed, the drought that the locals are suffering in is analogous to the plague that the people of Thebes are suffering in Sophocles’ tragedy. Since Oedipus Rex also inspired Freud‘s Oedipus complex, and a shocking revelation of incest comes up towards the end of Chinatown, it’s useful to know that jealousy is at the centre of a child’s Oedipal love of one parent and hatred of the other. The child narcissistically wants to hog the beloved parent all to him- or herself, and hates the other parent as a rival lover.

The rival parent is hated for having made the child feel pushed to the side, slighted, marginalized. In the child’s narcissistic state, he or she wants to remain the centre of attention, or the attention of the Oedipally-desired parent in particular. Being thus marginalized causes the child to be kicked out of his or her Oedipal Eden, and marginalization is another important theme of Chinatown, since not only is this part of LA not seen until the end of the movie, only occasionally referred to, but the Chinese-American characters, such as the Mulwrays’ butler, Kahn (Hong), are treated as mere details that hover in the background of the story.

To see how Oedipus Rex, and therefore the murderous/incestuous fulfillment of the Oedipus complex, relate to Chinatown, we need to interpret the Oedipus complex in an expanded and metaphorical, Lacanian form, since the equivalent characters of the play have their roles rearranged, if not outright reversed, in the movie. Instead of a young man unwittingly marrying and impregnating his mother, we have an old man raping and impregnating his daughter, giving birth to Katherine (played by Belinda Palmer), the Antigone of the film.

Furthermore, we seem to have two Oedipuses: a good one, Gittes, who like the Theban king is determined to uncover the truth of what’s going wrong in the city, no matter how painful that revelation will be (in accordance with Wilfred R. Bion‘s interpretation of Oedipus Rex, a growing in K); and the bad Oedipus, Noah Cross (Huston), the lecherous, incestuous rapist who, like a king, owns the police and the city, and who’s responsible for the deprivation of the city’s water, as Oedipus’ incest and patricide are responsible for the plague in Thebes.

If you read the third draft of Towne’s screenplay (link above), you’ll note that Cross’s original first name is given as Julian Cross. I’m guessing that when Huston was cast in the role, they decided to change the villain’s name to Noah, for Huston played the role of Noah eight years prior in The Bible: In the Beginning…, a film he also directed (as he did The Maltese Falcon, another noir film, and his directorial debut).

A number of interesting associations can be made with these two opposing Noahs. First of all, the Biblical Noah is the hero of his story, whereas Cross is the villain of his; Noah’s family is surrounded in water in the ark, whereas Cross deprives LA of water.

A particularly interesting association between these two Noahs, though Huston’s film doesn’t depict it, is how they’re related in terms of incest. In Genesis 9:18-24, Ham sees his father, drunken Noah, naked in his tent. This alone was considered quite a serious sin at the time–a breaking of the taboo against seeing a parent naked. Ham’s sin, however, may have been far more serious.

Most Biblical commentators, both ancient and modern, have thought that Ham’s merely seeing his father naked was not a sufficiently serious sin to deserve Noah’s curse. Seeing his father naked could be a Biblical euphemism for–among other possibilities–committing incest (paternal or maternal), as one reads in the Biblical condemnation of the sin: “the nakedness of thy [family member] shalt thou not uncover…” (Leviticus 18).

So Ham may have raped naked Noah (or his wife, his patriarchal property and therefore “his nakedness,” as euphemistically expressed), as Cross rapes his daughter, the real Evelyn Mulwray (Dunaway), and we assume he has similarly lecherous designs on Evelyn’s sister/daughter, pretty Katherine, hence Evelyn’s attempts to prevent him from getting his hands on the girl.

Now, if we apply Lacan‘s more metaphorical interpretation of the Oedipus complex, the little boy suffering his doomed love for his mother can be represented in the film by Cross. His mother can be represented by Evelyn (and later, Katherine), creating a kind of Iocaste complex, but with the sexes reversed. And the interfering, hated father can be represented by Hollis, who has intervened in this perverse family melodrama, married Evelyn, and spent time with Katherine, though in a perfectly innocent way, as opposed to the love affair that, as we later learn, Cross hopes to portray it in the newspapers, to disgrace and discredit Hollis, who has also frustrated Cross by opposing his plan to build the dam.

Hollis wants the water to be publicly available to everyone in the LA area; Cross wants to deprive the area of its water so the land can be bought up cheaply, then later sold at a much higher price. Because of Hollis’s opposition to Cross’s hoarding of the water, Hollis must be killed. The hoarding of the water parallels the wish to have Evelyn first, then Katherine later. Cross, an obvious narcissist who won’t take responsibility for the effects of having abused and estranged Evelyn, is also a wealthy capitalist who doesn’t care how his greedy control of LA’s water supply is hurting the people who live there, especially the local farmers and owners of orchards. In these ways, Cross personifies what I’ve elsewhere called the narcissism of capital.

As for the woman who impersonates Evelyn at the film’s beginning–actually named Ida Sessions–she could be seen as Cross’s idealized version of Evelyn, helping him to thwart Hollis. This idealized Evelyn, however false she may be, exists as she does exclusively for Cross’s benefit; she is thus a metaphorical mirror for his narcissism, an extension of himself rather than existing in her own right, just as the child wants the Oedipally-desired parent to exist for him or her. The real Evelyn originally served this purpose as Cross’s lover, but the trauma and shame she inevitably suffered from her incestuous union with him caused her to experience psychological fragmentation (Cross, accordingly, calls her “disturbed”). This fragmentation, an emotional falling-apart, is comparable to the fragmentation a child experiences up until the mirror stage, when he sees in his reflection a unified image of himself.

This image is the ideal-I, an idealized self-image, yet it’s also false, as Ida is a false Evelyn. Ego formation during the mirror stage, in the Imaginary Order, is grounded in untruth and illusion. It’s narcissistic, bringing about a False Self, reflecting grandiosity back to the subject, as Ida’s Evelyn does for Cross.

The dyadic mother/son relationship is reproduced for Cross in a transference first onto Evelyn, then onto Ida-as-Evelyn. Cross would like to do this a third time with Katherine, but Evelyn plays the role of the Non! du père by hiding her sister/daughter from him, then by threatening him with a pistol, a symbolic castrating phallus, at the end of the film.

The characters in this modern-day adaptation of Oedipus Rex often share, or even swap, roles. As I’ve said, both Gittes and Cross share the role of Oedipus, and Evelyn, pointing her gun at her father, is paradoxically in the prohibitive paternal role of Laius, who gets killed while traveling in a vehicle on the road.

She is also, however, in the role of Oedipus at times (recall that Freud rejected Jung‘s use of the term “Electra complex,” preferring to call the father/daughter romance the feminine version of the Oedipus complex; though what’s happened between Evelyn and Cross more properly corresponds with Freud’s earlier seduction theory). Apart from her incestuous union with Cross-as-male-Iocaste, and the shame she feels from that, she also gets a bullet in the eye, the same eye as the one with the flawed iris that Gittes has noticed, paralleling Oedipus’ having blinded himself upon learning of his shameful union with his mother.

Gittes’s parallels with Oedipus don’t end with his relentless search for the truth. He is deeply flawed in his own ways, though not necessarily in the same ways as Oedipus. Gittes is outright bumbling in the many mistakes he makes. The photos taken of Hollis and Katherine cause him embarrassing publicity leading not only to a near-fistfight with a banker at the barber’s but also to a near-lawsuit with the real Evelyn. His investigation of the releasing of water from the reservoir one night not only gets him nearly washed away and killed in the rushing water, but also gets him scathed with a cut nose from the knife of one of Cross’s henchmen (a short man in a white suit played by none other than Polanski himself).

The close proximity of the cut nose (awkwardly bandaged for much of the rest of the movie) to his eyes suggests another parallel between Gittes and blinded Oedipus. Indeed, the theme of blindness vs sight, as observed in Sophocles’ tragedy, is also seen in Chinatown, in the examples as given above as well as in the following, however symbolically.

First, there are Gittes’s newly-installed Venetian blinds, which he’d appreciate Curly not damaging as he goes through his grief over his wife’s unfaithfulness. Of course, towards the end of the film, we see the black eye that Curly must have given her as revenge for her adultery. When Gittes tells the dirty joke about “screwing like a Chinaman,” he has his back to the real Evelyn, thus blind to how offensive he’s being, even though his employees–to whom he’s telling the joke–are trying to warn him to watch his mouth. So his vulgarity is another glaring fault of his. Her alienation from men’s locker room humour, as well as that of his secretary, whom he asks to leave the room so he can be free to tell the joke, is also an example of marginalization.

Recall also how he tells Evelyn, just after making love with her in her bed, that he once tried to protect a woman he loved from being hurt and ended up making sure she was hurt. This sounds like Oedipus trying everything he could to prevent the fulfillment of the prophecy of his murdering his father and marrying his mother, yet he ended up fulfilling it anyway.

To get back to Cross and Evelyn, there’s no mention anywhere in the film about her mother, though in the third draft of the script (page 112, link above), she says, upon having revealed her incest with Cross to Gittes, that “the dam broke…[her] mother died…[Cross] became a little boy…[she] was fifteen…” In other words, Cross was going through his own fragmentation–he was losing his mind over his professional and personal adversities–and he found a defence from that fragmentation through a regression to infantile narcissism and an Oedipal transference, putting Evelyn in the role of a maternal Iocaste.

In this way, Cross responded to the extreme stresses of the time by reverting to the narcissistic solace of the dyadic, mother/son relationship via transference, back to the realm of the Imaginary. Still, that dyadic state keeps on being threatened by the marginalizing encroachment of third parties–Hollis, Gittes, and later, Evelyn herself when Cross jealously comes to want Katherine to complete his dyad.

A narcissist like Cross wants dyadic relationships with one person at a time–keeping things in the Imaginary–because the other person in the relationship is meant to act as a metaphorical mirror of the narcissist, as an extension of himself, like the narcissistic infant’s attitude toward the Oedipally-desired parent. The encroaching third party–the prototype of which is the child’s father, who prohibits his or her incestuous union with the mother–thrusts Cross back into the Symbolic Order, that of language, cultural norms, customs, and the radical alterity of other people who won’t act as mirrors or extensions of himself.

These other people, like Hollis, Gittes, and Evelyn, won’t indulge Cross in his wish to have Katherine as an extension of himself. Hollis won’t indulge Cross to have his dam, so he can buy the dried-up land cheap and sell it at higher prices later, and he won’t let Cross have Katherine, as Evelyn won’t let him have her, so Hollis has to be eliminated, and Evelyn’s plan to hide their daughter must be thwarted. Cross wants Gittes to find Katherine, but when Gittes learns Evelyn’s shocking secret about the girl and their father, he wants to stop Cross from getting Katherine, too.

Being thwarted by these third parties would make Cross feel marginalized, just as the child experiencing the Oedipus complex feels marginalized, pushed to the side and not allowed to have the Oedipally-desired parent, not allowed to be the phallus for that parent, because of the Non! du père coming from the third parties. Cross, however, is a rich capitalist, not a helpless child, and he can arrange to get what he wants with utter ruthlessness, just as King Oedipus, both by virtue of being King of Thebes and by being unaware that Queen Iocaste is his mother, can fulfill his own desires, as unconscious as they are.

Cross owns the police, as Evelyn observes at the end of the film, and his wealth can influence the government to build the dam and have huge quantities of water released from the reservoir every night, despite there being a “drought” in the LA area. So instead of being marginalized, Cross can marginalize others; he is free, through his wealth, to indulge his narcissism, just as King Oedipus indulges in his hubris, imagining his investigations will save Thebes from the plague the same way he saved the city from the Sphinx.

With the police working for Cross, Gittes can be arrested and detained instead of listened to, so Cross would be forced to face justice for his crimes; also, the police will shoot at Evelyn as she drives away with Katherine, killing the former (however unintentionally). Cross, though shot in the arm by Evelyn and showing grief over her death, nonetheless walks off with a traumatized Katherine so he can do to her what he did with her mother/sister.

It can be argued that part of the purpose of Greek tragedies like Oedipus Rex is that they are critiques of political corruption: the Theban king’s incest is symbolic of how his corrupt leadership has…plagued…his city. Similarly, the dyadic relationship Cross narcissistically and jealously wants to maintain with Katherine, marginalizing everyone else, spills over onto LA society as a whole (a private narcissistic relationship parallels such a relationship with the public)–controlling the water and depriving everyone else of it, marginalizing everyone else (a marginalizing paralleled by the Chinese-Americans’ relationship with white American society). Hence, Cross’s falling-out with Hollis is two-fold: over Katherine and over the dam.

My point is that, in Cross, we see how the unresolved Oedipal situation of narcissistically wanting to hog a person all to oneself leads, if one has the money and political influence, to wanting to hog crucial resources like water all to oneself, too. There are the material roots of power, and there are the psychological roots of grasping for power.

Recall what Cross says to Gittes after the latter has finally figured out that the former is responsible for Hollis’s murder and for having raped Evelyn: “Hollis was always fond of tide-pools…that’s where life begins…marshes, sloughs, tide-pools…he was fascinated by them.” (third draft of the script, link above, page 121) These three are all water sources and life sources, like one’s mother…le mer est la mère. In this we see the connection between Oedipal narcissism and that of capital.

Cross thus plans to incorporate the Northeast Valley into LA, then irrigate and develop it. He also schemes at finding Katherine, through Gittes’s help, and ‘irrigating and developing’ her, so to speak. His falling-out with Hollis outside the Pig and Whistle, as photographed by Walsh (played by Joe Mantell), one of Gittes’s employees, isn’t proof of Hollis having an affair with Katherine, but it reflects Cross’s jealous wish to hog that water and the girl to himself, and to stop Hollis from getting in the way of his plans.

Hollis is thus that third party, the Non! du père with his prohibitive laws and government regulations, stopping a capitalist from doing whatever he wants to the detriment of everyone else. But instead of the capitalist using the “free market” to rid himself of the intrusive government, Cross uses other parts of the government–corrupt cops, Yelburton (Hillerman), Mulvihill (played by Roy Jenson), etc.–to get what he wants, all proof of the hypocrisy of the capitalist who claims to advocate ‘small government,’ when he really considers government to be just fine…when it’s convenient for him.

Interestingly, right in the scene when Gittes meets Cross, and just before Cross wishes to hire him to find Katherine, Evelyn is brought up in the conversation, and Cross asks if Gittes is taking her for a ride…financially and sexually. Since Hollis is her husband, and Cross has had predatory interests in both females, he’ll feel jealousy toward Hollis and, potentially, Gittes. Again, in this we see the water and the women connect.

The eyeglasses found in the pond of saltwater (“bad for glass [sic]”) behind the Mulwray home are Cross’s, and they’re proof that he murdered Hollis, whose body had saltwater in it. The glasses fit in with the theme of sight-vs-blindness that’s also in Oedipus Rex. Killing Hollis, the Laius of the movie, and losing the glasses there is paralleled to Oedipus blinding himself after realizing his shame. One of the lenses is broken, too.

Note in this connection also the marginalization of the Chinese-American gardener, who like the other Asians is just a detail to the plot, whose imperfect English says “glass” when he means “grass,” and yet his comment is crucial to helping Gittes solve the mystery and determine Cross’s guilt. He’s thought the glasses were Hollis’s, and that Evelyn murdered her husband; but they’re bifocals, which Hollis never wore…Cross, however, did. Still, the git who is Gittes can’t convince Escobar (Lopez) and the other cops that Cross is their man.

So Gittes has to go home with the horrifying realization that he’s failed, as he has at so many other things, at protecting not only Evelyn, but also Katherine, whose father/grandfather is getting his filthy hands on her…as if the poor girl isn’t traumatized enough at seeing her mother/sister with a bullet in her eye. Rich Cross will get away with everything; Gittes cannot stop him.

The film ends with an emphasis on the theme of marginalization. Finally, we see in this last scene the Chinatown that is the film’s namesake and that has only been mentioned in passing here and there, like seeing the occasional Chinese-American servant. Walsh ends it all fittingly by telling Gittes, “Forget it, Jake–it’s Chinatown.” Yes, even in Chinatown, we should push it and its residents to the side. As the Chinese-American community comes over to see Evelyn’s dead body out of curiosity, Escobar shouts at them to get back and “clear the area.”

Marginalization, and the jealousy that comes from being pushed back, tossed aside, and forgotten for the sake of someone deemed more important–like a spouse in favour of a paramour, the needs of the poor in favour of pursuing profit, or a boy’s mother pushing him aside in favour of his father–this is the thematic essence of Chinatown.

Analysis of ‘Repo Man’

Repo Man is a 1984 film written and directed by Alex Cox, starring Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton, with Tracey Walter, Olivia Brash, Sy Richardson, Vonetta McGee, Fox Harris, and Dick Rude. Michael Nesmith of the Monkees was executive producer, and Iggy Pop wrote the Repo Man theme; he also sings the song during the end credits.

A satire on American life under the Reagan administration, on consumerism, and on the Atomic Age, Repo Man had a troubled initial release because Universal Pictures doubted the film’s commercial viability. It nonetheless received widespread acclaim, was considered one of the best films of 1984, and is now a cult film.

Here’s a link to quotes from the film, here’s a link to the script (including outtakes), and here’s a link to a rather poor quality video of the complete film (i.e., the image being in the bottom-right corner, it’s being sped up, with all the sound in a higher pitch).

After seeing, during the opening credits, a shifting road map of Los Alamos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and finally to California, we’re in the Mojave Desert, with J. Frank Parnell (Harris) driving a ’64 Chevy Malibu. A cop on a bike pulls him over and wants to know what’s in the trunk of the Malibu. Parnell tries to warn him not to look in there, but the cop insists. He opens the trunk, a bright light shines out of it, and he screams as he’s being disintegrated from the mysterious thing in there, leaving only his flaming boots. Parnell drives away.

Later in the film, we learn from Leila (Barash) that aliens are what is in the trunk; they’re emitting the radiation that killed the cop. A question that should be obvious to ask is this: what business were the contents of the car to the cop? What right had he (I couldn’t care less about his badge) to stick his nose in Parnell’s personal business?

Now, aliens are heavenly beings, if you will. This fact, combined with the sinfulness of LA (where the bulk of Repo Man takes place), as well as the vaporizing of anyone who opens the trunk and exposes the ‘heavenly beings,’ makes me think of the Biblical story of Lot in Sodom. Such an association probably sounds far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, but please hear me out.

To get our bearings, I’ll start by saying that the aliens are like the angels God sent to destroy Sodom, which LA represents here. Granted, the aliens don’t destroy LA in the movie, they just kill a few people nosy enough to look in the trunk; but they do shake things up for a lot of people in and around the city. The radiation emitted by the aliens can be associated with the radiation from nuclear explosions, which can wipe out cities, as happened in Japan. These associations are close enough for me, since as was mentioned above, one of the satirical targets of Repo Man is the Atomic Age.

One of the major sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was inhospitality. The Sodomites surrounded Lot’s house when they knew he was accommodating the visiting angels. The Sodomites demanded he send out the angels so they could “know” them. (Gang rape, regardless of sexual orientation, can only be evil.) Knowing his duty to be hospitable to the angels, Lot couldn’t send them out. When the Sodomites tried to force their way into the house, the angels blinded them, which can be associated with the aliens vaporizing the intruding cop.

My point in bringing up the story of Lot in Sodom is that one of the central themes of Repo Man is impingement, encroachment, or imposing oneself on another’s personal space, just as the men of Sodom tried to impinge on Lot’s home and the guests to whom he was giving hospitality. If you impinge on others, they’ll impinge back on you, as the angels did when the Sodomites tried to break into Lot’s house and rape the visiting men.

The scene in the supermarket–where Otto (Estevez) and Kevin (played by Zander Schloss, bassist for the Circle Jerks, who appear later in the film as a nightclub band) are working as stock clerks facing cans–is full of impingement. Kevin, a geek who is annoyingly sycophantic to the whole capitalist system, is singing, of all things, a 7-Up jingle right next to Otto, irritating him. The last thing punk rocker Otto needs to hear is an advertisement for a soft drink while he’s doing monotonous wage slave work.

Otto impinges back on Kevin by sticking a price tag on his glasses. Then, to annoy Otto further, his boss, Mr. Humphries (played by Charles Hopkins), comes over to nag him about not only being habitually late for work, but also for not spacing the cans properly. He gives Otto an implicit warning of getting fired by mentioning how, in the bad economy of the time, one must be careful about the quality of one’s work. Luis, an armed security guard, gets in Otto’s face for not listening to his boss, then Otto curses at him, shoves chuckling Kevin into the pile of cans they’ve been facing, flips off Humphries and Luis, and walks out.

Incidentally, all the cans, cereal boxes, and other things sold in the supermarket are generically labelled and designed, as if either made by one company with no regard for visual style, or to indicate that it doesn’t matter who the makers of the commodities are. The satirical point being made here is about consumerism as an escape from eroding democratic freedoms in the Reagan era, which inaugurated the “free market” policies that have resulted in the neoliberalism that plagues us all today.

I’m reminded of what George Carlin would, in later decades, complain about: the illusory freedom of choice (i.e., lots of different brands and flavours to choose from) for consumers instead of meaningful, democratic freedom of political choice (viable political parties other than the GOP and DNC, ones that offer a genuine left-wing alternative). Seeing generic, no-name brands in the supermarket exposes the lie of consumerism as ‘freedom of choice.’

Kevin’s gloating over Otto losing his job, as well as his sucking-up to his boss, does him no good, because Humphries in his rage fires the “worm” too. Kissing the asses of capitalists is no guarantee of advancement.

More impinging is going on in the next scene, though it’s consensual–slamdancing to punk rock–at a party that night in the back of a warehouse. There, Otto meets Duke (Rude), a fellow punk who just got out of jail. The Circle Jerks song “Coup D’état” is heard. There’s a suggestion in this atmosphere of an anarchist wish for violent revolution, though it’s only a fantasy.

In the next scene, Otto is in bed with Debbi (played by Jennifer Balgobin) in Kevin’s house, where the party has moved. She asks him to go get her a beer from the kitchen, an interesting reversal of sex roles, especially seen in light of how she’s about the cheat on him with Archie (played by Miguel Sandoval) and Duke.

The partiers are living in a freely anarchist manner, while nothing is being done about the capitalist-based problems of the outside world, in the rest of LA and in the world in general. We don’t solve our problems by escaping the world and getting wasted, but far too many of us do this anyway. “Institutionalized,” a song by Suicidal Tendencies about teenage disaffection and alienation (a fitting subject for these punks), is heard from downstairs.

Speaking of disaffection and alienation, Otto is next seen alone outside in the early morning, in a vacant lot drinking a beer. He recites some of the lyrics from “TV Party,” by Black Flag. They’re lyrics about not wanting to think about anything important, about only wanting to watch the idiot box and drinking beer. Otto vaguely senses the futility of mindlessly partying instead of, say, organizing and advocating for social change.

Later, when it’s light out, Otto is still walking around outside, now in some neighbourhood. Bud (Stanton) is driving by in his car and offers Otto ten bucks, which sounds to Otto like he’s soliciting for gay sex, which of course would be more impingement. (Note how Otto’s homophobic response could be linked to the homophobic tone in the Bible story.) Bud actually wants Otto to help him repossess a car in the neighbourhood.

Repossessing someone’s car has to be one of the extreme forms of impingement, as well as the opposite of hospitality, which involves giving, not taking. Sticking one’s nose into someone else’s business, going into his or her personal space, and taking a vital personal possession of his or hers are among the worst forms of impingement.

Repossession of cars also makes for a vividly illustrative metaphor for the Reagan revolution, which was, in effect, a repossessing of so many of the working-class gains of the postwar period up to the 1970s. The Reagan years saw dramatic cuts in domestic spending, a steep increase in the number of homeless people, union-busting, and a number of other policies that resulted in the widening gap between the rich and the poor, policies continued and exacerbated by all succeeding US presidents.

Otto repos the car for Bud as requested, unaware that what he’s doing is a repo, and he takes it to the “Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation,” a misnomer for a repo organization so ridiculously bizarre as to be outright Orwellian doublethink. Indeed, proponents of the Reagan agenda similarly regard its rolling back of government benefits for the poor as a ‘liberating’ of the people from the ‘shackles’ of ‘big government,’ all while jacking up military spending to the point of leaving the American government with a deficit.

When Otto realizes the people in this business are repo men, a truly despicable, thankless job, he expresses his contempt for them by taking the can of beer they’ve given him and spilling it all over the floor–impingement on their property. Instead of being mad at him, Bud and Oly (played by Tom Finnegan) say he’s “all right,” meaning Otto has the kind of confrontational, impinging personality that makes for an ideal repo man. Still, he doesn’t want to do the job.

A government agent named Rogersz (played by Susan Barnes)–she has a metal hand–is leading a group of people who are investigating how the cop got killed in the desert. They will now try to find the Malibu, which is to become the MacGuffin of Repo Man, the car that will be the ultimate repossession.

Otto and Kevin are going through a newspaper, job-hunting and sitting by an unemployment office. Still deluding himself that if he works hard and plays the capitalist game, Kevin can become “manager in two years, King! God!” after dedicating himself as a fry cook. Otto isn’t so optimistic, though. He’s had a dream in which he and Kevin were 65-year-old bellhops in a “sleazy shithole motel” in Miami. It looked painfully real to Otto.

Since job prospects don’t look too good for him, Otto goes home (he lives in the garage, incidentally: see the outtakes [link above] at about 9:00) and asks his parents for a thousand dollars promised to him if he finishes school, so he can go to Europe. His mom and dad are stoners sitting on the couch sharing a joint and watching TV. The show they’re watching is of a televangelist, Reverend Larry, to whom they’ve given the thousand dollars to sell Bibles to El Salvador.

To make money, Otto will have to become a repo man. You’ve gotta love the “free market.”

The televangelist, of course, is a real character in himself, and a reflection of the Reagan years in many ways. Apart from the fact that Reagan himself was a conservative Christian, his preaching of ‘small government’ was a ploy to lower spending on the poor in order to increase spending to further the interests of the rich (e.g., increasing military spending for the sake of US imperialism), that is, big capitalist government! Similarly, the reverend tells his viewers, largely lower to middle-class people in need of ‘spiritual answers,’ to give him their money.

Also like Reagan, the reverend wants us all to “destroy the twin evils of godless communism abroad and liberal humanism at home.” Note how the religious right, calling these ideologies “twin evils,” is either too ignorant or outright lying when they don’t see the huge difference between communism and liberalism.

It’s safe to assume that Otto’s stoner parents used to be hippies back when he was a baby. Hippies are liberals, by the way, not communists. A common complaint we on the left have is when liberals backslide toward the right, as Otto’s parents have done by going beyond smoking marijuana to enjoying the opium of the people, a subject I explored in my analysis of Drugstore Cowboy.

Note how Otto’s parents aid US imperialism by selling Bibles to El Salvador instead of helping the country be free of the American empire. Religion is a drug used to help people forget their oppression. TV, of course, can also be a drug in itself, a kind of distraction from one’s everyday troubles, just as the partying punks did as observed above. In the outtakes (link above, at about 12:34), we can see cobwebs enveloping Otto’s mom and dad as they’re on the couch watching the idiot box, just as Black Flag sing about in their song.

In his having no choice but to do a despicable job in order to make the money he needs, Otto demonstrates the lack of meaningful freedom in a capitalist society. And just as the punks have their beer and partying, and Otto’s parents have their marijuana and religion as manic defences against the misery of the world, repo men have speed and booze for the same kind of escape.

This escape will be necessary for Otto, since as part of his selling of his soul to do this new job, he’ll take Bud’s advice and “dress like a detective…dress kind of square,” so people will think Otto is a cop. So much for being a punk rocker. Since one imagines punk rockers have at least anarchist tendencies, we can see how this tendency can backslide into liberalism, then to even more reactionary thinking, as Otto’s choice to become a repo man can be seen to symbolize.

As he and Otto are snorting amphetamine in a car in an alley, Bud sees some people outside and tells Otto he hates “ordinary fucking people.” This is because ordinary people always try to avoid tense situations, whereas repo men are always “getting into tense situations.” Such an attitude, glorifying an aggravating of alienation, sounds suspiciously to me like neoliberalism romanticizing confrontation for the sake of furthering capitalist interests; it’s somehow ‘cool,’ ‘rebellious,’ and ‘edgy’ to be a repo man, rather it simply being an asshole.

Bud and Otto go into a store to buy six packs of beer (generically labelled “drink”) while Bud is still talking about “tense situations” with people with knives or guns. They leave the store, and speaking of tense situations involving guns, we learn that Duke, Archie, and Debbi have been hiding behind the counter, where Bud bought the beer, the whole time. The three punks are holding guns on the cashier, about to rifle the cash register.

We’ll notice as we go through the rest of the film that whenever we see Otto and Bud in a store buying drinks, the three punk rock thieves will also be there. Repo men and thieves are thus being associated with each other. This juxtaposition sends the message to us that repossession, properly understood, is stealing. Bud himself admits this earlier when he’s explaining to Otto how much money you can make when you “rip [off]” a car. Making money by stealing: this is also known as capitalism.

In an outtake (link above, at about 6:42), we see Bud trying to repo a car from a man named Arthur Pakman. Bud gives him his name card, which curiously has the name “I.G. Farben” on it. This is the name of a German chemical and pharmaceutical conglomerate that became a donor and major contractor to the Nazi government, relying on slave labour from the concentration camps; one of its subsidiaries supplied Zyklon B. That a repo man would have such a name on his name card is an obvious satirical comment on the corrupt Sodom and Gomorrah that is capitalist society, the fascism that hides behind its ‘freedom.’

More impingement occurs when Bud and Otto are driving around a concrete riverbed, and they encounter the Rodriguez brothers (played by Del Zamora and Eddie Velez) in their car, one of them flipping Bud off. They get into a car chase for a while, and Bud and Otto end up stuck in a puddle. Annoyed, Bud says he and Otto ought to go off and get drinks. Otto is amused at how “intense” the car chase was; Bud says that a repo man’s life is always intense.

Duke, Archie (with a paper bag on his head), and Debbi have just finished robbing the store that Otto and Bud are about to enter; the thieves have impinged on the store. They run out, and Archie knocks into a waist-high pole by the door, hurting himself in the balls…more impingement.

Next, Otto and Lite (Richardson) are driving up to Miss Magruder’s car, stopped at a traffic light, and get ready to repo it. Lite gives him a bag with a dead rat in it to throw into her car to upset and distract her, then Otto can get the car. He throws the rat on the seat just beside her; she sprays mace in his face and drives off when the light turns green. He who lives by impingement shall die by impingement, or get blinded by it, as the men of Sodom were.

After that, Otto and Bud drive over to repo a Cadillac owned by a millionaire named Peason, who is in a laundromat talking to two kids about the laundry, and how he wants it arranged. He has an unsurprisingly condescending attitude toward the kids. When Otto rips off the car, Peason runs out of the laundromat, and the kids toss his clothes outside while laughing at him. It’s hard to sympathize with a rich guy who can’t be bothered to make the payments on his Cadillac.

As he’s driving around in the Cadillac, Otto sees Leila running on the sidewalk. She’s attractive, so naturally he slows down to talk to her. He wants to offer her a ride, but she’s distracted him from his driving, so he drives his car into a pile of garbage on the side of the road (impingement), angering an old lady who nags him to clean it up; he ignores her, of course, Leila gets in the car, and he drives off.

It’s here where we learn that Parnell has been driving around with aliens in his trunk. She shows Otto a photo “of four dead aliens.” He laughs in disbelief at her story. Since she’s being chased by government men associated with Rogersz in their own car, Leila has ducked down and hidden herself from them; she’s afraid they’ll kill her over the aliens. She explains to Otto that Parnell has smuggled the aliens from an air force base in his Malibu. She needs to find him before Rogersz et al do.

In this sense, Leila and Parnell are like Lot and his family, and the government people are like the men of Sodom, so to speak. Otto drops Leila off at her place of work, “The United Fruitcake Outlet,” which sounds like a flippant pun on the United Fruit Company. Apart from the aliens being associated with the angels in the Lot in Sodom story, their deadly radiation implies an association with Soviet nuclear weapons, a capability that the American government would like to be about to take from them, as would any capitalists, such as the United Fruit Company, who spearheaded a coup against the leftist Guatemalan government in 1954 (remember the selling of Bibles to El Salvador in this connection).

It’s easy to see Rogersz’s government agents as the bad guys here, but one shouldn’t assume that Leila’s ‘fruitcake’ group of people are any more sympathetic just because she becomes Otto’s girlfriend…or something (Leila and Parnell aren’t the good guys, just as Lot’s family aren’t all that good, either, as we learn in Genesis 19–Lot offering his daughters for the sexual sport of the Sodomites, his daughters getting him drunk and committing incest with him, etc.). Recall how later Leila helps Agent Rogersz torture him by electric shock to get information as to where the Malibu is. At the end of the film, he leaves Leila to go in the car with Miller (Walter); she asks Otto about her “relationship” with him, and when he blows her off, she angrily says she’s glad she helped Rogersz torture him.

There isn’t really anyone in Repo Man who can be called a ‘good guy’ in a more or less pure sense. As I said, the LA of this film is a modern-day Sodom, a corrupt, impinging, inhospitable place. Even the aliens in the Malibu’s trunk, whom I’ve associated with the Biblical angels on the one hand, and with the USSR on the other (radiation>>Atomic Age>>Soviet nuclear weapons), aren’t to be considered the ‘good guys,’ given that this film is a product of Hollywood liberalism, which has no more sympathy for leftist anti-capitalism than conservatives do.

Accordingly, everyone in the film, those from the far-right to the left-of-centre of the political spectrum, wants to get his hands on the Malibu. Thus Agent Rogersz and Leila wanting to find it is simply symbolic of competing capitalists/imperialists wanting to thwart the Soviet accumulation of nuclear power, as represented by the radiation in the trunk of the Malibu. To repo the Malibu, one will get the unusually high reward of $20,000.

After repossessing a red car, Lite and Otto are driving around in it, and at one point, Lite mentions a book he once found when he swiped a Maserati in Beverly Hills. The book is called Dioretix: the Science of Matter over Mind. “That book will change your life,” Lite tells Otto. It is obviously a parody of L. Ron Hubbard‘s 1950 book, Dianetcs, and therefore a satirical stab at self-help books and pseudoscience in general. (Matter over mind? Not vice versa?)

In the next scene, we see Otto with Miller in a vacant lot. Otto is holding his copy of Dioretix and is about to toss it into a burning garbage can. Miller goes into a big spiel about how many things that seem to be coincidences are really interconnected in some secret, profound, mystical way; it sounds like Jung‘s notion of synchronicity, but Miller’s use of a plate of shrimp as an example of how it works sounds idiotic.

It seems as though Miller has been reading Dioretix, too. His absurd attempts at philosophical profundity give Otto the impression that he must have done way too much LSD over the years. Still, Miller seems like more of a Dostoyevskyan idiot, for though Miller expresses his opinions with ludicrous examples, he seems to have his instincts in the right places, for at the end of the movie, he gets into the Malibu, his gut correctly telling him that it’s an alien vehicle, a spaceship that goes up into the night sky, then into space, and…who knows?…may well even travel time, as he imagines flying saucers and time machines to be one and the same thing. He is a working-class man with a spark of intelligence never properly developed because of a lack of money for higher education.

When it’s learned from the repo men that the reward for finding the Malibu is $20,000 (and it’s speculated that the large amount of money offered for the car is due to it containing drugs, rather than celestial beings, symbolically linking the drug speculation to the “opium of the people”), Otto calls Leila about the car to arouse her interest. He, however, is aroused by her body, and when he arrives at The United Fruitcake Outlet, he tries to get sex from her…or at least a blowjob. Angered by his impinging on her at work, she slaps him…twice. He who leers with impingement shall get slapped with impingement.

But now that so many people are licking their lips over that $20,000, Bud is imagining a life of financial security without needing to work anymore. He insists to Lite that he can achieve this security with $20,000 because he has good credit.

In the next scene, he’s driving with Otto and telling him about how important credit is: it’s “a sacred trust,” what the American “free society is founded on.” (That’s funny: I thought American ‘freedom’ was founded on black slavery and the genocide of the Native Americans, but I digress…) This “sacred trust,” combined with getting the coveted money, is what Bud imagines is the capitalist ‘liberation’ he has within his reach.

He compares this dutiful payment of bills and debts favourably to how the Soviets don’t “give a damn about their bills.” When Otto implies that not needing to pay bills in the USSR is a better deal, Bud (recall his IG Farben name card from the outtake) takes umbrage at such an implication and wonders if Otto is a “commie.” So many Americans are brainwashed about what ‘freedom’ is under capitalism to such an extent that it’s inconceivable to them how not needing to pay bills is one of the most liberating things possible.

Now, Bud doesn’t want to sound too right-wing, so while he won’t tolerate any “commies” in his car, he doesn’t want any Christians in it, either. Such an odd appendage to his hatred of the left can only be explained, in my opinion, as an ego defence anticipating an accusation of far-right thinking, or an attempt to seem centrist and liberal. One ought, however, to take into account the “fish hook theory,” which illustrates how liberalism and centrism are actually closer to fascism (remember again Bud’s IG Farben name card) than communism ever was, in spite of what that nonsensical horseshoe theory says.

Parnell drives over to a gas station, where Kevin has a new job. The nerdy boy still kisses capitalist ass, doing the phony friendly-to costumers attitude and hoping it will lead to advancement. He approaches Parnell and offers a vacuum of the Malibu, but the sweaty old man wants to find junk food from vending machines, imagining such food to be healthy. Kevin offers to check Parnell’s trunk, and luckily for him, he ends up not doing so.

He does the same ass-kissing routine for the Rodriguez brothers, who recognize the nearby Malibu and swipe it while Parnell is gone and Kevin is looking for a non-existent box of matches for the brothers in the gas station office.

In someone’s home, Otto tries, instead of outright repossessing the car of a sweet middle-aged black lady named Mrs. Parks (interesting choice for a name on Cox’s part!), to get her to pay the rest of what she owes for it. Her musician son and his bandmates, all huge guys, come home and, learning Otto is a repo man, beat him up outside. Oh, the karma of impingement…

Otto returns to the lot at Helping Hand, and Miller bandages up his wounds. Plettschner, a cop played by Richard Foronjy, interestingly has the same first name as Otto but is practically the opposite in personality or likability. He gets in Otto’s face by saying he isn’t cut out to be a repo man, getting a “fuck you” reply, which just gets the already obnoxious cop angry, so he brags about all of his ‘achievements’ as a veteran and as a prison guard, whereas Otto is just a “punk” and a “little scumbag.” ACAB.

The Rodriguez brothers carelessly lose the Malibu, which is literally and figuratively hot (from the radiation), to Duke, Archie, and Debbi, who see their chance and steal it while it’s unattended. Otto and Lite try to repo a car, but the owner shoots at them. Lite takes out a pistol of blanks and shoots back, telling terrified Otto to get in the car and repo it. As we can see, this juxtaposition of swiping cars shows how repo men are hardly any different from any ordinary car thief. Otto is increasingly realizing that repo men, with their guns and intense lives, are crazy.

Leila is talking to Parnell on public phones, but a car with Rogersz’s agents smashes into her phone booth just after she’s gotten out; they chase and catch her, put her in their car, and take her away. Rogersz is in a van, looking at Leila on a monitor and questioning her about the Malibu. When Leila mentions the aliens in the trunk, Rogersz asks her if she’s ever thought of working for the CIA, Leila having already said she is in no way averse to torturing people. As we can see, the sides these two women work for aren’t all that opposed to each other.

Next, there’s a party in the Helping Hand yard. The staff ask Otto who beat him up, but he doesn’t want to talk about it. Marlene (McGee) asks Plettschner why he won’t go after Otto’s attackers, but the cop says he’s on his coffee break. ACAB. Bud says that repo men should get their revenge on Otto’s attackers without the need of cops. “Just like John Wayne,” Marlene says, sneering at the men, who insist that the Duke is the greatest of American men.

Miller rains on the parade of the repo men’s worshipping of this epitome of American machismo by calling John Wayne “a fag” who wears dresses. (One might recall, in this connection, the scene in Midnight Cowboy when Ratso Rizzo [Dustin Hoffman] tells Joe Buck [Jon Voight] that dressing like a cowboy in New York makes him look like a gay prostitute; Buck, shocked, says, “John Wayne? You wanna tell me he’s a fag?”)

The importance of this scene isn’t about the homophobia (though homophobia links this scene with the homophobia in the Lot in Sodom story, as discussed above). It’s a satiric jab at conventional masculine roles, something further developed when Oly says lots of straight men like to watch their friends fuck, as do Oly and tough-guy Plettschner…apparently.

The repo men insist that Otto tell them who beat him up, and he lies and says that it was his old boss, Humphries, who gets beaten up that night at his home. It’s hard to sympathize with a petit bourgeois capitalist, all the same.

Leila has Otto meet up with Rogersz in a bar to discuss the Malibu and the aliens in the trunk. The two women stress the urgency of finding the car. Recall how the aliens, via the radiation, represent the Soviet power that the women, in turn representing capitalist and state interests, want to get their hands on.

While this is all going on, significantly, the Circle Jerks are performing in the pub as a nightclub band. They’re playing a lame and square acoustic version (this must be deliberate) of their punk song, “When the Shit Hits the Fan.” It’s easy to see why Otto would say, “I can’t believe I used to like these guys.” Recall that the bassist of the Circle Jerks is playing Kevin the nerd.

The song, as you can glean from the lyric, is about economic hard times that hit the poor the hardest. It is an ironic take on the Reaganite way of seeing the problem: “blame the government for hard times”; “let’s leech off the state/gee, the money’s really great,” thanks to “welfare checks,” and “free loaves of bread.” However, thanks to Reagan, “social security has run out on you and me,” meaning that it’s the capitalist government, not a ‘socialist’ one (something the US has never had, by the way), that we should blame.

So when we see the Circle Jerks having changed from a punk band into a lame night club one, the transformation parallels what’s happened to Otto (from punk rocker to repo man), to his parents (from hippies to supporters of a televangelist), and to Leila (from avoiding the government to working for them). All of these transformations allegorize the Reaganite metamorphosis of a welfare capitalist society, one where there’s at least the hope of evolving into a more left-leaning one, into a nakedly neoliberal capitalist society, the worst of which we have now in the 2020s.

Small wonder when Duke, Archie, and Debbi enter the bar and see Otto, they speak derisively to the repo man, annoyed that he’s too busy with work to hang out with his punk friends. Though Otto’s choice of work is a bad one, no other money-making opportunities have been opened to him. As the Circle Jerks sing, “We just get by however we can/We all gotta duck when the shit hits the fan.”

Of course, the trio of punk thieves aren’t all that much better. Committing petty crimes hardly improves society. Debbi thinks Agent Rogerzs’s metal arm is fascinating: it merely symbolizes how the system has dehumanized her and made her part of ‘the machine,’ as it were. The three punks, in their own way, have degenerated from their would-be revolutionary ideals, as have Otto, his parents, Leila, and this fictionalized version of the Circle Jerks.

The three thieves leave the bar and find Parnell trying to retrieve his Malibu. They feel he’s impinging on him, not realizing he was originally impinged on, first by the thieving Rodriguez brothers, and then by these three. Their sticking their noses into his business is no different, in principle, to the cop’s having done so at the beginning of the film, so fittingly, Archie suffers the same fate as the cop. Duke and Debbi run off in terror, and Parnell gets his car back.

The Rodriguez brothers are driving along and see Parnell in the Malibu. They claim to be “special deputies” and tell him to pull over. This pretence of authority to justify taking away a man’s car is how we can see no substantive difference between cops, repo men, and car thieves. Might makes right in the end.

This mutual identity is especially apparent when the repo men, in Bud’s car, find the Rodriguez brothers and Parnell in the Malibu, then start vying over who will get the coveted car, which soon drives off. Bud et al get into a violent altercation with the Rodriguez brothers. Swinging a baseball bat at the two, Bud would like to repo their car, but they insist they’ve paid it off.

Because Bud hit one of the brothers with the bat, they’re suing Helping Hand “for malicious damages,” and Bud has lost his job in a nasty falling-out with Oly. He is next seen in a car with Otto. They’re driving in a neighbourhood with a bunch of homeless people. Bud has just lost his job, but he still has no sympathy for them; he’s internalized the Reaganite attitude that the destitute have somehow ‘chosen’ their lot, and they’re leeching off the welfare system. Bud doesn’t understand that, as an unemployed man, he’s closer to being one of the homeless than he is to being the ‘made man’ he thinks the repoing of the Malibu will make him.

Otto is so disgusted with Bud’s attitude that he gets out of the car and walks down the neighbourhood with the homeless, people who truly deserve our sympathy. People in radiation suits carry off a dead body and put it in a car trunk…rather like those melting aliens.

Otto then sees the Malibu. His sympathy for the poor dissolves, he has dollar signs in his eyes, and he runs after the car. Parnell lets Otto in the car, and they drive together. Parnell is actually dying right there as he’s driving, from his exposure to the radiation in the trunk with the aliens. His ability even to focus and follow a conversation is clearly impaired when, during his conversation with Otto, he mishears the boy saying he represents the Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation, hearing instead radiation, something impinging on Parnell’s brain.

Parnell claims, in his obvious, growing mental instability, that any talk of radiation being bad for you is “pernicious nonsense.” Then he speaks glowingly of lobotomies, a friend of his and he himself each having apparently had one. Soon, he slumps over the steering wheel and dies. Otto gets him out of the Malibu and drives it to the Helping Hand repo yard.

It seems that Otto’s going to get the $20,000 for the Malibu, so at a party at Miller’s that night, the wives of several repo men, including Oly’s, are all over Otto…”like flies on shit.” Someone, however, has broken into the yard and taken the Malibu. Otto goes walking outside; Bud drives by, and Otto gets in the car. They’ll go to that liquor store to get some drinks again.

Duke and Debbi are in a car just outside the store. He’s talking, in all absurdity, about how they ought to settle down, get a house, and have a baby, since “everybody does it,” and it “seems like the thing to do.” Here we see yet another example of initially rebellious attitudes degenerating into mere social conformity–from rebel to liberal. She can hear how ridiculous he sounds, and so they just go into the store to rob it.

Otto and Bud are in the store, and a gunfight ensues. Debbi shoots, and her bullet grazes the side of Bud’s head. Duke is mortally wounded. As he’s dying, he does a melodramatic speech about how ‘tragic’ his demise is, and that it’s society’s fault that he became a criminal, but he’s a white suburban (implying at least middle class) punk. He who lives by impingement, dies by it.

Since the Malibu is missing, the agents are trying to find it. Marlene and Otto want to stop the agents from getting it, but Plettschner, dick that he is, tries to stop her and Otto from stopping the agents. Otto throws scalding hot coffee on the cop’s face (serves him right–ACAB), and Otto and Marlene run out the door; but he’s caught by the agents.

Leila and Rogersz torture Otto to get information about the Malibu. Leila is still a little conflicted about hurting her apparent boyfriend, but Rogersz rationalizes torturing him with a typical psychopathic projection: “no one is innocent,” apparently. Marlene and the Rodriguez brothers break into the room where Otto’s being held and get him out of there. Rogersz is fine with this, since it will lead her to wherever the Malibu is.

The search for the car continues, and even the reverend is interested in it, which shouldn’t be at all surprising. Considering what the Malibu, which is glowing now, represents as I’ve described above, it’s easy to see how commie-hating religion fits in with the capitalist state as personified by Leila and Rogersz, respectively.

Eventually, the car is found in the Helping Hand lot, angelically glowing with Bud at the wheel. It’s raining ice cubes, a kind of dialectical opposite of raining fire and brimstone over Sodom. This is fitting, if we equate the Malibu with Lot’s house, and equate everyone gathering to get at the car with the men of Sodom surrounding Lot’s house.

Otto goes up to Bud and tries to make a deal over what percentage of the reward money each of them will get for the car. Someone from a helicopter above warns Bud to get out of the Malibu. He gets out, but he’s brandishing a pistol. He’s shot from someone in the helicopter, but before he dies, Bud quotes Emiliano Zapata, in all irony, given Bud’s established opposition to revolutionary ideas: “I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees.”

The agents get close to the car, but sense “a strange, eerie kind of force field” surrounding it. Another agent approaching the Malibu catches fire. The reverend comes near the car holding a large Bible; he’s flanked by others in religious garb, as he himself is dressed, and Rogersz is with him, even calling him “your holiness,” implying a link between the state and religion that the ruling class would keep intact. A bolt of lightning from the car zaps the Bible in his hands, causing him to expose the phoniness of his “holiness” by saying “holy sheep-shit!” The Church is every bit as corrupt and sinful as everyone else in LA, the modern Sodom.

The force-field, the fire, and the bolt of lightning coming from the car thus all parallel the angels (i.e., the aliens in the trunk) striking the men of Sodom intruding into Lot’s house (i.e., the Malibu) with blindness.

So who is worthy of getting into the Malibu and driving it (even though he can’t drive)? Miller is, and he waves at Otto to join him inside for a ride. Miller, recall, is the Dostoyevskyan idiot whose innocence and lack of interest in the $20,000 makes him worthy. Now, Otto, spurning Leila and her association with capitalism (the United Fruitcake Outlet) and the state (Rogersz and the agents), as well as his tiring of the repo man job, is now also worthy of being in the car and enjoying its true benefits.

The aliens take the car up into the sky. Just as Lot and his daughters escaped the sin of Sodom, Otto and Miller fly up in the car into space and freedom from the sin of LA and the rest of the world.

Analysis of ‘The Brood’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Barfly’

Barfly is a 1987 film directed by Barbet Schroeder and written by Charles Bukowski, who also does a cameo. It stars Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway, with Alice Krige, Frank Stallone, Jack Nance (whom you might remember from Eraserhead), and JC Quinn.

Barfly is a semi-autobiographical film with Henry Chinaski (Rourke) as a fictionalized version of young Bukowski. The film was entered into the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme D’or. Dunaway was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Drama. Barfly was also nominated for two Independent Spirit Awards: Best Actor for Rourke, and Best Cinematography for Robby Müller.

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

Destitute LA alcoholic/writer Henry Chinaski exemplifies the Dionysian lifestyle, and it goes way beyond the obvious link with drinking. To understand the extent to which Henry embodies Dionysus, we must understand everything the wine god represents beyond just wine: dancing and pleasure, or partying, and irrationality and chaos, including passion, emotions, and instincts.

More important than even these, though, to consider how Nietzsche discussed Dionysus in The Birth of Tragedy, the god represents disorder, intoxication, emotion, ecstasy, and unity, as opposed to the Apollonian principle of individuation. What does wine itself represent, when emptied from the bottle or wine glass and poured into one’s mouth? It represents a dissolution of boundaries (i.e., the bottle or wine glass that gives shape and boundaries to the drink), and in entering the drinker’s body, the wine becomes one with the drinker. The intoxication from the alcoholic drink causes blurred vision and slurred speech–more dissolution of boundaries, more non-differentiation.

Thus, in Henry, we have not only a drunk, but also a law-breaker and a brawler…that is, one who doesn’t respect societal boundaries. His fists cross boundaries to hit the face and body of Eddie (Stallone), the “unoriginal, macho…ladies’ man” bartender he so despises. Henry’s hands cross boundaries to steal a sandwich right out of the hands of a man who’s just paid him to fetch the sandwich, or to break into a neighbour’s apartment to steal his food and wine.

Henry, as a writer, is the Dionysian artist whom Nietzsche saw as having “identified himself with the primal unity, its pain and contradiction” (Nietzsche, page 49). In total unity of everything, there is no ego, no self, no individuation, and no boundary between self and other. The contradiction of identifying self with other is painful, because the ego one is attached to is an illusion, whereas the fragmented existence is the only reality, like that of mutilated Zagreus.

Henry is much like Zagreus after that first fight with Eddie in the alley behind the bar. He’s lying all bloody on the ground, practically left for dead. Later, after being hit several times on the head with a purse held by angry Wanda (Dunaway), he looks at his bloody head in the bathroom mirror and recites improvised poetry, which includes the word, “euphoria.” He’s seeing his Lacanian ideal-I in the reflection, seeing his suffering Zagreus-self as a role model to live up to.

Getting drunk is, as we all know, an escape from all the suffering of the world, a manic defence against life’s depressing realities. Bukowski once described drinking as a kind of slow suicide; it’s a pleasure that ends the pain of life by throwing oneself into death, or at least trying to.

Freud wrote of two opposing ways of achieving pleasure, either through Eros, the life instincts that include libido, or through the death drive (called Thanatos by Freud’s followers), since death brings the organism back into a state of total rest, just as the achievement of libidinal pleasure tries to do. “To die, to sleep, no more,” as Hamlet said.

Similarly, just as the Hindus and Buddhists hope to achieve moksha or nirvana through a dissolution of the self (be that in the form of Atman realizing its identity with Brahman, or in the form of realizing, as the Lacanians do, that the ego is an illusion, that there never was a self to begin with–anattā), so do Dionysian types like Bukowski, Henry, and Wanda attempt a kind of ego death, but through drink, and through all things considered sinful or self-destructive.

In other posts, I have written of the ouroboros as symbolizing the dialectical unity of opposites. The serpent’s biting head is one extreme opposite, and the bitten tail is the other; every intermediate point is corresponded on the relevant place on the serpent’s coiled body, which represents a circular continuum. Thus, heaven or nirvana can be seen at the biting head, for example, and hell can be the bitten tail. The normal spiritual quest goes to the head away from the tail, that is, along the length of the coiled body towards the head; the Dionysian, in contrast, gets to the biting head by passing across the bitten tail. People like Henry are trying to get to heaven by passing through hell first, as Christ did.

This perverse pilgrim’s progress of Henry’s explains why he is content to be left beaten to a pulp in an alley at night, helped by no one. It explains how he can look at his bloody head in a mirror and say, “euphoria,” how he can think that people who never go crazy must lead “truly horrible lives,” that “nobody who could write worth a damn could ever write in peace,” and that “endurance is more important that truth.”

Wanda as a drinker is going through the same pilgrim’s progress. After some heavy drinking one night at home, she is lying in bed and imagining she’s dying. She imagines an angel has come to take her away. She’s saying this to Henry as some beautiful Mahler, the andante moderato third movement from the sixth symphony, is playing. Henry is so convinced she’s dying that he calls some paramedics, who correctly conclude that she’s just drunk.

The point is that with each experience of suffering, the Dionysian pushes himself further, into even greater suffering, a move further towards the ouroboros’ bitten tail in the hopes of finally passing it and reaching the head of paradise. ‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

After being beaten by Eddie several times, Henry keeps coming back for more. He’ll do occasional jobs here and there, since he’s got to have at least a little money to live…and pay for drinks, of course!…but he is loath to get a regular job and join “unoriginal” society. (He’ll only try to get one for Wanda’s sake.) He’s been in jail twelve times, but he keeps breaking laws at every opportunity.

Now, one shouldn’t confuse his coarseness for a lack of culture. He’s a talented writer of poetry and prose, so talented that his writing has touched publisher Tully Sorenson (Krige), whose wealth and intervention in Henry’s life represent where Apollonian order intersects with Dionysian wildness. He listens to classical music, Mahler and Mozart in particular. He hates movies (as did Bukowski, who really needed a financial incentive to write the script for Schroeder’s film!), but he likes Schopenhauer, whose philosophical pessimism, by the way, is a Buddhistic opposition to existence.

His aspiration towards ego death is in such an advanced state that when Tully, on meeting him face-to-face for the first time in his frequented watering hole, asks him who he is–“the eternal question”–and he gives her the eternal answer…he doesn’t know.

Tully’s intervention into his life represents not only the intersection of the Apollonian with the Dionysian: it also represents the intrusion of capitalism into the world of the lumpenproletariat, which Henry so perfectly personifies. She is a wealthy book publisher, wearing fashionable clothes, living in a beautiful, large home, and–let’s face it–hoping to turn a profit off of his talent. Having a basic sense of class consciousness, though, he can’t accept her world, “a cage with golden bars.”

His class consciousness, knowing that “nobody suffers like the poor,” doesn’t mean Henry’s at all motivated to help organize anything like a worker’s revolution. Men like him are why Marx and Engels didn’t see any potential in the lumpenproletariat. Like so many of the poor, Henry feels incapable of pulling himself out of poverty, let alone doing so for the working class in general; hence the wish to escape his misery through drink.

Instead of supporting a vanguard-led revolution, he simply lives as an anarchist would in an otherwise capitalist world. He does what he likes, and has no respect for authority. His stealing of food, as is Wanda’s stealing of corn, is a kind of putting into practice the socialist ideal, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The same can be said of Wanda’s living off of Wilbur’s charity.

Henry’s meeting of Wanda in the bar where we see the Bukowski cameo is serendipitous, for in this meeting we’ll see the beginning of a relationship that will mitigate his misanthropy. His leaving of his dump of an apartment to live in hers, in a way, can also be associated with his Dionysian lifestyle, since as a chthonic god (i.e., of the underworld or of agriculture…recall that corn Wanda wants!), the wine god can also be associated with matrilineal and matrilocal forms of social organization.

Indeed, Henry’s anger at Wanda over her cheating on him isn’t based on some patrilineal notion that he ‘owns’ her: he explicitly acknowledges not owning her. He simply cannot stand that she’s slept with Eddie, of all men!

Henry’s jealousy of her over Eddie, paralleled with her jealousy of him over Tully, has as a coincidence how, when either of them is cheated on, the other has gone off to look for a job. Henry, after coming back to the bar from his job interview, tells Jim (Quinn) that he hates how society tells us we all have to do something, or to be somebody–i.e., to have a job and form one’s identity around it. Similarly, when upon meeting Wanda, Henry asks her what she does, she says, “I drink,” instead of saying a job title. So in betraying themselves to the capitalist system by trying to get jobs, they end up betraying each other sexually.

During Henry’s job interview–with a woman with beautiful, pantyhose-covered legs he ogles and gets a “hard-on” from–he answers “none” to questions about hobbies, religion, education, and even his sex. Once again, he’s demonstrating his Dionysian dissolution of identity…as well as his satyr-like lust.

After Wanda has beaten and bloodied his head with her purse and stormed out of her apartment, he gets back at her by throwing her clothes out the window, once again demonstrating his Dionysian disregard for people’s boundaries.

His Lacanian lack of an ego, combined with his lack of respect for boundaries and his embrace of violence, indicates his experience of the undifferentiated, traumatic, and nonverbal world of the Real. His writing of poetry and prose, however, bring him back to the verbal, social, and cultural world of the Symbolic, as does his making of money from that writing, through Tully’s cashed cheque of $500, which allows him to buy rounds of drinks at the bar to win “all [his] friends,” who will surely give him emotional support for his next fight with Eddie. His moment of “euphoria” in front of Wanda’s bathroom mirror, idealizing himself as an eternal fighter, a Dionysus, is Henry’s experience of the narcissistic Imaginary.

There are other Dionysian personalities in Wanda’s apartment building, mind you, than just her and Henry. Wanda’s next-door neighbours are an old man and woman, the former of whom, it seems, is physically abusing the latter. Henry notes, in near-Buddhistic fashion upon hearing the nastiness next door, that hatred is the only thing that lasts.

Still, even a Dionysian like Henry has a sense of gallantry, and after being fed up with the disturbing fighting he’s been hearing through the wall, decides he wants to help the poor old woman over there, right when he’s finally met and chatted with Tully. He breaks down the neighbours’ door to confront the old man over his vicious treatment of his woman. As it turns out, though, she likes being hurt by her man! It’s a kind of sadomasochistic kink that they’re into, another Dionysian embrace of violence and transgressing of boundaries.

It doesn’t take long for Tully to realize that her Apollonian world is incompatible with Henry’s. Not only can’t she convince him to be “a non-drunk,” and not only can’t she compete as a drinker with him, but she is horrified with his violent nature, gutting the old man with his knife, and driving his car into and pushing the car of two “unoriginal,” publicly kissing lovebirds into an intersection. Henry sees another Eddie in that man, and wants to trespass beyond his boundaries.

It’s an amusing example of projection when rich Tully, annoyed with Henry’s confrontational attitude toward two “romantic” lovebirds in their car, that she calls him “a spoiled asshole” (my emphasis). It’s even more amusing when Henry says that she “hired a dick [Nance] to find an asshole,” my favourite line in the whole film!

One cannot have Dionysus without Maenads, and Henry has one in Wanda. Her jealous fury over Tully having slept with him causes her to have violent designs on the rich, wealthy publisher.

Indeed, Tully’s disapproval of Henry’s wild dipsomania, and her wish to take him out of that unruly world and into her tame, Apollonian one, makes her into a kind of female Pentheus, the king whose banning of Dionysian worship caused him to be lured into the wine god’s sylvan milieu and torn to pieces by the Maenads, as is presented in Euripides‘ tragedy, The Bacchae.

Similarly, Tully feels pulled into Henry’s world, in spite of her opposition to it, and as soon as Wanda smells the perfumed proof of Tully’s closeness to Henry, the hostilities between the two women begin. This tension is building just as that between Henry and Eddie is being rekindled, the latter being annoyed over the former’s tardiness in paying for all the drinks he’s offering everyone in the bar to buy their friendship and backing in the two men’s upcoming fight.

Wanda grabs Tully by the hair and pulls her, screaming, off her barstool, just like a maniacal Maenad. Tully fights back as best she can, even biting Wanda’s hand; but her bourgeois sense of decorum just can’t let her endure in a fight, so she knows she has no hope of taming Henry. She leaves Dionysus in his world, and she returns to that of Apollo.

Now, this ‘catfight‘ won’t be the only entertainment of the night, since Eddie is hungry for revenge after his humiliating loss the last time. Henry is all too happy to oblige, of course, and the film ends with the eternal recurrence of Dionysian violence with which Barfly began.

After all, hatred’s the only thing that lasts, isn’t it?

Analysis of ‘This Is Spinal Tap’

This Is Spinal Tap: A Rockumentary by Martin Di Bergi is a mockumentary film co-written and directed by Rob Reiner (who plays Di Bergi), his feature directorial debut. It stars him, Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer, with Tony Hendra, RJ Parnell, David Kaff, June Chadwick, and a host of celebrities playing small parts throughout the film. Most of the film is improvised by all of the actors, though only Reiner, Guest, McKean, and Shearer are credited with ‘writing the script.’

As a satire on rock musicians and the industry, This Is Spinal Tap was released to critical acclaim, but initially found only moderate commercial success. After being released on VHS, though, it found greater success and a cult following. Many media sources now place it among the best and funniest films ever made.

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

While the foibles of confused, often stoned musicians, as well as incompetent management, are obviously major sources of humour throughout the film, perhaps the most important satirical target is the tension between artistic integrity and creativity on the one hand, and the mechanics of the profit-driven music business on the other. Put another way, capitalism kills art.

A hint at the contradiction is given away right at the beginning of the film, when Di Bergi introduces himself as a filmmaker who makes “a lot of commercials,” then he gives a brief description of an inane ad he filmed, hoping you’ll know which one he’s talking about. This comment in a sense parallels what’s to come, for the fictional hard rock band Spinal Tap would like to be regarded as legitimate artists, in spite of the often vulgar subject matter of their songs, which seem merely to copy whatever the musical clichés of the time happen to be. They’d even like a substantial amount of the American audience simply to know who they are, yet they’re “currently residing in the ‘Where are they now?’ file.”

Speaking of clichés, we get an example of one in humour a few times during these beginning minutes of the film. I’m referring to the Rule of Three in comedy: list three items, the last of which is the surprising, absurd punchline. Di Bergi was impressed with Spinal Tap’s “exuberance, their raw power, and their punctuality.” Then he says he “wanted to capture the sights, the sounds, the smells” of a touring rock band, After that, we hear from some fans why they like Spinal Tap: their music gives a female fan “a lot of energy”; a male fan says, “The metal’s deep”; and a potential groupie, it’s safe to assume, says she likes “the way they dress, the leather.”

It’s noteworthy that Di Bergi says that the US tour we see Spinal Tap on in this rockumentary is their first in almost six years to promote their new album, Smell the Glove, for that long gap in touring is surely among the main reasons, if not the main reason, for waning American interest in the band’s music. Consistent touring and playing of concerts is crucial for promoting a band and maintaining interest in them.

In direct contrast, the success of Rush in the late 1970s and early 80s has been attributed to diligent touring, in spite of the limited radio airplay their long songs got (George-Warren, Romanowski, Pareles, p. 847).

An omen of what’s to come during Spinal Tap’s disastrous American tour is when their limo driver (played by Bruno Kirby) is to pick them up from the airport, and he’s holding a sign saying, “Spinal Pap.” Later, when driving the band around, he tells Di Bergi that the band’s success is “a fad” and “a passing thing.”

The first song we see them play onstage is “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight.” The second verse, after the refrain, deals with wanting to have sex with an underage girl. The references to her being “just four feet” tall, and still having her “baby teeth” I prefer not to take literally for obvious reasons; I assume it’s just comic hyperbole.

Apart from the outrageousness of this naughty humor, I see the blatant sexual references in this song, in “Big Bottom,” and in “Sex Farm” as, apart from the obvious groupie adoration, a comment on how pandering to rock fans’ lewd desires cheapens one’s art in an attempt at increasing the band’s popularity and boosting sales. (I wonder, incidentally, if the singer wanting to get his hands on the underage girl is an oblique reference to stars like Jimmy Page having baby groupies like Lori Maddox, or the singer of the Knack‘s having his teen Sharona.) The irony in all of this pandering is how the business end of Spinal Tap is failing…as, perhaps, it should be.

A satirical crack at how rock performers all too often copy others, in a cheap attempt at a quick leap to success, is when singer/rhythm guitarist David St. Hubbins (McKean) formed a band with lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel (Guest) back in the mid-1960s called The Originals, but who had to change their name–upon learning of another local band with the same name–to “The New Originals.” A Canadian band, back in 1965, released a cover of “Shakin’ All Over” with the band’s name given as “Guess Who?” in the hopes that they’d be associated with the British Invasion (one might think of The Who, whose popularity blossomed the year before), and therefore boost the band’s career.

Eventually, David’s and Nigel’s band would be called The Thamesmen, which sounds derivative of The Merseybeats. One song from this period seems to sum up the whole tension between making music and needing to sell a product: “Gimme Some Money,” or GSM for short. The song is an obvious parody of the 12-bar blues-based rock ‘n’ roll songs of the mid-60s (à la Yardbirds, etc.).

The Thamesmen’s drummer at the time was “Stumpy” Pepys (played by Ed Begley Jr.), who died in a bizarre gardening accident that the police deemed “best left unsolved,” as Nigel says. This death introduces an, indeed, bizarre series of drummers’ deaths that makes one wonder if the other members of the band are guilty of foul play.

Their next drummer, “Stumpy Joe,” died from choking on vomit (someone else?). This joke seems to be inspired by John Bonham’s death by choking on vomit (Jimi Hendrix died similarly). Drummer Peter “James” Bond died, apparently, by spontaneous combustion onstage during a festival at the Isle of Lucy (Was Desi Arnaz there, by chance?). Their current drummer, Mick Shrimpton (Parnell), will explode onstage, too.

My speculation that Tap are secret suspects in these deaths is satirically based on how certain bands, like the Beatles and Genesis, had to go through a number of drummers to find the right one, then the band could go on and succeed. It could be argued that bands like the Beatles and Genesis were great bands right from the start, only they needed better drummers. Genesis went through three drummers (Chris Stewart, John Silver, and John Mayhew, these first and third drummers being fired) before settling on Phil Collins, who of course was crucial in building the band’s cult following during its prog rock phase, then–when he later replaced Peter Gabriel as lead singer–first hired Bill Bruford as touring drummer before settling on Chester Thompson, and the band switched to simple pop and became superstars.

Pete Best, surely the most unlucky man in rock music history, may have gotten a raw deal when he was fired just before the Beatles’ meteoric rise to superstardom, but Ringo Starr was clearly a far better drummer. The killing off of Spinal Tap drummers, while the band is struggling to cement their success, seems to symbolize this revolving door of drummers prior to a band’s striking it big commercially. Best must have felt ‘killed’ by the Beatles when he was fired.

Though Tap is soldiering on in their American tour, playing songs like “Big Bottom” (musically represented by a lot of bottom–David, Nigel, and regular bassist Derek Smalls [Shearer] all playing bass, keyboardist Viv Savage [Kaff] playing synth bass, and Shrimpton hitting a preponderance of tom-toms), the business end is having difficulties. Gigs are being cancelled, and Smell the Glove‘s release is being delayed over its controversial cover.

Bobbi Flekman (played by Fran Drescher), artist relations for Polymer Records, complains to Tap’s manager, Ian Faith (Hendra), about the cover, which shows the sexual degradation of a naked woman on all fours, with a dog collar on her neck and a glove shoved in her face to smell. Neither Ian nor the band can understand what is so offensive about the cover, since they–addled by their sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll hedonistic lifestyle–cannot fathom the idea that women are actually autonomous human beings with hearts and feelings.

Flekman argues that the Beatles were able to release a top-selling album with a cover that was nothing but white. (What’s ignored here, of course, is that The White Album, like any Beatles album, is guaranteed good music, unlike the sleazy nonsense that Tap produces, something trashed by the music critics.)

Next, Flekman discusses the cover with Ian and the band from a business angle. Both Sears and Kmart won’t sell the album because of the cover. Now, the issue isn’t so much the sexism of the cover, but rather how hard it will be to sell the album when so many conservative stores won’t sell one with a “sexy” cover. She argues that they could have pressed the stores to take the album if Tap’s previous work had been more successful. Sexism wouldn’t matter so much if sales were better, apparently. (Of course, the herpes sores on the lips of David, Nigel, and Derek suggest that the three lads have been made to smell the ‘glove,’ as it were, of a certain female.)

In any case, Smell the Glove ends up being The Black Album, though without an interesting cover, be it a sleazy one or not, it is doomed to poor sales. Apparently, a sexist/sexy album cover would have resulted in better sales after all, and that’s part of the satirical point of the movie. Good sales are valued more than good art. “Death sells,” as Ian says in his defence of the ridiculously nondescript death-black cover, but sex sells far better.

Attempts by Spinal Tap to incorporate high art into their music are vitiated by their tasteless expression of lust and their pandering to the lowest common denominator. Examples of this incompatible merging of high and low include Nigel’s pretty piano trilogy in D-minor called “Lick My Love-Pump,” the inexplicable quotation, on Nigel’s lead guitar, from the minuet in Luigi Boccherini‘s String Quintet in E Major in the otherwise meat-and-potatoes hard rock song, “Heavy Duty,” and the pompous way “Rock and Roll Creation” and “Stonehenge” incorporate elements bordering on, if not lapsing into, prog rock (e.g., changes in time signature, guitar leads with an arpeggiated diminished 7th chord…for that ‘classical’ effect, etc.).

As far as the lyrics of Tap’s songs are concerned, Derek’s ludicrous characterization of David and Nigel as “poets,” like Byron or Shelley, would be more accurately described, in the comic achievement of Guest, McKean, Shearer, and Reiner, as brilliantly cretinous. In a similar vein, Derek absurdly praises “Sex Farm” as taking “a sophisticated view of the idea of sex…on a farm.” All of this, on the musical and lyrical level, satirizes the contradictions between aspiring to higher forms of art and pandering to vulgar tastes for the sake of making more money.

Connected with this satire of the incompatibility of higher art with vulgar tastes–the incongruity of artistic freedom with churning out a product that sells–is the contradiction between musicians who have an obvious spark of talent and drug users’ dimwittedness. Note Nigel wanting to demonstrate a guitar’s sustain without even plucking a note; or his belief that the number eleven is what makes an amp louder than ten; and–upon realizing that making a woman the sexual submissive, rather than doing so with the boys in the band, is what was so offensive about the original Smell the Glove cover–Nigel’s and David’s musing of the “fine line between stupid and clever.” In spite of Bill Hicks‘s insistence that great music was made by people really high on drugs, I don’t think I’m being controversial in saying that drugs’ overuse doesn’t help with normal mental functioning–remember what happened to Syd.

David’s girlfriend, Jeanine Pettibone (Chadwick), comes to see him, and Nigel’s nose is out of joint. Ian won’t be happy with what he sees as her meddling, either. Her arrival, which coincides with that of Smell the Glove, or The Black Album, is significant, for her involvement is a parody of Yoko Ono’s involvement with the Beatles, right around the time when The White Album came out, from which John Lennon said, “the break-up of the Beatles can be heard on that album.” The unfair blame put on Ono for the break-up of the Beatles is parodied and paralleled by the sexist animosity Nigel and Ian shower on Jeanine, since Tap comes dangerously close to breaking up themselves.

Tap’s cheap pandering to whatever the musical trends of the time happen to be is reflected in the chameleonic changes in their style over the years with both the Thamesmen and Tap. After their mid-60s blues-rock pastiche, “Gimme Some Money,” the Thamesmen switched to psychedelic rock with “Cups and Cakes,” reminiscent of songs like Strawberry Alarm Clock‘s “Incense and Peppermints” and the Beatles’ “Penny Lane.”

When Nigel and David changed the band’s name to Spinal Tap, the pandering to current trends continued with “(Listen to the) Flower People,” just in time for the Summer of Love. And just as Black Sabbath shifted away from the peace-and-love hippie scene, preferring dark, Satanic themes, so did Tap replace its hippie audience with a heavy metal fanbase, as can be heard in the Tony Iommi style of the evil tritone chord progression opening “Rock and Roll Creation,” over which Nigel adds Iommi-style blues licks.

Though the fictional discography of Tap would date the album, The Gospel According to Spinal Tap (or Rock ‘n’ Roll Creation, with its cover design parodying Led Zeppelin’s Physical Graffiti), in 1977, when punk rock’s and new wave’s return to simple, three-to-four minute songs made the more pompous arrangements of the early 70s anachronistic, I for that reason would date the album back about five years earlier.

Similarly, I’d date “Big Bottom” about ten years after the given release date of 1970, and “Tonight I’m Gonna Rock You Tonight” at least five to seven years later than the given 1974 date (after all, a song with similarly controversial subject matter, by the musically talented but despicable Ted Nugent, came out–“Jailbait“–in 1981). The release of “Sex Farm” in 1980 sounds about right, since its lyrics’ lewd subject matter sounds like a parody of AC/DC’s cock rock lyrics.

All of this pandering to the popular tastes of the time, a dumbing-down intensified with the tasteless lewdness of the lyrics, reinforces the film’s satirical targeting of music for money, a sacrificing of art on the gold altar of capitalism.

The cheap appealing to sexuality continues with our understanding that there are “armadillos” in the tight trousers of David, Nigel, and Derek…though in the embarrassing airport metal detector scene, we seem to know why Derek’s surname is what it is. Just as Tap’s artistic aspirations and pretensions are phony, so is their swaggering sex appeal.

Indeed, the band’s career is less about art than it is about partying, as we can see on the face of Viv Savage during Tap’s performance of “Heavy Duty.” (Seriously, moviegoers must be wondering how to get in contact with the wasted keyboardist’s drug dealer–Viv’s obviously on really good shit! Is his dealer still alive? Hope springs eternal!)

Problems at the business end continue when a planned album signing of Smell the Glove in a record store results in no fans showing up. Ineffectual Polymer Records promoter Artie Fufkin (played by Paul Shaffer) blames himself, but the problem goes far beyond him and even Tap’s similarly incompetent manager. The satirical point behind the film is that a band so dedicated to pandering, instead of to music as art, doesn’t deserve to be successful.

The comedy of This Is Spinal Tap hits so close to home–“It’s funny ’cause it’s true!”–that a number of rock stars (e.g., Steven Tyler) who saw the film failed to see the humour in it. Being lost backstage at a gig, and being unable to find the stage, is a common problem for rockers, which should be easy to understand when one considers how a band goes to so many different gigs, all for such brief times, that they can’t be expected to know the–I can imagine–often labyrinthine structure of the halls in these buildings.

Just as John Lennon allowed Yoko Ono to give her input during the Beatles’ recording sessions, thus angering the other three through Lennon’s breaking of the rule of not allowing girlfriends or wives in, so does David allow Jeanine to interfere, thus annoying Nigel and Ian. Her absurd idea of putting makeup on the band members’ faces, to represent their astrological signs, is an obvious sendup of Kiss.

The very song, “Stonehenge,” is a great poking of fun at the growing “Englishness” of pop and rock since the British Invasion, as is the American comedy trio of Guest, McKean, and Shearer doing British accents (just as, on the other side of the coin, it was common for British rockers to be “fake Americans”. That would explain Nigel’s pronunciation of “semi” and Derek’s “zipper”. Jeanine says “airplane” and not “aeroplane”, and pronounces exit ‘egg-sit’ instead of the British ‘ex-it’).

This mocking of British pomposity is augmented not only through the inclusion of a Stonehenge monument onstage, but its careless measurement of 18 inches instead of the correct 18 feet. Nigel’s playing of a mandolin towards the end of the disastrous performance–with the miniature monument in danger of being trampled by a nearby dancing dwarf–adds to the pomposity in its implied parody of folk rock moments by bands like Jethro Tull.

Another example of Spinal Tap aiming for high artistry, but failing hilariously, is in Nigel’s guitar solos. The example given shows him ‘shredding‘ with his left and right hands so badly out of sync, it’s as if the distance between them were as wide as that of the Grand Canyon. Even more absurd is the self-indulgent noise he makes, a parody of Jimmy Page’s bowed guitar (see here, starting at about 11:30, for an example), not with a bow, but with a violin!

Ian’s quitting Tap can be compared with the death of Brian Epstein, since with these managers out of the picture, the bands they were holding together would then begin to fall apart, as we see when Nigel suddenly quits out of frustration at the Air Force base gig.

Ian’s and Nigel’s misogynistic attitude towards Jeanine’s growing involvement in the band’s affairs is topped by David’s saying that her help won’t be compensated for with any remuneration, an interesting irony considering how henpecked he is by his girlfriend.

More satiric examples of rock’s pretentious attempts at high art come with Tap’s performance of “Jazz Odyssey” in front of a festival crowd, who have no patience to hear a tedious and poorly-planned improvisational jam. Later, when it really seems as though Tap is soon to end, David and Derek discuss a few ‘high art’ projects they haven’t had time to do because of their full-time commitment to the band: a musical based on Jack the Ripper (Saucy Jack), and David’s acoustic guitar pieces played with the London Philharmonic. It’s easy to see how they “envy” themselves with such absurd ideas that will never get off the ground.

With the band’s future seeming moribund, Nigel reappears before the next gig with news from Ian that “Sex Farm” is on the charts in Japan. When no one else will have Tap, Japan will save them. So Nigel is back in the band, and they all fly to the Far East.

During a resulting concert there, we see a few examples of racist and sexist humour, the kind one wouldn’t think filmmakers would be able to get away with today. First, Japanese fans in the audience are all seen moving their arms, with pointed fingers, in the air to the beat, suggesting the Asian stereotype of mass conformity. After this, we see at the show that Ian has returned as manager, and Jeanine is sitting with a book and keeping her mouth shut as he stands by her, watching with his cricket bat, as if ready to whack her with it if she dares open her mouth.

I’m guessing that–apart from there being plenty of shots of the Japanese fans enjoying the show most individualistically after the stereotyped shot, and apart from our understanding that Ian is no less incompetent a manager than Jeanine (though as a professional, he shouldn’t be, while her inexperience makes her mistakes perfectly understandable)–the racism and sexism are deflated elsewhere in the film through its acknowledgement of these issues as serious problems (i.e., the original cover design for Smell the Glove, and Di Bergi asking if Tap’s music, with its mostly white audience, is racist…not so if Tap is now big in Japan!).

Another example of the film’s satirizing of capitalism’s degenerative effect on art is David’s purchasing of a set of tapes called The Namesake Series, on which famous people with the same surnames as those of famous authors read their books. The reciters get increasingly absurd in their incongruity with the writers they’re reading (i.e., McLean Stevenson reading Robert Louis Stevenson, and Julius Erving reading Washington Irving).

As the end credits are rolling, Di Bergi asks each member of Tap what he’d do if he wasn’t in rock-and-roll. Derek says he’d work with children (Doesn’t he already?). David says he’d be “a full-time dreamer.” Shrimpton is fine without rock-and-roll, as long as there are still sex and drugs in his life. Viv Savage says he’d “get stupid” and make a fool of himself in public. Nigel says he’d sell hats.

Note how none of them say they’d take their creative instincts into other avenues of expression. (In contrast, when Captain Beefheart and Grace Slick retired from music, they focused on the visual arts.) Without rock-and-roll, and their attempts to pander to vulgar tastes to make money off of it, these five guys would either have a regular, mundane job selling a product or service (I assume Derek would become a grade school teacher), or just be a wasted slacker or a rake.

These seem to be the options that a capitalist society offers the working class: as an artist, be a panderer; otherwise, do a dull nine-to-five job (if you like the hours), or be a ‘loser.’

The market is so free, isn’t it?

Analysis of ‘Messiah of Evil’

Messiah of Evil, or Dead People, is a 1974 supernatural horror film written, produced, and directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz. It stars Marianna Hill and Michael Greer, with Anitra Ford, Royal Dano, Elisha Cook Jr., and Joy Bang.

Though a lesser-known film, Messiah of Evil has been generally well-received. It’s wonderfully atmospheric, with beautiful, vividly colourful visuals. It’s been described as “unsettling” by Nick Spacek of Starburst Magazine, having given the film a score of ten out of ten. It was ranked #95 on IndieWire‘s 200 Best Horror Movies of All-Time; they said, “it’s full of iconic and memorable scenes that recall to mind some of George A. Romero’s best work.”

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

As with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Messiah of Evil does a subtle critique of capitalism. We see a satirical commentary on consumerism in the supermarket scene, with the ghouls eating all the meat in the meat section, then feeding off of Laura (Ford). We’re reminded of a similar satire on consumerism in Dawn of the Dead, with the zombies haunting the shopping mall.

Recall that this film came out in 1974, when the same manifestations of political upheaval happened that inspired much of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which came out the same year and also dealt with cannibalism. Early on in Messiah of Evil, we see Arletty (Hill) drive her car to a Mobil gas station, giving us an association with oil in the early 70s, when the oil crisis happened, an issue I discussed in my analysis of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Note the tension of the Mobil gas station attendant (played by Charles Dierkop), who is first seen shooting at someone (or some animal, as he seems to claim to have been shooting at). Then, when the creepy albino truck driver arrives (played by Bennie Robinson), the attendant, knowing how dangerous this albino is (with the dead victims in his truck, one of whom has a slit throat and was the chased victim seen at the beginning of the film), urgently presses Arletty to drive away without need of paying for her gas with her credit card. Finally, the attendant is killed by the ghouls of Point Dume (an obvious pun on doom), where she is headed to find her father.

My point is that the 1973 oil crisis marked the end of the post-war economic expansion era, which included welfare capitalism, strong unions, Keynesian government intervention to smooth over economic crises, and a strong push for progressive social reforms. The end of this era also meant the beginning of a reactionary, neoliberal push to the right; these trends have continued unswervingly over the past forty to fifty years, leading to the extreme income inequality and endless imperialist wars we’ve been suffering these years.

The evil spreading from Point Dume to the rest of the world, as is understood to be happening by the end of the film, can be seen to allegorize how neoliberalism has engulfed the world by now. The “messiah of evil,” that is, the antichrist, or as he’s called in the film, “the dark stranger,” appeared a hundred years before the events of this movie, when he returns; so he first appeared around 1873-1874, and has returned around 1973-1974. His first appearance would have been around the beginning of the Gilded Age, a time of terrible income inequality (the “gilding” being a gold covering of a far less valuable material, symbolizing wealth masking poverty); and his second appearance coincides with the beginnings of neoliberalism and our new Gilded Age.

Note how the gas station attendant tells Arletty that Point Dume is a “piss-poor” little town. Contrast this poverty with evidently rich Thom (Greer), in his nice suits and his hedonist mini-harem of women, Laura and Toni (Bang), soon to be replaced, it might seem, with Arletty.

One critic of the film, Glenn Kay, complained that the lead characters’ motivations are never explained in a satisfactory way, especially those of Thom; Kay also said that the titular Messiah is never properly identified. What Kay seems to have missed, though, is what is amply implied, but deliberately not explicitly revealed: Thom is the Messiah of Evil. In the flashback sequences, Greer plays the “dark stranger”; if one looks carefully at him in those shadowy scenes, one can recognize Greer’s tall, thin build, with the broad shoulders, in the black coat and hat. In an interview (<<bottom page), Greer even said he was soon to play “the devil’s son” in this movie.

So the hell that is brought to this town, and from thence to the rest of the world, is the evil of the rich, taking from the poor (Thom is wealthy, coming to the “piss-poor” town of Point Dume.). Recall 1 Timothy 6:10. Also note that the Beast came out of the sea (Revelation 13:1), just as the dark stranger comes out of the sea on a night with a blood-red moon.

In her search for her father, Arletty comes to a motel room and meets Thom, Laura, and Toni. Thom is listening to a dirty, poor old drunk named Charlie (Cook Jr.) tell the history of his birth, and of Point Dume. A hint as to Thom’s unsavoury character is how, instead of answering Arletty’s questions about her father, he rudely tells her to close the door, so he can continue to listen to Charlie’s story without any interrupting noise. Thom is fascinated to learn about Point Dume’s legendary history of the “blood moon” and “dark stranger” because he is intimately connected to them.

Arletty discovers a diary her father has written about his disturbing experiences in the town. His art, often black and white images of men in suits (suggestive of businessmen, or capitalists), reflects the change in his mental state, and like the diary, seems to be an attempt, ultimately failing, at therapy through expressing his pain. There seems to be estrangement between him and his daughter; he’s warned her never to come to Point Dume.

Thom, Laura, and Toni come to stay in her father’s home, where she is, for the three have not only been kicked out of their original motel for their questionable behaviour (we learn that Charlie has been killed), but no other hotel or motel will take them in. Since Thom is the antichrist, the refusal to him and his ‘groupie’ friends of accommodations seems like a Satanic version of the Christmas story, when pregnant Mary and Joseph couldn’t find an inn to stay in for the night, and had to make do in a manger.

Since I am linking Thomas with not only the devil, but also class conflict (he’s a Portuguese-American aristocrat), it might seem odd that he would have difficulty finding accommodations. Similarly, towards the end of the movie, he is fending off the ghouls with Arletty. I think the point is that Thom is hiding his true identity from her, because he has special uses for her…so they don’t kill her in the end. Part of the power of evil is how we have difficulty identifying it.

To give explanatory context to the seeming contradictions discussed in the previous paragraph, consider a few quotes by Baudelaire and Ken Ammi about the Devil either supposedly not existing or being the good guy. Similarly, 2 Corinthians 11:14 says that “Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” Indeed, in dialectical contrast to the black clothes of the dark stranger, Thom is always wearing light-coloured suits.

Furthermore, while wealthy Thom is largely presented as if he were one of the sympathetic protagonists of the film, many billionaires in today’s world have postured as if they’re friends of the common people: Trump, Soros, Musk, etc., and many of the common people are fooled by this charade. Just as we shouldn’t be fooled by these narcissists in real life, though, neither should we be taken in by Thom, as the mindless ghouls are. Arletty is right, towards the climax of the film, to trust her initial instincts and stab Thom in the arm.

Another example of Thom’s unsavoury character comes out when it’s obvious to Toni and especially Laura that he aims to seduce Arletty. One of the key problems plaguing all human relationships is the jealous competition over who one loves the most…me, or my rival(s)? The prototype of this problem is discovered in the Oedipal conflict over whether the desired parent loves the child, his or her other parent, or his or her siblings. Laura is so disgusted with Thom that she leaves…for this, there will be fatal consequences.

She foolishly chooses to go to town that night by foot. On the way, the albino truck driver drives by and offers her a ride, which she foolishly accepts. He’s playing the music of Wagner (specifically, the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin), whose name he incorrectly pronounces the English way (actually, an innocent goof made by actor Robinson, but one allowed by Huyck, who found it amusing), instead of the proper German way. Allowing the error in turn allows me to indulge in an interpretation of it: I see in the albino’s mispronunciation his limited, working-class education.

Some interesting associations can be made about the driver and his odd choice to play Wagner’s music in his truck (as opposed to listening to, say, pop music, or R and B). He’s an albino African-American, playing the music of a composer who was an old Nazi favourite. The linking of a ‘white’ black man with music associated with Nazism might make one think of Dr. Josef Mengele, who did such things as alter his patients’ eye colour to make them ‘more acceptable Aryans.’ Recall also that fascism exists to protect the interests of the capitalist class against socialism in part by turning the working class (people like the albino trucker) against the left and towards the right, as Trump did with his followers.

Beyond these political implications are other creepy things about the truck driver. His albino whiteness reminds us of that of Moby-Dick, especially in the chapter, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” in which it’s discussed how frighteningly unnatural the colour white can be. Finally, the disgusting fellow likes to eat living rats!

Laura naturally doesn’t want to stay in the truck of this freak, so she gets out and continues on foot to the town. She ends up in a Ralph’s supermarket, where she sees ghouls in the meat section eating all the meat like a bunch of gluttons. A number of the men among them, in suits and ties, remind us of the black-and-white men in the paintings of Arletty’s father, which gives us a clue as to what he, in his physically and mentally deteriorating condition, has been obsessed with.

The feasting ghouls all look over at Laura, and deciding that her flesh must be much tastier than what they’re currently eating, get up and run after her. Terrified, she runs, but can’t get out in time to save herself.

A key to understanding how this film is a critique, however subtle, of capitalism is seeing how the ghouls eating the meat in the supermarket, then eating Laura, is symbolic of consumerism. Note that in this feeding, we have a pun on consumer, as both eater and as excessive buyer of goods and services.

One way the capitalist class retains its power over us is by keeping us mindlessly buying things–rather like zombies–so we fill their wallets with money, instead of thinking about how to change the system. Volume One of Das Kapital begins with a discussion of the commodity, the basic unit of our economic system, seen as either a use-value or an exchange value, traded in for money. When our buying and selling focuses on only the things involved in the transactions (money and commodities), rather than the people involved, what results is what Marx called the fetishism of the commodity, which exacerbates alienation.

We get a sense, during the supermarket scene, of this excessive preoccupation with things, with products, over people when we see the greedy eating of not only the meat in the meat section, but of Laura, too, who is thus reduced to meat, a commodification of her body, as will later happen to Toni in the movie theatre scene.

Feminists have often written and spoken of how women’s bodies are commodified and exploited through such things as prostitution, stripping, and pornography. The cannibalistic eating of Laura, whom Thom has described as a model (Ford herself was a model), and later of Toni, can thus be seen as symbolic rapes.

Violence against women, as seen in the cannibalistic eating of Laura and Toni, as well as violence against the poor, as with the killing of Charlie, is an example of what I’ve described elsewhere as “punching down.” The capitalist class wouldn’t be able to keep its power over us if we “punched up” instead. We buy the capitalists’ products (we consume them), and we hurt each other (consuming each other, metaphorically speaking), instead of rising up in revolution.

This punching down connects the black albino listening to Wagner with the zombie-like ghouls eating meat, then eating Laura. Fascism is about punching down–that is, attacking foreigners, people of colour, leftists, homosexuals, etc.–to ingratiate oneself with the ruling class, or in a symbolic sense, making oneself ‘whiter,’ more class collaborationist, more pro-capitalist.

Another example of this film pushing the marginalized into the mainstream, that is, making them conform, is the choice of Greer to play Thom. Greer was known not only as one of the first openly gay actors to appear in major Hollywood movies, but also to act in early films that dealt with gay themes, like The Gay Deceivers and Fortune and Men’s Eyes. So in Messiah of Evil, we have in Greer a publicly-known gay actor not only playing a straight man in Thom, but also playing a womanizer.

On a comparable note, Thom as the antichrist is portrayed throughout the film as a normal man–that is, his evil is normalized. We wouldn’t know he was the dark stranger, a descendant of him, or his reincarnation–whichever–if we weren’t paying close attention. The same can be said about how neoliberalism has been insinuated into our lives over the past forty years without most of us even noticing this insidious evil–it has also been normalized for us. The bogus promise of economic prosperity that the “free market” is supposed to provide is an evil that’s been presented as a messianic cure to the ills of “big government” by such demagogic economists has Milton Friedman.

As for Toni, we can sense that her days, if not her hours, are numbered when she sings the famous first verse of “Amazing Grace,” but stops singing conspicuously at “I once was lost, but now…” once Thom enters the area. Like Laura, Toni is getting sick of Point Dume and wants to leave. She can’t even get entertainment from the radio, since it isn’t receiving any stations. Thom suggests that the bored girl go see a movie (he’ll have Arletty to himself that way).

Her in the movie theatre is yet another example of the film doing a social commentary on consumerism, our tendency to pay for pleasure instead of dealing with our relationship problems, such as her jealousy over his preference of beautiful Arletty. Thus we see in both Toni’s jealousy and her retreat to the movies a reinforcement of social alienation.

She watches a Western called Gone With the West, an indulgently violent parody of the genre. The zombie-like ghouls enter later in a large group; their mindless watching of the film is a social commentary on how so many of us do the same thing–pay to be dazzled by the media, which is part of the superstructure influenced by (and influencing) the base of society, or its means and relations of production.

It doesn’t take long for her to realize she has unwelcome company in the theatre, right from the sight of a ghoul staring at her just before the lights go out and the cowboy film starts. She snaps out of the lull the movie experience has put her in, and the ghouls notice her awakening. Then they, including the albino, go after her and indulge in more cannibalism. It’s as though they were punishing her for having woken up and begun thinking for herself.

Another way the capitalist class keeps us under their control is through that superstructure described above–in this particular instance, the media (movies, TV, the radio, the news,…and in today’s world, social media). The superstructure’s media wasn’t nearly as bad back in the early 70s as it is now–with 90% of American media controlled by only six corporations, who thus have control over most of our access to information (which is now extended to a global network)–but it was bad enough back then to deserve a social critique in Messiah of Evil.

I consider this film to be quite prophetic–whether intentionally so or not–through its symbolism and allegory, it being a film that came out during the huge political upheavals of the early 1970s (the Watergate cover-up, defeat in Vietnam, racial conflict, and economic convulsions), these being upheavals some of whose repercussions are being felt in full flower today; I discussed such prophetic, if you will, filmmaking in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (link above).

The sickness that takes over the people of Point Dume, each with a bleeding eye, can be seen in the context of my capitalist allegory to symbolize how the mindset needed to keep us all subjugated to the new neoliberal order has negatively affected our mental health. We see the world in pain, for we ourselves are in pain–we weep blood instead of tears.

Along with this growing sickness, the ghouls all act as an undifferentiated group, with no sense of individuality. They go to the beach at night, looking up at the moon (waiting for it to turn blood-red) in collective expectation of the return of the dark stranger, an act called “The Waiting.” Similarly, working class people today, far from experiencing the liberation promised after the disastrous dissolution of the Soviet Union, find themselves passively accepting worse and worse jobs, with low pay, reduced benefits, etc. They feel like mere cogs in a machine, pressured to work harder and harder, alienated from their work. The limited range of opinions allowed in the media result in conformist thinking among the masses, just like those ghouls watching the cowboy movie with blank faces.

There are moments when the film is outright surreal, such as when insects come out of Arletty’s mouth. This sense of the surreal adds to the disturbing atmosphere of the movie, and it can explain certain aspects of the plot that don’t seem to be properly developed or explained.

An example of such an unexplained moment, one that seems contradictory to my presentation of Thom as the real villain of the film, is when he, walking the streets of downtown Point Dume alone at night, is briefly chased and attacked by ghouls. The shots of the chase and attack are presented in a choppy way, as jump cuts, suggesting a dream-like quality, as if Thom has merely imagined the attack.

No bad person believes he’s evil; the villains of history have always imagined that their atrocities were meant ultimately for the greater good. These bad people also narcissistically imagine themselves to be the victim, rather than the victimizer…so why would Thom be any different, in wanting to associate himself with the real victims of the story? Recall in this connection what I said above about how the powerful and wealthy like to be associated with the common people, sympathizing with their interests. Thom’s imagining of himself being attacked can be understood in this light.

After Thom gets away from his attackers (imagined, as I see them, for surely they’d still be giving him chase if they were real), he stops to catch his breath, and a poor woman appears, begging him for help from the ghouls. He turns away, especially when he sees her eye bleeding. Of course he won’t help her: he’s the messiah of evil who is bringing on these evils, and he wants her to complete her transformation into another ghoul.

Arletty’s eye is bleeding, too, and like her father in his deteriorating condition, she’s beginning to cut herself. It’s around this time that she sees herself in the mirror, with a bug on her tongue, and she vomits out a host of insects.

Two police arrive on the streets, where Thom is wandering, to deal with the ghouls. One of the cops is bleeding from an eye, and the other shoots him in the neck and tries to run away. The ghoul cop then shoots him dead. In the context of my capitalist allegory, it’s easy to see how a cop could be spontaneously bleeding from an eye and becoming a ghoul: cops have historically existed to serve the ruling class; even if a small minority of cops, like the non-ghoul cop, are good people at heart, it’s the whole system of law enforcement that they work for that is the problem.

Something needs to be said about the origin of the “dark stranger.” He was a former minister (hence, his status as “messiah”) and a member of the Donner Party, who were a group of American pioneers migrating to California in a wagon train from the Midwest. During the winter of 1846-1847, they were snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains; some of the migrants resorted to cannibalism to survive, and two Native American guides were deliberately killed to eat the bodies. Our dark stranger seems to have derived his taste for human flesh from this grisly episode, and in Point Dume, he’s been spreading his “religion” with cannibalism as, if you will, a new form of the Eucharist.

It’s interesting to consider the murder and cannibalistic eating of the Native Americans in the light of not only the film but also of the migration of the pioneers out west. The migration is an example of settler-colonialism, associated with the genocide of the natives. It’s also related to imperialism, the theft of others’ land to exploit it and thus enrich oneself with it. Settler-colonialism and imperialism in the modern world are also manifestations of capitalism, which further solidifies the connection of Messiah of Evil with capitalism.

Arletty has been told that her father’s body was found on the beach, him having been building a huge sculpture there, but the tide, it seems, collapsed it on top of him. She doesn’t believe it was really his body on the beach, though, because the coarse hands of the body weren’t the same as those of her father’s. It’s later confirmed that her father is still alive, for he returns to his home to face Arletty. His transformation into ghoul is also just about complete.

He tells her the history of the dark stranger, of how he attacked and ate some of the flesh of a hunter who, as he lay dying, tried to warn others of his killer. They thought him delirious, just as many are thought crazy who try to warn people today of the evils of neoliberalism, which has come “to a world tired and disillusioned, a world looking back to old gods and old dark ways, our world.”

Remembering Charlie’s warning, she has to set her ghoul father on fire to destroy him. In his wild mania, he spreads blue paint all over his face and hands; it’s as if he’s making a desperate attempt to be at one with his art to treat his growing mental illness. Her being forced to commit such a violent, fiery patricide can be seen, in the context of my capitalist allegory, to represent how neoliberalism has exacerbated modern alienation, in this case, alienation in the family.

Thom returns to the house the next morning. His frown at seeing her father’s charred corpse can easily be seen as his sadness at the sight of one of his ghouls–his children–killed. Other ghouls are waiting on the glass roof to attack; for all we know, he’s summoned them there. She, screaming in her traumatized state, attacks him with the shears she used on her father before burning him, cutting a big gash in Thom’s arm.

After he lies in bed, resting a while and recovering from his wound, the ghouls on the glass roof break in, fall into the room, and attack him and Arletty. He helps her fight them off, though in a minimal way, and they run out to the beach. Again, all of this would seem to make him look like a sympathetic character, but I suspect his intention is really just to lure her out to the beach, and his disappearance in the water is to lead to an at least implied plot twist, in which he later reappears from the water as the dark stranger with the appearance of the blood red moon.

As he and Arletty are running together along the shore, we hear Phillan Bishop’s eerie synthesizer ostinato in 17/8 time (subdivided 4+4+4+5). The two briefly embrace like lovers: after all, this is part of Thom’s attempt at a physical and spiritual seduction of her.

The ghouls start to congregate at the beach, staring out into the ocean as they’ve done every night, waiting for the blood moon and the dark stranger. Thom and Arletty go out into the water in an attempt to escape the ghouls by boat. He seems weakened from his arm wound, making it hard for him to swim.

According to the Wikipedia article on the film, Thom drowns; but I don’t think that’s what’s really happened to him, though Arletty seems led to believe this was his fate. As I said above, he merely disappears to get ready for his return as the dark stranger, the Beast, the antichrist (Revelation 13:3-4).

The ghouls get her out of the water at night, but they don’t kill her. They dress her in a pretty gown to offer her to the returning dark stranger at night, under the blood moon and among the ghouls’ bonfires. She’s too horrified, I’d say, to say Thom’s name upon recognizing him. Instead, we get a loud, hysterical scream from her.

She’s taken to an insane asylum, and like her father, she takes up painting, presumably as a kind of art therapy to soothe her madness. Trying to warn the world about the coming evil causes one to think she’s insane. Indeed, this evil is so traumatizing, so crazy-making, that all she can do is scream…yet no one will listen.

The film ends as it began, with a return to a shot in a hall in the insane asylum, with light in the middle, where Arletty can be seen wandering, and dark shadows around the edges of the shot. Just as the dark stranger has returned, so has this shot from the beginning returned, a coming full circle…just as the Gilded Age has returned to us today.

We hear her distraught narration, her trying to warn people of the spreading sickness that makes one a ghoul. Similarly today, some of us try to warn people of the growing sickness caused by neoliberalism and imperialism–the alienation and its attendant mental illness, its pressure to conform to today’s ways, as the ghouls all conform to the grisly ways of the messiah of evil. Yet, just as no one will hear Arletty’s screams, no one will listen to our cries of help.

“No one will hear you SCREAM!!!”

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

Child’s Play is a 1988 horror film directed by Tom Holland, written by him, Don Mancini (whose story the film is based on), and John Lafia. It stars Catherine Hicks, Chris Sarandon, and Brad Dourif, with Alex Vincent, Dinah Manoff, and Jack Colvin.

Child’s Play gained a cult following, and its commercial success spawned a media franchise including seven sequels (with a TV series), comic books, and a 2019 reboot. It won a Saturn Award for Best Actress (Hicks), and was nominated for three–Best Horror Film, Best Performance by a Younger Actor (Vincent), and Best Writing (Holland, Lafia, and Mancini).

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

There is a subtle critique of capitalism in Child’s Play. We see a stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots, that is, people like Karen Barclay (Hicks) and her son, six-year-old Andy (Vincent), on the one hand, living in their nice apartment, and the homeless, one of whom (played by Juan Ramirez) has sold her a Good Guy doll.

The doll itself is a commodity sold to “bring…a lot of joy” to the child who plays with it. The Good Guy doll, especially when the soul of Charles Lee Ray, or “Chucky” (Dourif), is in the doll, is a literally fetishized commodity. One buys the commodity as a complete, finished product, without any sense of the workers who made it, just as one might worship an idol, believing in the god inhabiting the carved wood or sculpted statue, without any thought as to who made the idol. Chucky is thus like a pagan idol, with a spirit animating it, adored by Andy the idolater, because the lonely, alienated boy has no real, living friend to play with. In commodity fetishism, there’s a preoccupation between things (money and merchandise), not between people, hence its relationship with alienation.

As far as the opposition of those with shelter and the homeless is concerned, that opposition is in potential danger of being erased, in Karen’s case, as a consequence of her walking out on the job during her shift to buy the doll from the homeless peddler. Her manager, Walter Criswell (played by Alan Wilder), pesters her about walking off on the job, and implies a threat of firing her if she won’t agree to covering a sick worker’s shift…on Andy’s birthday. In this conflict, we see an example of worker alienation, which is adding to the Barclay family’s alienation as already discussed in lonely little Andy (whose father died).

Another thing should be mentioned about the homeless, as seen in the peddler in particular: they aren’t portrayed sympathetically. The peddler tries to suck as much money as he can out of Karen (but isn’t that what capitalists do?), on two occasions: his selling her the doll, and his exploiting her need to get information about where he found the doll, even to the point of wanting a sexual favour from the pretty woman in exchange for that information.

This associating of the homeless with criminals can be interpreted in two ways: either it’s a 1980s Reaganite lack of sympathy for the poor, or it links the peddler’s desperation with that of Charles Lee Ray. The frustrations of being poor often have a way of making people mean; they either try to get as much money out of better-off people, like Karen, as they can, or sexual frustration can make them act like creeps, as the peddler does to her; or the detrimental effect of capitalism on one’s mental health can drive one to commit violent crimes, as it drives Charles Lee Ray to become a sociopathic serial killer.

His passing of his soul into a doll represents a classic case of projective identification, a Kleinian concept that goes beyond the ordinary projection of imagining one’s own traits in others, but instead one succeeds in putting those traits into someone else (or in the case of the doll, something else). What’s more, the bad guy puts himself into a Good Guy, in the form of a voodoo incantation.

There is a lot of duality in this film. In particular, there are many pairings: Charles Lee Ray and Chucky, Andy and Chucky, Karen and her friend, Maggie Peterson (Manoff), Charles Lee Ray and his double-crossing partner-in-crime, Eddie Caputo (played by Neil Giuntoli), Detective Mick Norris (Sarandon) and his partner, Detective Jack Santos (played by Tommy Swerdlow), and Chucky with the voodoo doll of John “Dr. Death” Bishop (played by Raymond Oliver).

These pairings are generally parallels and/or opposites of each other, in some way: a bad guy in a Good Guy doll, a sweet little boy who physically resembles (sometimes even dresses like) his doll with the killer’s soul in it, his nice mother and his cranky baby-sitting substitute mom, two criminals, two cops, and a victimizer doll vs a victim’s doll. These parallels/opposites remind us of dialectical realities.

Because Karen has to cover the sick worker’s shift on her son’s birthday, her friend Maggie will babysit the boy that night. She’s rather cranky about Andy getting to bed without letting Chucky watch the news to know the latest about the police’s manhunt for Eddie Caputo, the partner of the presumed-dead Charles Lee Ray, and someone he wants to kill for having driven away and abandoned him when Norris was chasing them at the beginning of the film.

Maggie’s perceived crankiness as Karen’s substitute puts her in the role of what Melanie Klein called the bad mother, as opposed to Karen as the good mother. Maggie not letting the ‘boys’ stay up is frustrating to them, whereas Karen going all out to buy the doll for Andy makes her the good mother, who strives never to fail in pleasing her son. These women are thus like the “bad breast” that won’t give the baby milk, versus the “good breast” that will feed the baby.

This splitting of the women into two moms is a defence mechanism that Andy also does, in a symbolic way, on himself, with his understanding that Chucky is alive. Just as there is a good mom and a bad one, so is there a good boy and a bad ‘boy.’ Splitting as a defence mechanism is thus aided by another defence mechanism, projection. Andy is projecting his bad, hateful side into Chucky (in a symbolic sense), just as Charles Lee Ray has literally done.

It’s interesting that much of the doll’s violence and terrorizing happen in the apartment, with Maggie or Karen as the victims. We’re reminded of the last, and best, episode of Trilogy of Terror, “Amelia,” in which the Zuni doll terrorizes Amelia (played by Karen Black) in her apartment. In my analysis of Trilogy of Terror, I explored the projection and splitting-away of the bad character traits of the characters Black plays in all three episodes, leaving the remaining ‘good’ characters as timid and sexually repressed. Andy’s sweetness, as opposed to Chucky’s viciousness, can also be seen in this light. Maggie‘s falling out of the window and crashing through a car roof, incidentally, reminds me of the fate of Katherine Thorn (played by Lee Remick) in The Omen, another film about an evil boy.

When the police investigate Maggie’s death, Norris notices that the soles of Andy’s Good Guy shoes match the footprints leading up to the attack on her, so he deems Andy to be a suspect. Of course, Karen is too upset even to consider such suspicions.

Later that night, she’s talking to her son, who says that Chucky told him that he was sent to Andy by his dead father in heaven. I’m curious to know how Chucky learned of Andy’s father’s death in so short a time to be able to make up such a story. One wonders how much of the boy’s conversation with Chucky is real, and how much of it is just the boy’s imagination.

Andy also tells his mother that “Aunt Maggie was a real bitch and got what she deserved.” He insists that Chucky is the one who said it, which is of course perfectly plausible, given the killer’s personality…but technically, we never hear those words come out of the doll’s mouth. For all we know, Andy said and thought it himself, however unlikely that may be, given the context.

Even if all of this did come out of Chucky’s mouth, though, which is of course more than probably true, it’s true only on the literal level. On a symbolic level, we can still see the living doll as a case of projection and splitting-away of Andy’s bad side onto the doll.

His father’s death would have caused emotional trauma for the boy, who would have imagined the death as a kind of abandonment of him, thus making Andy’s father the bad father, in the Kleinian sense. The good father in heaven may have given him the doll as a gift; but the bad father gave Andy a Bad Guy in a Good Guy doll.

The police see Andy as a suspect, even though it’s hardly much more plausible that a little six-year-old boy could have had the strength to make a woman fly out of a window than a ‘living doll’ could have. Andy’s insistence that the doll is alive sounds like a manifestation of mental illness in him, even though Chucky really has the killer’s soul animating it, so it’s not surprising that he’s taken to a psychiatric hospital to be treated by Dr. Ardmore (Colvin).

As I said above, on both literal and symbolic levels, little Andy really does have issues. His father died, the death of Maggie is a shock to him even if he isn’t the perpetrator of the killing, and he’s so lonely, he needs a talking doll for a friend. His physical similarity to the doll, including their clothes, sometimes suggests a potential merging of identities, in spite of the splitting and projection.

Andy’s experience of what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position–a schizoid splitting of his mom into absolute good (Karen) and bad (Maggie, the mom substitute), as well as a paranoid fear that the bad projection will come back to get him (i.e., Chucky coming to the mental hospital to get him–actually, not to kill him, but to put the killer’s soul into the boy’s body…still, Andy doesn’t know that)–is a projection of the splitting of the good and bad sides of Andy himself. His splitting of his dead father into good and bad versions is also such a projection, as is his projection of his bad side into Chucky.

This splitting of people into good and bad, as well as the projection of this splitting onto people in the outside world, is symptomatic of the alienation we all feel in a society ruled by the profit motive, which splits people into rich and poor, then idolizes the rich while looking down on the poor. The capitalist class exploits this splitting and projection by selling us the commodities representing idealized people (Good Guy dolls, films and TV shows glorifying our objects of hero worship), and the war on the poor that results from chasing profits in turn results in desperate people we denigrate, the lumpenproletariat (criminals and the homeless).

Note how the story takes place in winter, with the homeless huddling together around outdoor fires to keep warm. One homeless man, the peddler of the doll, turns nasty and tries to get as much out of Karen as he can, even her body, in exchange for information about where he got the doll (never mind all the greedy capitalists who try to squeeze out as much profit as they can through the extraction of surplus value, some of whom exploit the bodies of females far younger than Karen!); but when Norris rescues her from the peddler and his meat-hook hands, he also points his gun at all the other homeless in the area, as if they were just as bad as the peddler, making them run away from their one source of heat, their outdoor fire, on that cold, bitter night.

Norris may be a good guy in his helping of Karen, but as a cop pointing his gun at freezing cold homeless people who never laid a hand on her, he is working to protect the class interests of the wealthy. By speaking of an area where the homeless hang out as a rough part of town that she shouldn’t be in alone at night, Norris is lumping the homeless together with criminals. This lack of sympathy for the poor and desperate makes Chucky’s revenge attack on him in his car not exactly surprising.

Now, Chucky learns from John “Dr. Death” Bishop, his former voodoo instructor, that in order for his soul to escape the doll (which is becoming increasingly human), he must put it in Andy’s body (he being the first person to know that Chucky’s alive). This putting of Charles Lee Ray’s soul into the boy’s body, a merging of bad Chucky with good Andy, should be understood, symbolically speaking, in terms of the paranoid-schizoid position, which is a splitting into absolute good vs bad, and the depressive position, an integrating of the split-off good and bad.

Though a child perceives the split-off good vs bad as being in his good vs bad parents, we must remember that the splitting is happening in the child’s mind, and it is thus a projection of a splitting that isn’t really in his parents, but rather in himself. Chucky, back in Karen’s apartment with Andy and having knocked the boy out, begins the incantation to put his soul in Andy’s body, a merging that represents the integration of the good and bad sides. He doesn’t complete the ritual, though, because Karen and Norris arrive just in time to stop him.

Just as the merging of Andy and Chucky isn’t complete, so is the integration of the good and bad mother, or the good and bad father, a child’s reparation with them, never complete. Throughout one’s life, one tends to shift back and forth between the paranoid-schizoid position (PS) and the depressive position (D), an oscillation Wilfred Bion expressed in this shorthand form: PS <-> D (e.g., in Bion, page 67).

Accordingly, Chucky as the bad Andy fights with Karen and Norris (who could be seen as a substitute father). When Karen, having put Chucky in the fireplace, screams to Andy to get the matches so she can burn the doll, the boy sits in hesitation at first–partly out of fear, no doubt, but also partly out of an unconscious wish to remove Karen the bad mother by letting Chucky kill her. Nonetheless, the good Andy wins out in his conflict, and gets the matches.

Chucky attacking Karen with, for example, him stabbing the knife through the door with her holding it closed on the other side, can be seen to symbolize how Andy, in unconscious phantasy, is attacking his mother through a projection of his bad self. He unconsciously wants to attack her because he feels she’s frustrated him in certain ways (not buying the doll at the beginning of the movie, not being with him at night for his birthday, but having cranky “Aunt Maggie,” Karen’s substitute and therefore split-off bad mother, instead to babysit him, etc.).

Later, when he sees Karen and Norris trying to protect him from Chucky, he can see the good mother in her, and he can understand that both the good and the bad mother are the same person. Now, instead of wanting to attack her in unconscious phantasy, Andy wants to keep her. In fact, even Chucky, wanting to merge with Andy, says he’ll let Karen live if she gives him the boy (a pretty weak promise coming from a serial killer, but still symbolic of an unconscious train of thought). So the bad side in Andy, Chucky, is still vicious, but thanks to his help in getting the matches, as well as his recognition that his bad side is really bad (“This is the end, friend.”), Andy can weaken his bad side and integrate it with his good side, a switch from PS to D.

With the final destruction of Chucky, through not only gunshots breaking off his limbs and head, but also that bullet in his now fully-formed heart, Andy no longer needs to project his bad side. He can now switch from paranoid anxiety to depressive anxiety, from the fear of being persecuted by the projected bad mother to the urge to hang on to his mom with all of her faults, her mixture of good and bad.

The film ends with a frozen shot of Andy leaving the room and looking at burned, mutilated, and dead Chucky. The boy’s frown isn’t only from his trauma: it’s also from his enduring sense of connection to his other, bad, projected self. The movement between splitting and integration doesn’t end in infancy or childhood: PS <-> D is a lifelong oscillation.

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