Tag: film analysis

Analysis of ‘Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1955 play by Tennessee Williams, an adaptation of his short story, “Three Players of a Summer Game.” COAHTR is one of his most famous plays and was his personal favourite. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955.

Set in “a plantation home in the Mississippi Delta” (Williams, page xv), COAHTR explores themes of social mores, greed, superficiality, mendacity vs the truth, family dysfunction, sexual desire, and death. Much of the writing uses eye dialect to capture the feel of the local southern accent of the US.

The original stage production starred Barbara Bel Geddes as Margaret (“Maggie the Cat” of the play’s title), Burl Ives as Big Daddy Pollitt, and Ben Gazzara as Brick, Margaret’s alcoholic husband, with Madeleine Sherwood as Mae. the 1958 film adaptation kept Ives and Sherwood in their roles, but had Elizabeth Taylor as Margaret and Paul Newman as Brick.

Here is a link to quotes from the play, and here is one to quotes from the 1958 film adaptation.

A number of social issues dealt with in this play–family dysfunction, greed, superficial displays of love and morality, the marginalizing of blacks and homosexuals, etc.–can be seen to centre around one big social issue in particular: class. Big Daddy owns the plantation home mentioned above, and he’ll die soon, so many in the family are hoping to get their grubby hands on his property when he dies.

The set of the play is the bed-sitting room of the plantation home. The style of the room hasn’t changed much since it was the home of Jack Straw and Peter Ochello, two old bachelors who shared the room and, it is strongly implied, if not stated more or less explicitly, were gay (Williams, page xv).

Since Williams himself was gay, COAHTR, as with A Streetcar Named Desire, has a gay undercurrent mixed into the plot, something excised from both film adaptations for obvious reasons. Brick, a former football hero turned sports commentator, has become an alcoholic over his grieving from the suicide of his close friend, Skipper, who had a homosexual attraction to Brick that Brick rejected.

This issue is an example of marginalizing in the plantation home, as is the use of black servants (e.g., Lacey and Sookey), who are in no way developed characters and are just there to do whatever their employers, the white Pollitt family, want them to do. In the film, during a scene in the basement of the house, Brick complains to Big Daddy that he’s so out of touch with people, as a man occupied only with money, that he doesn’t even know the servants’ names!

Brick’s grief over Skipper’s suicide has poured over into his marriage with Margaret. He won’t make love with her, meaning they’re childless and therefore won’t produce an heir to pass Big Daddy’s plantation onto. Maggie the Cat is frustrated with this situation, since she knows that Mae, Sister Woman, and her husband, Gooper (Brother Man, Brick’s brother, played by Pat Hingle in the original production, and by Jack Carson in the film), with all their spoiled brat children, whom Maggie calls “no-neck monsters” will inherit the plantation instead, an inheritance that that big part of the family greedily covets. Even worse, though, is Maggie’s sexual frustration…yet she doesn’t want to leave Brick.

She is the cat on a hot tin roof: her feet are burning on it (unfulfilled sexual desire), but she can’t jump off (can’t leave Brick and the rich Pollitt family), because if a cat jumps off a roof, it will injure itself. Maggie the Cat left a childhood of poverty to marry into the Pollitt family, so leaving Brick will mean going back into poverty (jumping off the roof and injuring herself). In this predicament, we can again see how class is the centre of everything in COAHTR.

As of the beginning of the play, we understand that Brick, almost always with a glass of an alcoholic drink in one hand, is hobbling around on crutches. This is because, prior to the beginning of the play, he, drunk the night before at the high school athletic field (page 4), tried to run and jump hurdles, only to fall and break his ankle. In the film, we see him do this. He was trying to relive his old jock hero days, and he failed miserably.

The symbolism here is apt: Brick, a pun on break, is a broken man, broken by his alcoholism and his bittersweet memories as an athletic hero of his old high school days, memories made all the more bitter by Skipper’s tragic end. He can’t move on with his life because of his emotional brokenness, so he limps on crutches from his physical brokenness, with only booze to help him forget the pain.

As for Maggie, the play begins with her in the bedroom (while Brick is in the bathroom finishing a shower), complaining because one of those “no-neck monsters” has dirtied her clothes with a hot buttered biscuit, so she has to change. An equivalent scene is shown near the beginning of the film, just after the one with Brick breaking his ankle.

Maggie’s hatred of those “no-neck monsters,” whose fat little heads and fat little bodies have no connection where she could put her hands and wring their necks, is based of course on her envy of their existence, as opposed to her and Brick’s childlessness. If only Gooper and Mae were the childless ones; then Maggie and Brick, having kids, could get at Big Daddy’s property!

As for Big Daddy, whose birthday is about to be celebrated, and everyone coveting his property is thus kissing his ass, there have been worries that he is dying of cancer. He understands that this is not so: he apparently just has a spastic colon, so he should have plenty of years left to live.

The ‘spastic colon’ story isn’t true, though. He’s been told this story to spare him the pain and allow him to enjoy his birthday. The family will break the hard truth to him and to Big Mama (Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production, and Judith Anderson in the film) at a later, better time. So the ‘spastic colon’ lie is the only well-intentioned one of the story…though Big Daddy will be no less upset to know the truth of his medical condition than Brick is about all of the “mendacity” in the world.

Though Gooper and Mae are Brick’s and Maggie’s enemies, Big Daddy dotes on Brick (page 4), as King Lear does Cordelia. Indeed, in some ways, COAHTR can be compared to King Lear, with Big Daddy corresponding to the old king giving away his land to his daughters, who in turn correspond to Big Daddy’s sons, Gooper (Goneril and Regan) and Brick (Cordelia). Gooper and Mae (the Duke of Cornwall?) put on acts of affection towards Big Daddy in their covetous attempt to get his property, as Goneril and Regan do to King Lear, with their pretty speeches of love for him at the beginning of that play; while Brick, not interested in Big Daddy’s property, sticks to the blunt truth, as Cordelia does.

One must find it hard to believe that Brick has no urge to sleep with Maggie, who is attractive enough that, according to her, at least, “Big Daddy harbours a little unconscious ‘lech’ fo’ [her]…” (page 5). She notes how “he always drops his eyes down [her] body…drops his eyes to [her] boobs an’ licks his old chops!” When Brick finds her comments “disgusting,” she dismisses his attitude as that of “an ass-aching Puritan”, and that Big Daddy’s adoration of her “shape…is deserved appreciation!”

Even if Maggie’s words here are just narcissistic wish-fulfillment, there’s also the choice of beauty queen Taylor to portray her in the film. Richard Brooks, who directed the film adaptation and co-wrote its screenplay with James Poe, had difficulty figuring out how to make it convincing that a man might not want to go to bed with a woman of Taylor’s beauty. This would have been especially difficult with the homosexual undercurrent censored from the story.

Brooks tried to portray Brick’s refusal to have sex with Maggie “because he holds her responsible for Skipper’s death,” but such an attitude is far from convincing. As far too many women have known (and suffered), a man does not have to feel love and affection for a woman, and also desire her sexually. He can have that desire while also feeling the utmost loathing and contempt for her. He can use sex deliberately to hurt her, and a man like Brick can treat even the raping of his wife as “His conjugal right. Her connubial duty.”

Now, while it’s never explicitly stated anywhere in the play, it’s strongly implied that Brick’s relationship with Skipper was more than just a close friendship. Brick may have rejected Skipper’s sexual advances, but that doesn’t mean Brick never felt the urge to return those feelings physically. As a play written by a gay man in the 1950s, long before Stonewall and contemporary gay liberation, COAHTR is going to reflect the social mores of the time, to which Williams would have been more than usually sensitive.

If Brick was gay, it would be only natural for him–in a society that morally condemned homosexuality with a virulence and disgust for “queers” that would make today’s homophobes seem sensitive in their prejudices by comparison–to be more than a little conflicted about his sexuality. Brick jumping into bed with Skipper, even if kept secret, would have been far less believable.

The film further dodges the gay undercurrent in a manner comparable to how the 1951 film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire does with the suicide husband of Blanche DuBois: he’s portrayed as weak and cowardly, rather than homosexual. As I said in my analysis of ASND about Blanche’s husband, Skipper is all the gay stereotypes without the gay. And again, removing the homosexuality only makes the reason for the suicide unconvincing. “Cowards die many times before their deaths,” as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar observed, and they feel a lot of shame…but do they kill themselves over it? They’re too scared of getting hurt or dying…aren’t they, by definition?

In her jealous suspicions that Brick and Skipper had a sexual relationship, Maggie provoked Skipper into trying to take her to bed ‘to prove that he was a man,’ but he couldn’t go through with it, only to reinforce her suspicions and his shame, hence his suicide (page 66).

As I said above, this taboo subject is an example of marginalization, made even more so in its being censored out of the movie. Other examples of marginalizing in the 1958 adaptation are, at the beginning, the kids’ marching band with Confederate flags, the above-mentioned black servants, and a little girl, one of the “no-neck monsters,” going around with a toy pistol and wearing a Native American headdress, a white girl who’s been raised to have no respect for aboriginal culture, having fun playing ‘cowboys and injuns.’

These forms of marginalization, combined with the Pollitt family dysfunction and coveting of Big Daddy’s property, all rooted in class divisions, are manifestations of social alienation. Maggie’s a cat on a hot tin roof because of her and Brick’s mutual alienation; Big Daddy may be fond of Brick, but he finds Big Mama, Gooper, and Mae to be annoying, just as Maggie feels about the “no-neck monsters.” There aren’t any real friendships here. Even Gooper often tells Mae to be quiet.

In Act One, Maggie’s wondering why Brick has looked at her a certain way that “froze [her] blood.” He says he wasn’t conscious of looking at her. She says, “Living with someone you love can be lonelier–than living entirely alone!–if the one that y’love doesn’t love you…” (page 8). That is alienation.

At one point, Brick drops his crutch, and he asks Maggie to give it to him. She’d have him lean on her shoulder, but he just wants his crutch (page 11). Alienation. Finally, she gives it to him in exasperation.

She’d like him to leave the booze alone until after Big Daddy’s birthday party is over, but he’s forgotten all about it, so estranged is he from his family (page 12). He, of course, never bought a birthday present for Big Daddy, so Maggie’s bought one for Brick to give his dad. Brick isn’t even willing to write ‘Love, Brick’ on the birthday card, so averse is he to being untruthful.

He speaks of himself and his wife having made conditions by which he’ll agree to stay on living with her. She complains of not living with him, but rather of occupying the same cage with him.

Mae interrupts and complains about an archery set left around her precious children, blaming Maggie for having exposed her kids to the ‘danger.’ Then, Mae brags about the show her kids put on, with music and dancing. Big Daddy loved it, apparently (page 13). Maggie comes back by taunting Mae that her kids all have dogs’ names–Dixie, Trixie, Buster, Sonny, and Polly (this last apparently a parrot).

After Mae leaves the bedroom to attend a resuming of the kids’ show, Maggie complains to Brick of being like a cat on a hot tin roof, to which Brick replies that she can simply jump off the roof and land, as all cats do, on all fours, uninjured. What Brick means is that she can take a lover to deal with her sexual frustration (page 15), but of course she doesn’t want to do that for the reasons I gave above. She insists she loves him too much to leave him, and wishes he’d “get fat or ugly or something so [she can] stand it.”

Soon, Big Mama comes over to tell Brick and Maggie the good news that Big Daddy doesn’t have cancer, and he only has a spastic colon. Big Mama’s annoyed with the locked bedroom door, not being concerned with Maggie’s or Brick’s right to privacy (that is, she doesn’t respect boundaries…a typical problem in dysfunctional families–page 16). This would explain why the bratty kids come running into the bedroom with impunity.

Big Mama asks Maggie if Brick is still in much pain from his broken ankle (page 18), which is a metaphor for what seems his impotence. Not long after, Big Mama shows concern over whether or not Brick and Margaret are happy in bed, obviously putting pressure on the couple to produce grandchildren for her and Big Daddy (page 20). Once again, there is no respect for the couple’s boundaries or privacy.

When we accept the play’s strong implication that Brick is a closet homosexual (as opposed to the film’s senseless censoring of what was clearly Williams’s main theme of exploration, making him dislike the film), then not only is his not sleeping with her explicable, but also his urging her to find a lover. If she can get pregnant with a bastard child they can pass off as their own, then the pressure for Brick to get it up for her will finally be off.

Brick married Margaret for the same reason many gays married back in those days: for appearance’s sake. It’s yet another example of the kind of mendacity that Brick complains about.

Now, Maggie is as determined as Gooper and Mae are in getting Big Daddy’s estate when he dies, which they all know will come sooner than the ‘spastic colon’ story lets on. In fact, the Cat is so determined to get it that, at the end of the play, she lies that she’s with child in order to get in Big Mama’s and Daddy’s good graces. She plans to pressure Brick into getting the job done by depriving him of his liquor.

The sanitized film version shows Brick content to go along with getting the job done. Williams’s original ending–before Elia Kazan, director of the Broadway production, insisted Williams make changes to Act Three, which among other changes included a more sympathetic Maggie (pages 92-93)–is far preferable, in preserving a sense of the family’s dysfunction by having Brick passively acquiesce to her wish “to make the lie true” (page 91).

She insists that she loves him, and he “[smiling with charming sadness]” says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that was true?” His latent homosexuality would make this original ending (as opposed to Kazan’s urged rewrites or those of the film) far more believable; it would also bring home all the harder just how tragic this story is. It’s far from the straight ‘family values’ ending we get in the film; instead, gay Brick is being forced by the scheming Cat to sire a family so she can get at Big Daddy’s property. Brick has to be another Gooper. He’s being crushed by her mendacity.

While in much of Act Three of the play, Brick is in the gallery (as opposed to the bedroom where the bulk of the play is set), Big Daddy not reappearing at all until Kazan insisted on him coming back, another of the changes made to Act Three, in the film, there’s a lengthy scene of the two men in the basement (after a spell outside in the rain gets them wet) towards the end. Now, this basement scene is meant to create a sense of reconciliation between the two, to prepare us for Brick’s willing agreement to sleep with Maggie. As such, it’s another example of the film sanitizing the play to make it more ‘family-values’ oriented, taking away much of the bite of Williams’s social critique.

The faults of this scene’s inclusion, however, don’t mean that it’s entirely without merit. Its exploration of Big Daddy’s character and motivations dovetail with how his social rank and wealth result in alienation.

He speaks of how all his wealth has allowed him to buy lots of gifts for his family, supposedly proving how much he ‘loves’ all of them. Brick expresses his disgust at such ostentation masked as generosity. One cannot buy love. Brick says that Big Daddy owns his family rather than loves them. Capitalism alienates people by making commodities out of them.

Big Daddy hopes his plantation empire will live on after his death through his heirs, Gooper and Brick. Brick denies this possibility because of the inherent alienation in a bourgeois family that treats its members as property. And we all know how capitalism leads to empire, in various forms…and look at all the toxic families that exist out there.

Big Daddy speaks of his own father, a hobo who hopped trains with his then-young son and left him nothing but a suitcase with a uniform worn in the Spanish-American War. Big Daddy brags of how he built up his plantation from nothing,…though any Marxist worth his salt knows the real way business empires are built: with the blood, sweat, and tears of an exploited working class. Success has made a failure of Big Daddy’s home.

To go back to comparisons between COAHTR and King Lear, Big Daddy–upon learning that, indeed, he does have terminal cancer, and that the ‘spastic colon’ story was a white lie meant to allow him to enjoy his birthday–goes into a rage, shouting “Lying! Dying! Liars!” at the family that gave him his false hope (at the end of the original Act Two, or at the beginning of the Act Three revised for Kazan, whichever). Like Lear, Big Daddy is upset over having to confront the ultimate loss, that of his life, which Lear loses onstage at the end of the final scene of Act Five.

As I explained in my analysis of the play (link above), Lear loses everything, one by one: his kingly authority, his one hundred knights, the ability to trust his daughters, shelter, his sanity, his one true daughter, Cordelia, and finally, his life. In knowing he’s losing his life, Big Daddy is losing it all in one fell swoop. When Mae gets Gooper’s briefcase (page 106) so he can get at the legal papers pertaining to what he sees as his and Mae’s rights to his father’s estate, Gooper and Mae are demonstrating their “avarice, avarice, greed, greed!” (page 107), as Maggie judges (not that she’s really any better), that Big Daddy’s lost his ability to trust them.

If only, in all of this alienation, class conflict, and loss, Big Daddy could have a moment to reflect as Lear does in his own loss:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just. (Act III, Scene iv)

In Williams’s original version, Big Daddy sympathizes with Brick, in spite of prevailing prejudices against homosexuality: if only he could extend that empathy to the poor, as Lear does.

Of course, just as Lear is, for a while, happy to have regained Cordelia after realizing she is the one true daughter, so is Big Daddy happy to have regained something (even though it’s just a lie): Maggie is apparently pregnant with Brick’s child–“this girl has life in her body” (page 115). In the hope of having life in an heir he’d rather pass his estate on to, Big Daddy imagines he won’t be losing life–and all his property–after all.

How sad that the man fooled by lies is still letting himself be fooled by them. And in linking his life and happiness to his private property rather than to people whom he could help with it, people he’s alienated from, he sadly also won’t show the heavens more just.

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, London, Penguin Modern Classics, 1955

Analysis of ‘Jaws’

Jaws is a novel by Peter Benchley, published in 1974 and adapted the next year by Steven Spielberg into a movie that starred Roy Scheider, Richard Dreyfuss, and Robert Shaw, and costarring Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton.

While it is more usual to say that a book is better than its movie adaptation, it is almost universally felt that the reverse is the case with Jaws. The novel’s characters are generally felt to be unlikeable and unsympathetic, and so the changes made to them for the film are justified. Also, while the film streamlines and simplifies the plot to focus on the shark threat, the novel does a detour in the middle to make it into a character study, focusing on their conflicts.

Now, while I would agree that the film is far more entertaining than the novel–indeed, the film established the notion of the summer blockbuster–there are important thematic elements in the novel, only lightly touched on in the film, that deserve a more thorough exploration, so I’ll be focusing on the novel a lot here…without neglecting the film, of course.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here’s a link to an audiobook of the novel, whose quirky AI narrator makes lots of amusing mispronunciations.

While the great white shark of the film is just a menace to be defeated, the shark of the novel, somewhat like the white whale of Moby-Dick, is symbolically a force of nature ready to fight back against a most predatory human race. Just as the crew of the Pequod hunt and kill whales as their way of making money (e.g., to get the oil), so do the people of the fictional town of Amity use the beaches and swimming as a way of making money, which can be seen as a human muscling in on the fish’s natural territory.

So the people in the novel are as much predators in their own way as the shark is. Indeed, predation in general is a major theme of the novel, something stripped away to a minimum in the film. When making the film, Spielberg famously said he’d been rooting for the shark as he was reading Benchley’s novel, since the characters were so unlikeable. I would argue, though, that the unlikeability of the characters was the whole point of the novel.

A careful reading of the book demonstrates a critique of capitalism that Spielberg and his fellow moviemakers were trying to shy away from…and in making not only the first summer blockbuster, but also a well-loved, classic film that has since raked in hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide (the result of an aggressive marketing campaign that had included such merchandise as a soundtrack album, T-shirts, beach towels, blankets, toy sharks, etc.), they succeeded most admirably in making the film all for capitalism, rather than against it.

The film, while scary, gave viewers a sense of hope, whereas the novel is much darker in tone, giving us a sense of how much nastier we can be than sharks. Small wonder people like the movie so much more than the book.

I will go into the capitalist critique later on, in particular as regards the…business relationships…of Amity Mayor Larry Vaughn (Hamilton), something removed from the film. For now, though, consider the reality of such things as the polluting of our oceans, which harms so much of marine life because proper disposal of garbage is more costly and eats into profits. Also, there’s the hunting of sharks for their fins to be eaten as a delicacy. Indeed, Benchley later regretted how the Jaws phenomenon led to hostility to a marine animal that doesn’t attack humans all that much, thus making him preoccupied with marine conservation and protecting sharks. As I said above, man is every bit the predator that sharks are, if not much more so.

An understanding of that reality can help us to see how, on a symbolic level, people going out to swim in the waters of Amity Beach are intruding on the territory of marine animals. So while in the movie, as well as in the novel, young Christine Watkins may be innocently skinny dipping, then to die a violent death, that is just our human point of view. From the shark’s point of view, too, she’s just its prey…killing her is of course nothing personal. But the shark, often called “the fish” in the novel, represents the vengeful wrath of nature against her human predators. On a couple of occasions in the novel, a resident of Amity claims that the shark is God’s agent of retribution for the town’s sins.

When police chief Martin Brody (Scheider) learns of the killing of Watkins, and that it was probably a shark attack, he wants to close down the beach to prevent any more attacks. The problem is that the summer tourist season has come, and the Amity economy depends almost entirely on tourism. Because of this problem, Vaughn and the town’s selectmen want news of the shark attack to be kept secret. And so the editor of the local newspaper, Harry Meadows (played by Carl Gottlieb, who also did rewrites of Benchley’s original script for the film, and whose role as Meadows was little more than a cameo, as opposed to Meadows’s much more substantial part in the novel), gives no reports of the attack.

Issues of class difference having an impact on the novel first become apparent in the dissatisfaction of Ellen Brody (Gary) with her marriage to Martin. Her family background is further up in terms of social class than his, so her having become the wife of a police chief feels as though she’s ‘married down.’ As a result, she feels alienated from the Amity community, who seem ‘beneath’ her, and when she meets Matt Hooper (Dreyfuss), an ichthyologist from a class echelon similar to hers–and whose older brother she once dated, years before knowing Martin–she develops a sexual interest in him. Needless to say, none of this is in the movie.

What must be understood here is that the unpleasantness of these characters (her lust, Hooper’s snottiness to Martin, his jealous suspicions of Hooper with his wife and resulting antagonism to him, etc.) is all part of the novel’s critique of class conflict and alienation, all products of capitalism, which in turn is an important part of the overall theme of predation in the novel. Recall, in this connection, Einstein‘s words: “the real purpose of socialism is precisely to overcome and advance beyond the predatory phase of human development.”

Because no one yet knows of the danger of the shark, some people go out to the beach for a swim. Brody is there, too, watching over the area just in case. A little boy named Alex Kintner goes into the water and is eaten by the shark; in the film, his blood is splashing with the water, the shock of it vividly captured in the famous dolly zoom of Brody’s reaction to the killing.

Because of technical difficulties with ‘Bruce,’ the mechanical shark used in the film, its appearance had to be limited. Spielberg was able to turn this problem into a virtue, however, by instead suggesting the shark’s presence: filming from its POV, using shadow, and having John Williams‘s famous music, with the E-F-E-F-E-F-E-F in the cellos, double basses, etc. The result was something incalculably scarier, with the sense of approaching danger.

When Alex’s mother (played by Lee Fiero) learns that Brody had known of the shark danger, yet let the beaches stay open, we see her approach him and slap him. In the film, her reaction is gentle compared to the rage she shows him in the novel, and it’s another example of how the film makes the characters more likable and sympathetic.

Still, despite Brody’s attempts to have the beach closed, especially since he’s racked with guilt over Alex’s death (Brody has sons of his own: two in the film, and three in the novel), Mayor Vaughn insists on keeping the beaches open for the sake of the summer season and the health of the town’s economy.

Now, in the film, Vaughn seems to be a well-intentioned, but short-sighted and foolish mayor, dismissing the shark threat and trivializing it in comparison to the, to him, far greater urgency of keeping the town’s economy healthy. In the novel, though, things get far more sinister and darker when we learn of his business dealings with the mafia.

In many posts, I’ve described the presentation of the mafia in film as symbolic of capitalists, since I consider the exploitation of labour to be criminal. The mafia’s criminal actions are illegal, with mainstream capitalists, their criminal actions are legal. In the Jaws novel, though, the mafia are literally capitalists, who have bought up local property at cheap prices and are hoping, during the summer tourist season, to sell it at much higher prices to get a nice profit.

So the mafia is pressuring Vaughn, who in turn is pressuring Brody, to keep the beaches open, with no regard whatsoever for the safety of the swimmers. The mafia at one point even kill the Brody family cat, which Brody angrily tries to blame on Vaughn. Now, Vaughn, incidentally, also needs money from the tourism to pay off some debts. So in all of these issues, we can see not only a sense of predation far greater than just that of the shark, but also how Benchley’s novel is a critique of capitalism.

In man’s muscling into the marine animals’ territory to make a profit, we can see how one of the residents of Amity considers the shark to be an agent of God’s retribution against the wicked.

Quint (Shaw) is introduced in the film far earlier than he is in the novel, which is just before he, Brody, and Hooper go out hunting for the shark. At a town meeting, where a $3,000 bounty is placed on the shark, the eccentric Quint, after scratching his fingernails on a chalkboard where a shark has been drawn (suggesting his Ahab-like hatred of the great white marine animal), he offers his own shark-hunting services for $10,000.

Other shark hunters go after the shark, but end up catching a different one, a tiger shark. At about 6:47 in this set of deleted scenes, we see not only their shark hunting, but also their rowdy competition with each other, hitting the butts of their rifles against other boats, throwing bait at rivals in other boats, foolishly taking their dogs in their boats, and recklessly firing their rifles into the water. Though the film managed to remove much of the novel’s human predation, this deleted scene demonstrates at least an attempt to compensate for those removals.

Because the shark seems to have been caught and killed, Vaughn confidently assures everyone it’s OK to come to Amity Beach and have a good time in the water. He reminds us that amity means “friendship,” though for those who know the town of the novel, the unlikeable characters imply that the town would be more aptly named ‘Enmity.’

Indeed, the sense of unfriendliness and alienation is so keenly felt in a reading of the novel that at times it’s to be noted even in the narration itself. Homophobic slurs pop up occasionally, and racist stereotypes are presented in the insistence that rapists in the town must be black. I suspect, in all fairness to Benchley, that these elements aren’t meant to be a reflection of his character, but are meant to be present in whoever is narrating the story, presumably a resident of Amity.

To get back to the film version, we note that people are on the beach again, though at first they’re nervous about going into the water. Vaughn has to urge an elderly couple to go in, to prod all the others to go in also, by imitative conformity. Brody has people patrolling the water, watching it like hawks in case the shark that had been caught was the wrong one.

Around this time, we see a TV news reporter saying a cheesy line about how Amity Beach has a cloud over it in the shape of a killer shark. This, by the way, is a cameo by none other than Peter Benchley himself (a former reporter for the Washington Post)…and one wonders if the clichéd line he speaks is meant to be a dig at the writer’s prose.

After a prank pulled by a couple of boys in the water, a false alarm that allows for some temporary relief in the tension, the shark really makes an appearance, killing a man, whose dismembered leg is seen floating down in the water, his blood mixing with it. Later, Vaughn is finally showing some remorse over his trivializing of the danger and his overconfidence that there was no more shark to worry about.

Around this time in the novel, Ellen has seen Hooper again, and with a tense dinner party in the Brody house, her predatory seduction of him begins. Martin, sensing the chemistry between them, is getting drunk and making things awkward for everyone.

After the party, she arranges to meet Hooper in a restaurant for lunch, and the flirtation between them continues. At one point, she makes an odd comment about having rape fantasies. While it is true that some women have these (though they’d be more accurately described as fantasies of being ravished or of having ‘good, rough sex,’ the word ‘rape’ being used here for its connotations rather than its denotative meaning, since ‘rape’ by definition is something one does NOT want to be subjected to), one cannot but be suspicious of the inner motives of a male novelist putting such fantasies in the mind of one of his female characters.

Still, as unseemly as such fantasies may be in Ellen’s mind, they do, in a way, fit in with the general theme of predation. If we see sexual predation and seduction as forms of sexual sadism, then ‘rape’ fantasies could be seen as examples of sexual masochism. Ellen, in this sense, would prey on Hooper and be preyed on by him. In this connection, note what Freud once said: “A person who feels pleasure in producing pain in someone else in a sexual relationship is also capable of enjoying as pleasure any pain which he may himself derive from sexual relations. A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.” To paraphrase Freud, a predator is always at the same time prey. The shark will certainly be the prey of Brody, Hooper, and Quint.

Anyway, Ellen and Hooper will go to a hotel after their lunch date and prey on each other, as it were, in bed. Martin, in the meantime, will try to reach both of them by phone that afternoon, and being unable to do so, will feel his jealousy swelling in him.

Other examples of what could be called predation in Amity include some local scammers trying to take advantage of tourists, who want a glimpse of the notorious shark they’ve heard about in the media; the scammers will trick the tourists into buying unneeded tickets for admission to the beach! Brody finds out about this, and realizes he has to apprehend the scammers.

Finally, after a boy narrowly escapes being eaten by the shark, Brody closes the beach and convinces the town’s selectmen to hire Quint. Now, as we know, insanely jealous Brody and snotty rich kid Hooper are not likable (as opposed to their portrayal in the film, of course), but neither is the Quint of the novel, who disembowels a blue shark and uses an illegally caught unborn baby dolphin as bait, angering ichthyologist Hooper. Once again, we see man as much more of a predator than sharks are.

Now, while in the film there is some friction among the three men on Quint’s boat, the Orca (aptly named after the killer whale that is the natural enemy of the great white shark), such friction is expressed in a generally light-hearted manner. Recall Dreyfuss’s Hooper making faces at Quint after being told he can’t admit when he’s wrong.

In the novel, however, the friction among them gets much nastier, and this contributes to their unlikeability. As I mentioned above, neither Brody nor Quint likes snotty rich kid Hooper, and in this we see the alienation caused by class differences, caused in turn by capitalism. On top of that, Brody’s rising jealous suspicions of Hooper having played around with Ellen (also, as we’ve seen, a product of class differences) fill him with so much rage that at one point he physically attacks Hooper, strangling him for a moment.

While in the movie, the men go out in the Orca one time and confront the shark at the end, in the novel, they go out on four separate trips, each time returning to shore at the end of the day. They never see the shark on the first day, but they do on the second, and Brody is amazed at the size of it. In the film, his amazement can be related to the scene when he’s ladling chum into the water, the shark suddenly appears, shocking him, and he backs up and says the famous line to Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” (Incidentally, Scheider improvised the line.)

The third day is not only when Brody and Hooper have their fight, but also when Hooper brings the shark cage and, unlike in the film, he dies underwater in it when the shark attacks him. Now, he was originally supposed to die in the film that way, too, but footage filmed of a great white shark attacking the cage (with no one in it) looked so compelling to Spielberg that he wanted to use it, and this meant rewriting the scene so Hooper instead would escape and swim to safety on the ocean floor, then resurface with Brody, and together they swim to shore at the end. Besides, the problems with ‘Bruce’ were a constant source of changes to the story.

The fourth and final day, of course, is the final confrontation with the shark, both it and Quint dying, though the latter dies in a more Ahab-esque way, and the former in a far less…explosive…way. But I’ll come back to that in more detail later.

While in the film, there is some friction among the three men, there’s also a lot of camaraderie, which adds to their likability. This is especially so in the night-time scene on the Orca, when they have a few drinks and engage in male bonding in the form of Quint and Hooper comparing scars on their legs.

And it is at this point that we come to one of the most important film contributions to the story: Quint’s recollections of what happened to the crew of the USS Indianapolis. This incident really happened in 1945; the ship delivered the components of an atomic bomb to Tinian in a mission so secret that when the ship was sunk by Japanese torpedoes while on its way to Leyte, the Philippines, the navy was late to learn of the ship’s non-arrival in Leyte.

The surviving crew at the time were left adrift over an ordeal of several days, leaving them without food or water, to suffer from exposure to the elements that resulted in such problems as hypothermia. Then there were the shark attacks, which of course are the focus of Quint’s telling of the story, as well as the source of his Ahab-like hate of sharks.

Just as Captain Ahab, in his rage, tells his crew of when the white whale bit off his leg, so does Quint speak, though in a calm, sombre voice, of his trauma and fear from that ordeal in the water. The scene adds depth to his character, to help us sympathize with him, and also to add an Ahab relation to him in a way that Benchley’s attempts at such a relation come off as contrived and superficial in comparison.

There’s another thing that the Indianapolis story adds to Jaws: the element of capitalism’s muscling in on the sea, causing nature to get revenge on it in the form of shark attacks–God’s retribution on the sinful, as that Amity resident sees it.

The sending of the atomic bomb components to Tinian, “the Hiroshima bomb,” as Quint calls it, was of course part of the plan not only to defeat Japan in WWII, but also, as I explained here, to give the Soviets a great big scare. The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was meant to demonstrate the military superiority of the American empire to the world. As we Marxists know, imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, WWII was an inter-imperialist war between Anglo-American imperialism on one side and fascist imperialism on the other.

The nukes didn’t just kill between one and three hundred thousand Japanese; they were also an outrage against nature. The shark attacks, thus, are a symbolic revenge.

In the novel, after Hooper dies, Brody believes the shark can’t be killed and tells Quint he doesn’t think the town can pay him anymore. Quint, however, decides he’ll go after the shark with or without the money, so determined is he in his Ahab-like drive to kill it.

In the final confrontation, the shark attacks the Orca, causing it to sink. In the novel, after harpooning the shark several times, Quint gets his foot entangled in the rope of one of the harpoons he’s hit the shark with, and as the shark goes back into the water, Quint is pulled in with it and he drowns, in true Ahab fashion. All he’d have to say, to make it perfect, is, “from hell’s heart, I stab at thee…”

This link with Moby-Dick is feeble and anticlimactic compared to Quint’s spectacular death in the movie, since we know of his trauma from the Indianapolis incident being reawakened as he kicks in terror and slides down to the shark’s eager mouth to get that fatal bite in the belly.

While the shark’s confrontation with Brody in the novel is, again, anticlimactic, at least it’s more realistic than the spectacular blowup at the end of the movie. Benchley hated the changed killing of the shark so much that he got kicked off the set when they were to film it. Brody’s shoving of a pressurized tank into the shark’s mouth, then firing a bullet into the tank, would not have caused it and the shark to explode; still, Spielberg felt a more dramatic ending was more important than realism, and from the point of view of the movie’s commercial success, he was right.

As for the novel, though, the wounded shark moves closer and closer to Brody, who is afloat on a seat cushion now that the Orca has sunk, and he’s resigned to his fate. But the shark, right up close to him now, just…dies. It succumbs to its harpoon wounds, and sinks down to the ocean floor with Quint, his leg still stuck in the harpoon rope.

Then Brody, like sole-surviving Ishmael, starts swimming to shore–the end!

This is the way the novel ends, not with a bang but a whimper. Again, it’s not an exciting ending, it’s certainly an abrupt ending for the novel, but that was Benchley’s point. This is reality: people aren’t generally very nice (sorry, Dear Reader!), and problems aren’t normally solved in a dramatic, Hollywood fashion.

Jaws the movie is a great moment in cinematic history, to be sure, and is thoroughly entertaining, but it is so because it’s a capitalistic crowdpleaser. Jaws the novel, on the other hand, is an exploration of the darker, predatory nature of man as well as, if not much more so than, of sharks, of which the one in the novel is just a symbolic projection of ourselves.

Predictably, the phenomenon of the film led to the sale of Jaws-related merchandise as I mentioned above, as well as sequels that got worse and worse until being totally ridiculous. Then there were attempts to capitalize on marine animal terror with different movies, like Orca. So the first Jaws film may be justifiably far more beloved than the novel, but it also proved Benchley’s point about the predatory nature of capitalism.

Analysis of ‘American Beauty’

American Beauty is a 1999 satirical black comedy film directed by Sam Mendes in his feature film directorial debut. Written by Alan Ball, the film stars Kevin Spacey, Mena Suvari, and Annette Bening, with Thora Birch, Wes Bentley, Chris Cooper, and Allison Janney.

The film received widespread critical and popular acclaim, grossing over $350 million worldwide and winning five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor for Spacey, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Cinematography. It was also nominated for and won many other awards and honours, mainly for directing, writing, and acting.

Retrospective appraisals of American Beauty, however, have not been as positive. Its themes have seemed trivial since 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Allegations of sexual misconduct against Spacey have not helped the film’s reputation, either, especially given their disturbing parallel to the lecherous, teen-obsessed character he plays in the movie.

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

I find it interesting to do an analysis of a film praised before the 21st century, and one whose praise has dwindled since the beginning of the 21st century, because I find the change in values between these times so well encapsulated in this change of attitude toward the film.

What were considered deep themes in the movie–rebellion against the psychological imprisonment imposed by social conformity in the American middle class, finding beauty where it’s least expected, living a more meaningful life, etc.–now seem fairly trivial and superficial. What seems to have brought about our change in attitude toward these themes, our depreciation of their worth, is our change in attitude toward the liberal mindset.

It takes someone like the people in this suburban middle-class neighbourhood to see depth in these themes, whereas someone raised in poverty, or in the Third World (oppressed by Western imperialism), would regard them as little more than First World problems. We the audience are meant to sympathize with Lester Burnham (Spacey), the beginning of whose lecherous, predatory attraction to underage Angela Hayes (Suvari) is the inciting incident in the story that propels his character arc from psychological imprisonment to liberation and finally to redemption, when he finally stops his predation on her, just before mounting her, on learning she’s not the sex goddess he thought she was, but just a virgin.

It took such world-shattering events as 9/11 (with its resulting perpetual war, curtailing of civil liberties, mass surveillance, etc.) and the global financial crisis of the late 2000s to make us realize how hollow and superficial the bourgeois liberal values of this film are. The idea that one can take such a flip, light-hearted attitude towards Lester’s creepy designs on a girl, when he seems to go to heaven after being shot…the sight of which gets an awed reaction from Ricky Fitts (Bentley).

The movie begins by acknowledging Lester’s creepiness through his daughter, Jane (Birch), complaining to Ricky about it, and even seeming to consent to have her boyfriend kill her dad. What immediately follows is a shot of a tree-lined street, bird’s-eye-view, in the American suburbs. A voice-over of Lester saying this is his neighbourhood, and that he knows he’ll be dead within a year, suggests it’s his spirit looking down from heaven and remembering that last year of his life. Lester–a pun on lecher?–is in heaven–forgiven so easily? And who is his killer? Is it Ricky, or someone else?

Next, the film establishes Lester’s dull, pathetic life as of the beginning of that last year, when he-as-angel imagines he’s “dead already.” He’s in a psychological prison, symbolized first by the shower door he’s seen behind, where he masturbates–the best time of his miserable day–and second by the image of columns of data on his computer screen at work resembling jail bars, with his face reflected on it among the columns, making it look as if he were incarcerated in his office at his miserable job as a media executive.

It’s significant that, when we’re introduced to his wife, Carolyn (Bening), she is seen cutting one of many red roses (American Beauties) she’s been growing on the fences around their house. Red rose petals are a recurring motif in the film, associated with Angela’s sexuality and therefore Lester’s sexual resurrection. His neurotic, control-freak wife has been sapping him of his energy for years, or so he imagines. Her clipping of the roses is therefore symbolically apt.

After we see her with the roses and chatting with one of the Burnhams’ two next-door neighbours (Jim and Jim are a gay couple played by Scott Bakula and Sam Robards), there’s a scene with Jane in her bedroom at her computer. She’s wearing a sweater with a motif of red roses, and being a typically insecure teenager, she’s looking into getting breast enhancement.

That the rose motif ties Angela in with not only Lester’s wife but also his daughter–with all of the sexual overtones either discussed above or implied and understood–should tell us all we need to know about Lester’s filthy mind. His being trapped in the capitalist world should be enough for us to sympathize with him, but his idea of how to escape that trap–lusting after a girl his daughter’s age (implying unconscious feelings he may have about Jane, in that red-rose sweater and wanting to have larger breasts!), smoking Ricky’s weed, and replacing his media executive job with a much lower-paying one and with far fewer responsibilities–causes our sympathy to wither away.

His obsession with an underage girl, combined with his defiant attitude at work towards his “efficiency expert” boss, Brad Dupree (played by Barry Del Sherman), who’d have Lester justify why he shouldn’t be fired, makes me describe American Beauty as a cross between Lolita and Office Space. In this combination we see the psychological conflict of the liberal mindset (link above): the superego makes moral demands for progressive social change and freedom from capitalist exploitation (Office Space), while the id wants satisfaction of base, morally objectionable desires (Lolita).

When Brad tells Lester about the “need to cut corners” in the business to “free up cash,” since profits are more important than workers’ needs, of course, Lester reminds Brad of when the company’s editorial director, Craig, used company money–$50,000–to pay for the sexual services of a prostitute. This upper-level man gets to enjoy that and have his reputation protected from scandal, while lower-level workers like Lester have to fight to save their jobs.

When Brad says, “It’s just business,” we might be reminded of a famous line in another movie about capitalist and political corruption–The Godfather. Of course, Lester considers his need to write out a report justifying his job to be “kinda fascist,” as he says to Carolyn when they’re driving home; and then, almost immediately after, they notice they have new next-door neighbours moving in, on the opposite side of the Burnham house to the Jims. This new family are the Fittses, whose father, Col. Frank Fitts (Cooper), as we’ll eventually learn, is “kinda fascist,” too.

We learn that the family who’d lived there before and moved out were mad at Carolyn for having cut down a sycamore that both their and the Burnhams’ property shared. Her cutting down of the sycamore reminds us of her cutting the rosa American beauties. Just as those flowers are superficially beautiful, but are susceptible to the fungi diseases mildew, rust, and black spot (symbolic of the superficial enjoyment of luxuries and material pleasures associated with capitalism, which mask the evils of imperialism and poverty–recall in this connection the song “American Woman,” by the Guess Who, and sung by Lester in his car later on in the film as he’s smoking a joint), so is the chopped-down sycamore symbolic of the pain of being in love.

Romeo visited a sycamore grove when he was sad, lovelorn, and wishing to be alone in his rumination. Desdemona, fearful of her increasingly jealous husband, Othello, sang “a song of willow,” which began, “The poor soul sat sighing by a sycamore tree…” (Act IV, Scene iii) ‘The Willow Song’ is about someone in love who dies of a broken heart when the love object proves untrue. Sycamore can also be a pun on “sick amore,” or “sick in love”…or in the case of Lester’s taboo infatuation, a “sick love.”

So in this cut-down sycamore, we see more of the Lolita-oriented symbolism, a variation on those clipped red flowers, a killing of Lester’s sexual energy by his psychologically castrating wife. Small wonder he masturbates so much, and as Angela will later observe, he and Carolyn haven’t had sex in a long time. Incidentally, Angela’s last name is Hayes, rather like Dolores Haze in Lolita.

Note also how, on the one hand, Lester is obsessed with Angela, Jane’s friend, but on the other, he has barely spoken to his daughter in months, as she herself complains to him at dinner. His infatuation with her friend could be interpreted as an unconscious displacement of incestuous feelings for Jane (recall the rose motif on her sweater).

Consider how, if you watch the film carefully, Jane wears less and less makeup as the story progresses, while Angela remains fully made up throughout. The implication is that Jane’s desirability is being transferred, displaced, from her to Angela. And when Lester sees Angela for the first time, during the cheerleader dance routine to the music in the high school gym (‘On Broadway’), both she and Jane are in the same uniform, dressed identically, and heavily made up. All of this just makes Lester’s desires all the creepier.

So instead of directing his energies towards doing something about the exploitative capitalist system (as Milton symbolically does by burning down the Initech building, his place of work where he’s mistreated so badly as to work for no paycheck, in Office Space), Lester lets those energies of his be distracted by and redirected towards the immature grafitication of his libido. Such is the typical liberal mindset. Tom Hanks’s Charlie Wilson is similarly hedonistic in a movie that glorifies using the mujahideen to weaken the Soviet Union, ultimately leading to the Taliban.

Because of this liberal acquiescence towards not just the gratification of desire, but also to self-absorption and to the bland and the conformist (instead of rising up in solidarity with one’s fellow workers to overturn the system), we shouldn’t be surprised to see the Burnhams’ new next-door neighbours as having a head of the house with fascist tendencies. Recall that even the Jims, the gay couple on the other side of the Burnhams’ house, are also fully enmeshed in bland bourgeois conformism, the kind that would tolerate, if grudgingly, such fascist tendencies.

Note what Stalin once said back in the 1920s: “Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie. These organisations do not negate, but supplement each other. They are not antipodes, they are twins. Fascism is an informal political bloc of these two chief organisations; a bloc, which arose in the circumstances of the post-war crisis of imperialism, and which is intended for combating the proletarian revolution. The bourgeoisie cannot retain power without such a bloc. It would therefore be a mistake to think that ‘pacifism’ signifies the liquidation of fascism. In the present situation, ‘pacifism’ is the strengthening of fascism with its moderate, Social-Democratic wing pushed into the forefront.”

American liberalism, especially ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the age of the Clintons, is to the right of social democracy, making it even closer to fascism. We thus shouldn’t be surprised at the contemporary liberal embrace of Ukrainian fascists, as well as liberals’ enabling of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

To get back to Lester’s watching of the cheerleader dance in the school gym, we must keep in mind that, from his point of view, Angela is too far away from him to be seen in any detail and therefore to become the object of so sudden and intense an infatuation with her. In that uniform and all made up, she hardly looks any different from his daughter, apart from Angela’s blonde hair and Jane’s brown hair. It’s thus easy to see how he can go from unconsciously lusting after Jane to consciously lusting after Angela.

Since it’s his own daughter he so incestuously and shamefully wants, that is, his own flesh and blood, this lust is symbolically narcissistic, as is his habitual masturbation. This ‘having sex with oneself’ is in turn symbolic of his narcissistic self-absorption and solipsism, which brings us back to my point about the liberal mindset: one is too egoistic to care about the problems of the rest of the world in a meaningful way, thus enabling fascism to creep into our world.

So underneath the surface of physical beauty and the desire to have it, and other sources of superficial happiness, is a moral decay. Hence, the name of the movie, referring to a flower of surface beauty, but with root rot.

Examples of this superficial beauty or happiness hiding a deeper ugliness or unhappiness include Carolyn’s embrace of toxic positivity: first, she–being a real estate agent–chants the affirmation, “I will sell this house today,” then after all the work she’s put into cleaning the house and trying to sell it, failing to do so with client after client, she bawls like a baby at her failure.

Another example is Angela’s physical beauty masking her ugly, narcissistic personality. She constantly bad-mouths Ricky as a “mental-boy” and others whom she imagines to be envying her for her ‘success’ as a model, shouting “Cunt!” at one of them. She isn’t even the sexually experienced hottie she presents herself to be.

There are also instances of ugliness or misery that…could be seen…as masking beauty or happiness, or at least they are presented in the film as such or as possibly so. Col. Fitts’ homophobia is an ugliness that masks what is finally revealed at the end of the film: his suppressed homosexual feelings that he hides through reaction formation. If he’d stop hating himself for those feelings and be honest about hem, he might see a beauty in himself and find true happiness.

Ricky has a reputation for being mentally ill, since his father, the colonel, has had him put in psychiatric hospitals, and also because Ricky has an odd habit of filming things he thinks are beautiful, but which most people would never deem as such–a dead bird, a plastic bag drifting in the wind (Ball’s apparent inspiration to write American Beauty), and a homeless woman frozen to death. Actually, to get to know him, he’s one of the most laid-back guys ever.

So there’s a recurring theme of people or things not being what they seem. In fact, as time went on, people came to realize that this movie isn’t what it seemed: not so deep, not even really finding beauty in the unexpected.

As I’ve been trying to argue here, the acts of rebellion–against bosses, against a domineering wife, against appropriate expressions of sexuality (either those genuinely appropriate or merely deemed so)–aren’t the edifying ones they’re presented as. Finally, the sentimentalized ending, portraying a redeemed, angelic Lester looking over his neighbourhood from heaven, right after his getting a bullet in his head and all the other awful things I’ll discuss below, seems terribly inappropriate.

And yet these inappropriate and trivial themes make sense in a film that, intentionally or not, allegorizes liberal self-absorption as paving the way for fascist violence. Since we’ve seen these things happen in real life in the decades since the release of American Beauty, perhaps these trivialities aren’t so inappropriate after all.

When Lester first sees Angela in that cheerleader dance–what, as I said above, was too far away to be seen in any significant detail, and thus was just any teen girl as a variation on Jane–he’s seeing, as a displacement of Jane and therefore of his own flesh and blood, a metaphorical mirror of himself, a Lacanian ideal-I. His drive later on to exercise, lift weights, and smoke Ricky’s pot (to be cool), to be desirable to Angela, is part of his drive to live up to the ideal-I, for desire is the desire of the Other, for recognition by the Other, to be desired by the Other.

Just as Angela is a mirror reflection of Lester’s narcissistic ideals, so is Ricky, Lester’s “hero” for quitting his catering job so insouciantly so he and Lester can smoke pot outside the building where a party is being held for Carolyn and other real estate agents like “King” Buddy Kane (played by Peter Gallagher and who incidentally is her mirror reflection of her narcissistic ideals, her ideal-I). It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that Lester, in imitation of his teen hero, should quit his job so insouciantly, too.

The point is that with Angela and Ricky as Lester’s two teen ideals, the metaphorical mirrors in whom he sees himself whenever he’s with either of them, he is, at heart, an overgrown teenager whose interactions with those two have reawakened his repressed immaturity. That’s what he means at the beginning of the movie when he says he’s “lost something,” but “it’s never too late to get it back.”

This immaturity of his shows itself not just in his predation on Angela, but also in his masturbating and fantasizing about her, his pot-smoking, his quitting of his media job to replace it with the low-paying, low-responsibility fry cook job, and in his impulsive buying of the 1970 Pontiac Firebird. And just as he’s planning on cheating on his wife with his feminine ideal-I, so is his wife going to cheat on him with her masculine ideal-I, the “King” of real estate.

To shift away from Lacanian to Jungian psychology, in Lester’s designs on Angela, he is symbolically connecting with his anima; in Carolyn’s desire to be with Buddy “the King,” she is connecting with her animus. Now, while normally such a connection, symbolic or not, with a repressed side of one’s psyche is a positive development in one’s mental health, Mr. and Mrs. Burnham’s narcissistic, self-absorbed motives vitiate the hopes of such improvements.

Lester sees himself in Angela and Ricky, and likes what he sees. Col. Fitts also sees himself (as we learn by the end of the film) in the two Jims at his front door when they introduce themselves to him and welcome him to the neighbourhood…but he does not like what he sees. He’s disgusted to realize that by ‘partners,’ the Jims do not mean ‘business partners,’ but partners in the bedroom. Lester’s lust and teen hero worship reflect his narcissism and immaturity; the colonel’s homophobia reflects his self-hate and shame.

The Jims’ welcome gift to the Fittses includes flowers, what are a motivic link to the rosa American beauty and the chopped-down sycamore tree. They’re an expression of love to be rejected.

Angela is Lester’s Jungian anima, Buddy is Carolyn’s Jungian animus. The Jims, and by extension what the colonel sees, however incorrectly, in Lester and in his son are his Jungian Shadow, the ego-dystonic part of himself (his suppressed homosexuality) that he’ll never accept…even up to when he kiss’d Lester ere he kill’d him.

Now, Ricky is Lester’s Shadow, but a Shadow the man eagerly integrates. One thing to remember in all of this is how Ricky goes from doing unwanted filming of Jane, initially upsetting her, to being her boyfriend. Ricky’s being Lester’s Shadow is thus all the more insightful…and disturbing…given what I said above about Lester’s desiring Angela as a displacement of his repressed incestuous feelings for his daughter.

In stark contrast to Lester’s nagging, domineering wife is the colonel’s timid, almost catatonic wife, Barbara (Janney). A housewife whose spotless house seems unbearably filthy and messy to her neurotic eyes, she seems to have mental problems rooted in, apart from the miseries of housekeeping and a borderline fascist husband, a near-nonexistent sex life. One imagines his copulating with her to conceive Ricky to have been nothing other than painful.

Ricky goes home one night to see his mom and dad in the living room watching TV. We should not be surprised to see her watching This is the Army, a movie only her husband would be interested in watching. Seeing military men on the screen, the colonel is looking in a metaphorical mirror, seeing his ideal-I as a macho he-man rather than the ‘Jim’ that he secretly is.

It’s significant that we see a shot of Ronald Reagan back in his acting days. As we know, it was Reagan who, with Thatcher in the 1980s, helped bring today’s neoliberalism into full force, with all that nonsense about ‘small government’ (translation: bust unions and cut taxes for the rich, but build up a large deficit, in no small part due to military spending) and the “free market.”

This shift to the right in the decades since then–with increased income inequality, the killing of welfare, the allowing of mergers and acquisitions in the American media so that now six corporations control 90% of it and therefore determine most of Americans’ access to information, and the economic instability since the Great Recession (to say nothing of the endless wars since 9/11)–has helped create the conditions that have resulted in the fascist leanings of the Trump administration, the use of Neo-Nazis in Ukraine to provoke a needless, avoidable war with Russia, and the Gaza genocide. Col. Fitts’s enjoyment of an army film with Reagan in it is, thus, most apt.

To get at the colonel’s own fascist leanings, something that can be found in a lot of people in the armies of many countries, we need only see the scene in the film when Ricky has taken Jane into his house and shown her his dad’s plate, on the back of which is a Nazi swastika in the centre. The colonel would easily see the putting of pink triangles on gay men as a good thing.

To return to Lester and Ricky smoking pot outside the building where the real estate party is happening, it’s interesting how Lester picks, of all subjects to be talking about with Ricky, the scene in Re-Animator when Dr. Carl Hill (played by David Gale), a decapitated, reanimated corpse, performs forced cunnilingus on Megan Halsey (played by Barbara Crampton)…or as Lester so crudely puts it, “the head goes down on that babe”. When we consider the age difference between the lecherous old doctor and pretty young Megan, it’s easy to see how Lester would identify with the doctor. Being “dead already,” Lester is something of a reanimated corpse himself.

When Lester later wants to buy more pot from Ricky, he’ll use “Re-Animator” as a code word for the pot so the colonel, in earshot, won’t know what the movie is meant to represent. Still, “Re-Animator” is an apt way to describe a substance Lester is using to bring himself back to life with, to bring back his lost youth and coolness.

During this scene, when the colonel has been washing his car by the road in front of his house, and he has seen Lester jogging with the Jims, he suspects that Lester is of similar sexual inclinations with them, and he is therefore a little uncomfortable with Lester going up to Ricky’s room to get “Re-Animator.” The colonel is seeing his own secret sexuality in everyone except himself.

Before that scene, the night when Lester and Carolyn have come home from the real estate party (and he’s still enjoying his buzz), Jane and Angela are there, the latter enjoying the narcissistic supply she’s getting from his sexual interest in her and wanting to encourage it. This is one of those moments when women have legitimate suspicions about the motives of a male writer (Ball) characterizing a pretty teenage girl returning the sexual curiosity of a man old enough to be her father, one she hardly knows, one with few charms of his own for her to be interested in.

Such a mutual sexual interest is utterly implausible. It’s a mere male sex fantasy, and a creepy one, at that.

As inappropriate as such a movie premise is, though, I find it fitting that Lester’s lustful motivation to work out over the rest of the year and to smoke pot is entangled with the colonel’s growing suspicions that his son is having a homosexual relationship with Lester, however incorrect they may be, leading ultimately to the colonel killing Lester. I see an allegory here of liberal self-absorption and pleasure-seeking leading to fascist violence, which wouldn’t have happened if that liberal energy had instead been used to fight for social justice.

We should consider, in this connection, the implications of Lester driving around in his car while smoking a joint and singing along with “American Woman.” From the lines he’s quoting in the scene, one would think he’d be reconsidering his creepy attraction to one underage American female in particular, but of course, he isn’t.

Other lines from the song that are not heard in this scene, but ones far more pertinent to the meaning of the song lyric, involve not needing the “war machines” or “ghetto scenes” of the US. The writer of the lyric and singer of the Guess Who, Burton Cummings, has denied that the song is political; but knowing the words quoted above, I’d say he’s just sheepishly trying to avoid offending his potential American audience and thus lower sales of the music.

In any case, it’s significant that Lester neither quotes the unmistakably political passage nor takes to heart the other parts of the song, those about the dangerously seductive allure of the US and what it stands for–politically, economically, and culturally. Such obliviousness, while singing along stoned, is key to understanding not just what’s wrong with the America that the film is satirizing, but also what’s wrong with the film itself.

In this scene, Lester personifies the liberal who indulges in pleasure (for his id) while paying lip service to an acknowledgement of the issues of injustice in the world (for his superego), by singing along to the song while stoned.

Later on, after Carolyn has dealt with her own sexual frustration by sleeping with Buddy in a hotel, he tells her about another way she can release her stress: by going to a firing range downtown and shooting a gun. Nothing, apart from sex, will make her feel more powerful, he promises her.

Later on, she’ll go there and fire a gun, finding it to be just as fulfilling as Buddy promised it would be. The gun is a phallic symbol, the firing of it obviously symbolic of orgasm. She feels so powerful shooting it, as opposed to the powerlessness of being in an unhappy, loveless marriage to an immature, irresponsible husband who is now forcing her to be the main breadwinner of the family. In her toxic positivity, she’d have no one rain on her parade, but he does so all the time.

This phallic symbolism is in turn symbolic of giving her a kind of power traditionally given only to men–hence, her fulfillment in firing the gun. If this interpretation seems offensively phallocentric to you, Dear Reader, then consider this aspect of the movie to be yet another of its many faults, as with the misogyny of Carolyn’s ‘bitchiness’ and the sympathetic portrayal of a lecherous ephebophiliac.

Yet another fault of American Beauty is the scene when Ricky, walking home with Jane, tells her about his having filmed a homeless woman who froze to death. Jane rightly notes how incomprehensible it’d be to film such an awful thing, but Ricky thinks “it was amazing.”

Ricky claims that the “amazing” thing about seeing the homeless woman’s dead, suffering face, its “beauty” is that “God is looking right at you. And if you’re careful, you can look right back.” Perhaps Ricky really is a psycho after all. Or maybe this is just the privileged bourgeois liberal mindset that doesn’t have to worry about freezing to death from having no home. Such people can afford to see “beauty” in the suffering of the poor.

Later, after taking her home and showing her his dad’s Nazi plate–again, with an attitude of mere curiosity, not moral repugnance–he shows her “the most beautiful thing [he’s] ever filmed”…that stupid image of the white plastic bag floating about in the wind, this insignificant image that Ball thought was so profound.

Ricky imagines that this meaningless bag, drifting in the air, is a sign that there’s “this entire life behind things…an incredibly benevolent force…” telling us there’s “no reason to be afraid. Ever.” Well, when you live in an upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhood, far away and safe from the horrors of Third World poverty, Zionist oppression, and other forms of the kind of imperialist violence that would soon lead to 9/11, you might believe in such a sentimentalized kind of divinity…even if your dad beats you from time to time.

It’s easy to see “so much beauty in the world…[that you] can’t take it…” if you don’t ever have to worry about freezing to death when homeless. Recall that even when his dad disowns him and kicks him out of the house for supposedly being gay, Ricky has no fears of homelessness; he’s even confident enough to take Jane with him, because he can simply sell dope to make ends meet.

This sentimentalized “God” that Ricky talks about is a variation on Carolyn’s toxic positivity, which is also represented in her cornball choices for music to listen to at dinner, much to the annoyance of Lester and Jane. Carolyn will play this phony upbeat music while complaining and bullying the two of them…hence, toxic positivity, as when Ricky sees “beauty” in a homeless corpse or a man with a bullet in his head.

In her bedroom, and after a family fight, Jane looks out her window and sees Ricky filming her again. Instead of feeling uncomfortable about it, she removes her shirt and bra for him. Since he is, as I mentioned above, Lester’s Shadow, and she is as underage as Angela, we can see how indirectly creepy her indulgence of Lester’s incestuous lust is–seen through Ricky’s camera.

And what happens immediately after? Ricky’s father barges into his bedroom and hits him, furious that Ricky sneaked into the room with the Nazi plate. Once again, we have a scene that allegorically juxtaposes overindulgence in physical pleasure with a fascist kind of repression. Though the filmmakers probably never intended this, we see in this scene how indulgent liberalism, contrary to popular belief, is often quite close–next door, even–to fascism.

After Lester, at his fast-food job by the drive-thru window, has caught Carolyn with Buddy in her Mercedes together and has put two and two together about them, she has to deal with her now-disintegrating marriage. Driving home on that rainy night, at the climax of the film, she is listening to a motivational tape telling her she’s “only a victim if [she chooses] to be a victim.” She also has her pistol for the firing range, a Glock 19, in one hand. Toxic positivity, in a nutshell.

Meanwhile, the colonel has become convinced that Ricky is having a sexual relationship with Lester, having seen the two together in the latter’s garage, the two of them positioned in a way that seems, from the colonel’s incomplete perspective, that Ricky is performing fellatio on Lester (actually, Ricky is bent over rolling a joint by Lester’s legs, while Lester is leaning back in a bowl chair).

This is the night that Lester is to be killed. Who will do it? Ricky, as suggested at the film’s beginning? Carolyn, with her Glock? Or the homophobic colonel? The answer is far from surprising; it’s disappointingly predictable…another plot weakness.

Jane and Angela are in the Burnhams’ house, arguing over whether or not Angela should let Lester have her. Jane not only objects to Angela screwing her dad (an indirect, displaced screwing of Jane, as I’ve described above), but also her talking about Jane’s presumably by-now-sexual relationship with Ricky (Lester’s Shadow, once again implying an indirect sexual relationship between father and daughter). It’s as though Jane can intuit her father’s unconscious desires for her, and also senses that his otherwise surface emotional distance from her is an unconscious reaction formation against those desires.

What’s striking here is how there are several sexual relationships going on, or appearing to be going on, or about to be going on, with varying levels of approval or disapproval. Ricky’s seeming gay relationship with Lester is looked on with horror by the colonel; Carolyn’s adultery with Buddy is accepted by Lester, since his relationship with her is “just for show”; Jane’s relationship with Ricky is regarded bawdily by Angela, who also rejects him as unfit for her, him being such a “psycho” and a “freak”; and Lester’s would-be sexual liaison-to-be with Angela is treated semi-sympathetically in the film, when this is the one that should be condemned the most, by far.

We’re about to see two families fragment into pieces over sexual relationships, real or imagined, actual or potential. Both mothers are going to end up alone: Barbara will lose Ricky from having been disowned by the colonel, who surely will be charged with Lester’s murder soon after this night ends, and therefore she’ll lose him, too; Carolyn will lose her husband and Jane, who’s going to run away with Ricky, since I doubt she’ll grieve much over her pig of a father, and Ricky probably won’t stick around long enough to learn that his dad is Lester’s killer. Carolyn can console herself with Buddy…to an extent.

And Lester, the selfish root cause of so much of this mayhem, gets to look down as an angel from heaven on the neighbourhood, full of “gratitude for every single moment of [his] stupid little life.” Toxic positivity, once again.

When Lester makes his move on Angela–who feels hurt and vulnerable after Ricky has called her “ordinary”–he’s taking advantage of her vulnerability…well, to take advantage of her. He’s being the consummate creep, a total sexual predator on a minor, and what does it take to get him to snap out of it and behave like a decent human being?

Just as he’s getting her out of her clothes, she tells him this is her first time to have sex.

She is no longer the sex goddess he’s imagined her to be. She’s just a child…like his daughter.

He now realizes, on at least some level, that he has repressed his incestuous feelings for Jane, and his repression has returned in the unrecognizable, displaced form of Angela. His guilt and shame have finally surfaced, and he cannot go through with having sex with her.

Does this sudden repentance redeem him, though? Of course not! He should have expelled from his mind the thought of having Angela from the very beginning, no less so than that of having his daughter. We all have dark desires in our private thoughts, even the best of us do; but the better among us will never act on those desires, not even entertain the idea of acting on them. That’s the difference between the Lesters and the decent people of the world.

What’s worse is that we now know that Spacey in real life acted on his dark desires, for example, getting drunk at a party back in 1986, and aggressively coming on to Anthony Rapp, then 14 when Spacey was 27. Since then, he’d been recognized as one of the most celebrated actors of recent times, just as Lester is portrayed sympathetically in the film, rather than condemned. Only since the #MeToo movement has Spacey been forced to take responsibility for his many gropings and sexual advances, just as American Beauty has been reassessed, its critical reputation having sunk. It’s sad when an actor of Spacey’s obvious, enormous talent is discovered to be someone to be looked down on rather than up to.

What should be considered a real low point in the film is how only at the end does Lester realize what he was doing was wrong, and instead of feeling and demonstrating a due amount of shame and remorse, he acts as though he’s on the cusp of nirvana, or to use a Catholic metaphor, he’s received sanctifying grace! Instead of feeing a great need to atone and earn forgiveness, he’s grateful for his “stupid little life.” That bullet in his brain is hardly a punishment, since as Ricky observes in amazement and near-religious awe, Lester’s facial expression shows bliss and peace of mind.

Just before the colonel, who feels shame for sexual feelings he needn’t blush at, pulls the trigger to kill Lester, the man who should be feeling shame for his inappropriate lust is looking lovingly at an old photo of himself, Carolyn, and Jane as a little girl. He feels great, as he’s told Angela, when he should be weeping at that photo and whispering “Sorry” to Jane, since his lust for Angela was redirected from his unconscious incestuous feelings for Jane.

Two families have been torn apart by lust and violence, and the movie has a liberal ‘feel good’ ending. This is what I mean by toxic positivity: just trivialize human suffering and imagine that some kind, gentle, and genial God is watching over everybody and judging nobody, not even judging those who surely deserve it.

Liberal self-absorption and overindulgence in pleasure, rather than rising up against our exploitative economic system, is what ultimately leads to fascism–just see what’s happened between the 2000s and 2025. The Burnhams and Fittses living next door to each other is apt. That American Beauty was celebrated before 9/11, then negatively reassessed after 9/11 and the Great Recession, is also apt, since the traumas caused by those two cataclysmic events have woken us out of our liberal torpor.

In a way, though, American Beauty is a most fitting satire of our contemporary lives, since the film embodies so many vices that ought to be satirized. We just have to refrain from sympathizing with Lester, for if we do sympathize with him, then the satire’s on us.

Analysis of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a 1958 novella by Truman Capote. It was adapted into a film by Blake Edwards in 1961, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, with Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam, Buddy Ebsen, and Mickey Rooney. The film differs from the novella in many significant ways, as will be discussed below.

The novella is so short, not even a hundred pages, to go by the edition I have, that ‘novella’ seems to describe a story too long for BAT, and ‘short story’ is too short for it. Since, as is the case with my copy, the story is often published with three short stories–“House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory“–I’ll make a number of references to these stories whenever they share comparable or contrasting themes with BAT.

The novella is as short as it is, but the film is almost two hours long, suggesting a much longer story. Neal’s character, Mrs. Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson, is nowhere to be found in Capote’s story.

The unnamed narrator of the novella is named Paul Varjak (Peppard) in the film. He and Holly Golightly (Hepburn) develop a love relationship that is absent in Capote’s story (in fact, true to the writer’s own sexuality, the unnamed narrator–it is implied–is gay, therefore making his story at least somewhat autobiographical, since the narrator is as much a writer as Capote was).

The regrettably racist caricature of a Japanese, in the klutzy Mr. Yunioshi–played by Rooney in yellowface–isn’t in Capote’s story, either, though Yunioshi is referred to with a racial slur–a “Jap”–by Joe Bell, a bartender near the beginning of the story.

The film ends with a typical Hollywood rom-com cliché, with Varjak getting the girl and kissing her in the rain; while in Capote’s story, there is a far more ambiguous and uncertain ending, with Holly leaving the narrator and going off, out of New York City and into the world.

As for the casting of Holly for the film adaptation, Capote was hoping for Marilyn Monroe to play the part, and he was angry that the part ended up going to Hepburn (though he came to like her performance, all the same). Given that Holly is a romantic dreamer of a girl, chasing wealthy men, I find Capote’s preference of Monroe to play her strange and ironic, when Monroe, having married Arthur Miller at one point, demonstrated left-wing sympathies that may have contributed to her having been murdered, as opposed to the official suicide story of her death. The only thing Monroe had in common with Holly was the blonde hair (well, bleach-blonde, in Monroe’s case), and so brunette Hepburn had blonde streaks added to her hair.

The opening scene in the novella is nowhere to be found in the film, which during the credits shows Holly window-shopping outside a Tiffany’s store. We come to understand that Holly loves being in Tiffany’s because the luxury jewelry store is the only place where she can feel a sense of safety, peace, and calm in her turbulent world. She imagines that nothing bad can ever happen there.

She denies that she likes Tiffany’s for the jewelry (Capote, page 35). While it may not literally be the jewelry that she likes so much about the store, surely it’s the sense of a luxurious life that Tiffany’s represents that gives her that safe, serene feeling.

Holly is a socialite who, as a kind of “American geisha,” dates wealthy men and accepts cash gifts from them; she also aspires to marry such a man. If it isn’t about the wealth that makes Tiffany’s so appealing to her, then why is it that store, of all stores, that gives her that feeling of peace and security?

Material abundance, of the sort that a luxury jewelry store can easily represent, can give one a great and obvious sense of security, of safety and therefore of calm, peace, and serenity, that nothing bad can happen. Thus, Tiffany’s is a capitalist paradise. After all, money isn’t everything, but having one’s basic material needs taken care of certainly gives a sense of peace of mind, so material abundance ensures that peace of mind all the more.

Why does Holly want to “wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s” (page 35)? Why breakfast at Tiffany’s, which at the time sold only jewelry, and not food (the Blue Box Café first opened in 2017)? Consider the origin of the word ‘breakfast’–a breaking of a fast. So it’s the ending of a period of going without food.

The implication here, symbolically understood, is that one is going from rags to riches, from fasting or starving to abundance, all in one fell swoop. Such has always been Holly’s ambition: to go from her humble beginnings as Lulamae Barnes, married in her teens to a veterinarian named Doc Golightly (Ebsen) in Texas, to her now glamorous life in New York City, renamed Holly Golightly and chasing rich men to subsidize her now high-maintenance lifestyle, and thence, she hopes, to marriage and solid security with such a rich man, who would be Tiffany’s personified.

What we have here is a traditional woman’s version of the American Dream: social mobility through marrying up. The story takes place before the Sexual Revolution, and so women were still chained to the fetters of traditional sex roles, meaning they had to get their access to wealth through successful men…if they were young, pretty, and desirable enough…which Holly assuredly is, at the age of about eighteen or nineteen.

Beyond this dream of chasing wealth, though, is the pursuit of what Lacan would have called an ultimately unfulfillable desire. Tiffany’s symbolizes a nirvana one can never attain, though Holly will never stop trying, romantic dreamer that she is. She can never settle for an ordinary life, and that’s why she leaves New York City and the unnamed narrator for the unknown at the end of Capote’s novella. She may not have married José Ybarra-Jaeger (José da Silva Pereira in the film, played by José Luis de Vilallonga), the rich Brazilian diplomat, but she does go to Brazil in search of a similar dream.

This endless seeking out of more and more to satisfy a desire that can never be satisfied, is not only the essence of what drives Holly to do what she does (symbolically, what Lacan would have called jouissance), but also her unfulfillable desire can be paralleled to capitalism’s endless pursuit of profit (i.e., the Marxist notion of surplus value and Lacan’s plus-de-jouir, or “surplus enjoyment”). Hence, Tiffany’s can be seen as a capitalist paradise.

It is common for people to dream about striking it rich rather than doing the hard work of fighting for workers’ rights and reducing income inequality. Hence, even in today’s world of the obscenely wealthy few vs the impoverished many, we still have all this simping for billionaires going on. Holly can be seen to represent such people, on at least some level.

We can contrast her lifestyle among the affluent in New York City with the uniformly poor in “House of Flowers,” set in Third World Haiti, “A Diamond Guitar,” set in the austerity of an American prison, and “A Christmas Memory,” about a family so poor that the narrator, when a boy and close to his older female cousin, had to save up every penny they could get over the year to pay for the ingredients they needed to make Christmas fruitcakes (page 144). While Holly dreams of the security that comes from wealth, so many others just struggle to survive.

Capote’s novella begins with bar owner Joe Bell telling the narrator about photos of a black man holding a wooden sculpture of a woman’s head, and the woman looks exactly like Holly. Yunioshi is the one who found the wooden head while traveling in Africa, and he informed Bell of it.

It seems that Holly’s been to Africa some time since the end of the narrator’s story about her. Bell imagines she’s “got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.” (page 8) In this incident, we see again the contrast between being a girl from the First World Who aspires to wealth, and people in poverty with much more humble dreams, as those in Capote’s aforementioned three stories.

The story about her in Africa causes the narrator to recall his story about her from years before, back in the 1940s. Though she had dreams of wealth, she lived in a modest brownstone apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Yunioshi, in an apartment on the top floor, complains about Holly ringing his bell and waking him up to open the door for her.

This scene corresponds with the beginning of the film after the opening credits, though as I said above, the novella doesn’t portray Yunioshi as a spastic racist Asian stereotype, bumping into things, and having buck teeth sticking out of his face. Blake Edwards films are full of slapstick, but it’s sad that he stooped to this low for cheap laughs. In all fairness to Rooney, though, when he realized how offensive his performance was, he expressed the deepest remorse and publicly apologized to Asian communities. Edwards was similarly contrite.

Anyway, the narrator has seen her for the first time during this altercation with Yunioshi (page 11). He describes her as having “an almost breakfast-cereal air of health” (page 12). In this context, we note that a man who’s just “pick[ed] up the check” for her, one of those male pursuers of hers who pay for things for her in the hopes of getting…something…back from her. This picking up the check is the so-to-speak breakfast–the end of her poverty–that she hopes will one day lead to Tiffany’s.

From then on, she isn’t ringing Yunioshi’s bell, but the narrator’s, and they haven’t met yet (page 13). He learns more about her nonetheless, such as her cat (which is never named) and her playing the guitar, something she sometimes does sitting out on the fire escape as her hair dries (page 15). We’re reminded of the scene in the film when Hepburn is there, strumming and singing “Moon River,” with music by Henry Mancini.

When the narrator finally does meet her, it’s out by his window. Coming into his room, she explains that she’s trying to get away from another suitor. She notes the narrator’s resemblance to her brother, Fred, and so, feeling a brother transference, she wants to call him Fred. Note how she doesn’t go by her real name (Lulamae), she doesn’t call the narrator by his real name (which we never learn in the novella, and as I mentioned above, is given as Paul Varjak in the film), and the cat is never given a name (except “Cat” in the film).

At the end of the film, Holly contemplates their no-name status when justifying to Varjak why nobody belongs to anybody, and saying that she doesn’t know who she is. Namelessness, thus, represents social alienation, between people and in one’s own species-essence.

Linked with this alienation from within and without is how OJ Berman (Balsam) characterizes Holly: “She is a phony,” and “She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony.” (page 27) Berman is a Hollywood talent agent who has groomed Holly in the hopes of making her into a movie star. She believes all the nonsense she says about herself, and his grooming of her, which has included French lessons to help her get rid of her original hillbilly accent from Texas, has been part of the process of creating her phony personality as a café society girl. (page 29)

To get back to her meeting of the narrator, he tells her he’s a writer. He also tells her that it is Thursday, which reminds her that she has to go to Sing Sing and meet a mafia man incarcerated there named Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. She’ll get the “weather report” from him: a coded message to transmit information about such criminal activities as the narcotics smuggling that she’ll get entangled in and arrested for towards the end of the story. She’ll give that “weather report” to Sally’s lawyer, Oliver O’Shaughnessy, every week.

As I’ve pointed out in many other posts, I regard mafia men in movies and fiction as representative of capitalists in general, since as a Marxist I regard capitalism’s accumulation of surplus value to be a theft of the value that workers put into the production of commodities; therefore, capitalism in general is criminal activity, whether legalized or not.

Holly’s regular involvement with Sally, therefore, is part of her own simping for the rich, which in turn is part of her dream of finding that peace and security that comes from wealth, as represented by Tiffany’s. The chaotic and troubling world from which she wishes to escape into a capitalist paradise is the capitalist hell of poverty, which she naturally fears. One is reminded of what Belle says to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol as an explanation for his own pursuit of wealth: she says to him, “You fear the world so much” (Dickens, page 50).

To get back to OJ Berman and whatnot, he first appears at one of Holly’s many parties, in which she hobnobs with rich and socially important people like him. In the film, you can spot a couple of Asians in the background, extras with no dialogue: they seem to be there as if to say, ‘Look, the filmmakers are not saying that all Asians are like Yunioshi.’ The inclusion of these two non-caricatured Asians hardly compensates for Rooney’s performance, though.

One presumably wealthy man that Holly shows interest in is Rusty Trawler. He’s thrice divorced, but he’ll end up marrying someone else (page 66). Rusty also seems to be a Nazi sympathizer, for according to a set of clippings from gossip columns about Holly and Rusty, “he attended rallies in Yorkville“, he’d “sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn’t” (recall that the narrator’s reminiscences about her take place during WWII, when her brother Fred is serving in the army), and Winchell always referred to [Rusty] as a Nazi (page 33).

Yes, Holly, in her pursuit of that capitalist paradise of peace, symbolized by Tiffany’s, is even willing to marry a fascist if he has money. Supporters of capitalism are willing to lean that far right, if need be.

Her wish to marry money runs deeper than mere gold-digging, though. The transactional relationship between men and women as a result of sex roles (he gives her money in exchange for at least the hope of sex) is, of course, profoundly alienating, exacerbated by modern capitalism. She opts for this transactional relationship with men (while also having something of a bisexual attraction to women, using the word “dyke” in a non-derogatory sense, and hinting at this sexuality in the stripper scene in the film) because, as I mentioned above, deep down, she cannot relate to people in a deep, meaningful way.

Her platonic friendship with the narrator, therefore, is an ideal escape from the usual ‘I give you something, so you give me something back’ trap between men and women, because recall, it is strongly implied, if you’re paying attention as you read, that the narrator is gay. Holly observes that if a man likes neither baseball nor horses, “he don’t like girls.” (page 34) The narrator likes neither; he’s even tried riding a horse with her in the park (pages 77-78), and he loses control of his mare and falls off. Also, when saying she’ll never rat out Sally Tomato in exchange for the cops dropping the charges against her in her connection with him, she addresses the narrator as “Maude,” slang at the time for a gay man or a male prostitute (page 91).

He has no sexual interest in her, a girl whom, recall, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play, therefore Holly’s something of a sex goddess. He is, nonetheless, fascinated with her in the way a gay man might be with a beautiful woman or a talented female singer like Judy Garland, that is, adoring her for aesthetic reasons rather than sexual ones.

To get back to Rusty, when the narrator has learned that he’s married for the fifth time, according to a newspaper (page 66), he assumes that Holly is the bride, and he’s most unhappy to have learned of this. Later, he realizes that it isn’t Holly whom Rusty has married, but Mag Wildwood, a fellow socialite, friend and sometimes roommate of Holly’s, and a model with a stutter (page 67). He goes “limp with relief” to have learned of this.

On a Monday in October 1943, he is with Holly in Joe Bell’s bar drinking Manhattans (pages 47-48). Then, after lunch in a cafeteria in the park, they avoid the zoo, since Holly can’t stand to see anything in a cage; oddly, for Christmas she’ll buy him a beautiful bird cage and make him promise never to put a living thing in it. (page 53) She sees herself as a free bird.

On that Monday in October, they pass a Woolworth’s, and she wants him to go in with her and steal something (page 49). He goes in reluctantly, and she eyes some Halloween masks. The two of them put on masks and walk out of the store wearing them. After they’ve run off for a few blocks (they’ll wear the masks all the way home), she tells him how she used to steal things when she had to or wanted to, and she still does it every now and then. The scene is replicated in the movie.

That a young woman who attracts wealthy men in the hopes of one day marrying one, and who feels peace of mind only in a luxury jewelry store, would engage in shoplifting from time to time makes perfect sense to me. She embodies the self-centered materialism of capitalism; capitalists accumulate their wealth by stealing the fruits of workers’ labour.

In the film, the shoplifting scene comes right after a scene with the two in Tiffany’s, then in the public library. Note the contrast between the private property of the jewelry store and the 5 and 10 store where they steal the masks. Sandwiched in between in a place for the public, one she significantly doesn’t know about. As a lover of all things connected with capitalism, Holly is fully aware of those places that are private property, but she’s a bit of a fish out of water in public places.

Eventually, that dull, unromantic life she’s tried to run away from tries to find her and get her back. Such a life is personified in Doc Golightly (Ebsen), who’s been snooping around near the brownstone building and getting the narrator’s attention (pages 57-58). This is after the narrator has had a falling-out with her, over a slur he’s made about her way of getting money from men (page 56).

Doc is a personification of the cage she never wants to be trapped in. His appearance and the falling-out between her and the narrator sandwich her bird cage gift that he puts in front of her door: then she rejects it as much as he has, having put it “on a sidewalk ashcan waiting for the garbage collector.” (page 56), then it’s taken back by him into his room. She’ll reject Doc the cage again when he tries to take her back with him to Texas.

Oddly, her revulsion against animals in cages is disregarded by the moviemakers when we see a shot most deliberately taken of a bird in a cage in Holly’s apartment, early on in the film, during that party scene. We see Balsam as Berman looking at the bird. Is Holly supposed to be enigmatically contradicting herself here? Or is it a wish-fulfillment on the filmmakers’ part to put Holly in a cage, as we see when she decides to stay with Varjak at the end of the movie?

When the narrator first meets Doc, he imagines that the man, being so much older than Holly, is her father rather than her husband (page 59). Doc married her when she was just going on fourteen, making her the stepmother of kids he’s had from a previous marriage, kids older than she was! (page 60) Doc claims she had no reason to be unhappily married to him, as his daughters did all the housework and she didn’t have to lift a finger (pages 60-61).

As a horse doctor, he presumably has been able to provide a decent life for her. But the point is that, beyond how cringe we today would find such a marriage to a girl so young, Holly is a romantic who wants to rise up above the mediocre and the ordinary, to the heights that capitalism promises (but rarely delivers) and to those pleasures that jouissance wants (and never fully delivers). Hence, she left him, and despite his pleas for her to come back, she never will.

Still, when Madame Sapphia Spanella, another tenant in the brownstone, sees Holly and Doc embracing, she assumes he is another of Holly’s johns and is morally appalled. Holly thought she’d see her brother Fred before being surprised by Doc (page 64). Later, after Rusty’s married Mag, Holly learns of Fred’s having been killed in action, and she smashes everything in her apartment in a rage of grief. Spanella is as horrified now to know of this tantrum as she was scandalized before with her and Doc. As it turns out, not everyone in the past of otherwise self-centred Holly is contemptuously tossed aside. Elsewhere, now that Rusty is unavailable, she now has a new rich man: the Brazilian diplomat, José.

After Fred’s death and the arrival of José into her life, Holly is changed in many ways. She’s nowhere near as sociable as she once was, José has replaced Mag as her roommate, she generally never mentions Fred anymore, and she no longer calls the narrator “Fred” (page 71). The only times she ever leaves her apartment are on Thursdays to see Sally in Sing Sing.

Because she imagines she’ll soon marry José, she’s developed a “keen sudden un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking,” thus making her buy a number of things that it doesn’t seem quite like her to buy. She’s bought two Gothic ‘easy’ chairs from the William Randolph Hearst estate, and given his tendency to have flirted with fascism around this time, though, perhaps this purchase in particular isn’t all that un-Holly-like (page 71). She’s also trying to learn Portuguese so she’ll be comfortable living in Rio when her husband-to-be takes her there (page 72).

Now, since Holly is taken to having rich men pay her way, whether they be husbands or not, it is apposite to point out that in the movie, Varjak also has someone paying his way. This is the wealthy Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson (Neal), his “decorator.” The inclusion of this character has a way of equalizing things between the sexes; it’s as if the filmmakers, in spite of preferring to put Holly in the ‘cage’ of a relationship with Varjak, don’t wish to leave the receiving of cash in exchange for sex to be stereotypically the exclusive domain of ‘gold digging women.’

After the fiasco with the horses, the narrator finds “photographs of Holly…front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror.” (page 79) She’s been arrested in a narcotics bust connected with Sally Tomato (page 80).

The narrator imagines it must be Spanella who is to blame, given how she always complains to the authorities about Holly in a way we see Yunioshi do in the film (Yunioshi is also the one in the film who gets the cops on Holly for the drugs).

Joe Bell, who also likes Holly, wants the narrator to call her rich friends to help her out (page 83). The narrator tries Rusty and Mag, who turn on Holly, not wanting their names at all to be associated with her. Calling Doc in Texas is out of the question–Holly would never want that. Then the narrator tries Berman, who says she’ll be out on bail (pages 84-85).

When the narrator goes to find her in her apartment, though, she isn’t there. He does find a man in her home–José’s cousin, who has a message from José for her (pages 85-86). He wants to break off the marriage plans, because, like Rusty and Mag, José doesn’t want his name, family, and reputation to be stained by association with a girl mixed up with drugs. The narrator finds Holly in a hospital room, where she’s been since the arrest. There he reads her José’s letter (pages 87-88).

Now, she’s heartbroken to know that José has dumped her, that he’s just another “rat like Rusty” (page 88), but she’s not going to let that stop her from going to Brazil anyway. The narrator tries in all futility to stop her from jumping bail, for she won’t “waste a perfectly fine ticket” (page 90), and she won’t testify against Sally Tomato, even though she admits that she is “rotten to the core” (page 91).

I’m not interested in the sentimentalized, rom-com Hollywood ending of the film, so I’ll stick with the novella’s ending. Holly really does leave New York and the gay narrator, and she even gets rid of the cat, putting it outside the car taking her to the airport and telling the cat to “f___ off!” when it won’t leave her. (page 95)

Some may think of Holly favourably as a feminist free spirit for leaving the narrator, as opposed to her choosing to stay in her ‘cage’ in a patriarchal relationship with straight Varjak. But when we read the ending of Capote’s version, in which she isn’t freeing herself from a relationship with a gay friend–who has no wish to dominate her as a husband might–and where she doesn’t want to take responsibility for her involvement in a mafia racket or even for her cat, we realize that the narrator is right when he says to her, “You are a bitch.” (page 95)

She tosses the cat aside because of her fear of commitment, her wish never to be chained to anyone or anything, not caring at all about who or what she’s hurting as a result of abandoning them–Doc, the cat, or her friend the narrator. She is just that self-centred, on an endless quest to satisfy her insatiable thirst for jouissance, that surplus-value plus-de-jouir that connects her desires with capitalism, hence her trip to Rio when she’s lost her José.

Still, the narrator will find the abandoned cat and take care of it (page 97). He gets a postcard from her, saying she’s been to Buenos Aires, liking it there far more than Brazil. She’s “joined at the hip with duhvine Señor. Love? Think so.” He’s married and with “7 brats,” though (page 97). In other words, she’ll use him for his money, for as long as the relationship lasts. Then, as we learned from the beginning of the novella, she’ll pursue her elusive jouissance somewhere in Africa. The narrator just hopes that Holly, like the cat that in many ways is a double of her, has found a place where she truly belongs (page 98).

As I said above, the three stories in my edition of the book that fallow BAT—“House of Flowers,” A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory”–all share certain themes with the main story, and I think they’re all worth mentioning before I end this analysis. These themes include: platonic relationships and/or friendships with implied homosexual elements, the breaking-away and ending of said friendships with the aim of attaining personal freedom, and whether or not marriage is a kind of prison.

In the first of these three stories, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ottilie is a beautiful, strong-willed prostitute, parallel to Holly as an “American geisha.” But where Holly hopes to marry a rich man and experience the capitalist paradise of peace and freedom from the “mean reds,” a paradise symbolized by Tiffany’s, Ottllie’s marriage to the aptly-named Royal Bonaparte, a marriage in the Third World, a harsh contrast to the opulence of New York City, it is a nightmare in which she is tyrannized by her new grandmother-in-law, the also aptly-named Old Bonaparte…a witch. Her new home is the cage Ottilie is trapped in, “like a house of flowers” (page 109).

In such historically impoverished countries as India and China, it was common for women to be treated like abject slaves by their mothers-in-law, since in a patrilineal society, a married woman leaves the family of her flesh and blood to live with her husband’s family, who don’t regard her as their own flesh and blood. So, the contrast between the First World and the Third World is apparent in regard to a woman’s marriage: one as, on the one hand, at least a dream of marrying up into Tiffany’s heaven, vs on the other hand, marrying into patriarchal hell.

In “A Diamond Guitar,” it’s been said that Mr. Schaeffer is parallel to Holly for being, like her, a dreamer; but I must disagree and say that he corresponds to the narrator of BAT, and that it’s Tico Feo who corresponds to Holly, and for several reasons. Tico Feo is a young man with blond hair (like Holly, young and blonde); the boy tells a lot of lies (as Holly is a “phony”), he plays the guitar, as she does, and like her, he eventually frees himself from the Alabama prison he and Schaeffer are stuck in (and just as Holly jumps bail and leaves the narrator in NYC, so does Tico Feo abandon Schaeffer in the prison).

Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship isn’t at all physical, but “they were as lovers” (page 130), just as Holly and the narrator of BAT have a platonic relationship, but he is so fascinated with her as almost to be in love with her. The narrator in BAT expresses himself artistically as a writer; Schaeffer does so by carving dolls.

In “A Christmas Memory,” there’s another platonic male-to-female relationship, but this time in the form of a boy and his much elder cousin. Both characters are unnamed, though she calls him “Buddy,” and he, the narrator, calls her simply “my friend.” This kind of naming and non-naming is similar to how the unnamed narrator of BAT is addressed as “Fred” by Holly (recall, not her real name, either), implying a transference of her brother-to-sister relationship with the real Fred that parallels the familial relationship of cousins “Buddy” and his “friend.”

So we can see a number of parallel themes and motifs in all these stories, including also Capote’s autobiographical elements in at least three of the four stories, through the implied homosexuality in the narrator of BAT, the platonic homosexuality of Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship, and how “Buddy,” the boy in “A Christmas Memory,” dramatizes much of Capote’s childhood. We see the superiority of platonic relationships over transactional, sexual ones, and we also see the yearning to escape from one’s cages–literal ones, metaphorical ones, and ones made of flowers.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, London, Penguin Essentials, 1961

Analysis of ‘Sleuth’

Sleuth is a 1972 mystery film directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz, with a script by Anthony Shaffer, based on his 1970 Tony Award-winning play. The film stars Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, both of whom got Oscar nominations. Mankiewicz’s final film, Sleuth received overwhelmingly positive reviews, with an Oscar nomination for Best Director, too, as well as one for Best Original Score.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, a link to the script, and links to the full movie (in case any of them are pulled from YouTube).

Hints to what the dominant themes of the film are–theatricality, deception, mind games–are already given during the opening credits…provided one already knows better. Fictional actors’ names are listed, meant for roles that do not exist onscreen. These include ‘Alec Cawthorne’ as Inspector Doppler, who is actually played by a disguised Michael Caine; also, ‘John Matthews’ as Detective Sergeant Tarrant, ‘Eve Channing’ as Marguerite Wyke, and ‘Teddy Martin’ as Police Constable Higgs, all characters only referred to by Andrew Wyke (Olivier) and Milo Tindle (Caine), the only two people ever seen throughout the film. The reason for this deception was that the production team wanted to reveal as little as possible to the audience to maximize the element of surprise.

Another hint of the theme of deception at the end of the opening credits (as well as at the end of the film) is the framing of the visuals in a theatre stage with curtains. It’s hardly necessary to show such a framing in the cinema–as opposed to a stage production of Sleuth–unless the very idea is to stress that what we’re seeing isn’t real.

The film begins with Tindle driving into Wyke’s country manor house, a vast area of property indicating how obviously wealthy Wyke, a bestselling writer of crime fiction, is. That Wyke considers the enjoyment of his genre of writing to be “the normal recreation of noble minds” is a further association of him with the aristocracy, something against which middle-class Tindle, who “[doesn’t] know very much about noble minds,” will be sharply contrasted.

As Tindle is walking about outside trying to find Wyke, he can hear the latter reciting his prose aloud into a tape recorder. Wyke is among hedgerows designed like a labyrinth, and Tindle cannot locate the voice until Wyke moves some hedge, which has been like a wall separating the two men.

When they meet, introduce themselves, and shake hands, Wyke welcomes Tindle to “Cloak Manor,” the name of his home and yet another early indication of the film’s theme of subterfuge.

Wyke notes how “all detectives were titled,” as is the sleuth of his novels, Lord Merridew. His sleuth, far cleverer than the comparatively dimwitted and frequently baffled police detectives of his novels, represents an idealized version of his egotistical, elitist self. This is so in spite of Wyke’s claim that we are living in a “classless society,” a bizarre assertion to be made in capitalist England, when not even any of the socialist states of the twentieth century, for all of their accomplishments, ever achieved classlessness, let alone the giving-up of money or the withering-away of the state.

Snobbish Wyke would never allow his fiction to be adapted for television, which for him is “no recreation for noble minds.” Wyke leads Tindle inside, where he is now to be acquainted with Wyke’s many automata, including a sailor named Jolly Jack Tar, who laughs at Wyke’s jokes. These automata, or fake people, once again reinforce the themes of theatricality and deception.

Finally, Wyke gets to the point of why he’s invited Tindle to his home. He knows that Tindle has been having a sexual relationship with his wife, Marguerite, for some time, and so he, in all bluntness, asks about Tindle’s wish to marry her.

Normally, a man would be furious to learn that his wife has made him a cuckold, especially a man as narcissistic as Wyke obviously is. Nonetheless, he pretends not to be angry, and instead acts as though Tindle’s affair with her is an excellent opportunity for Wyke to get rid of her by having Tindle take her off his hands. Then, Wyke can be free to live with his mistress, a girl named Téa.

Wyke needs first to know of Tindle’s family background. Tindle’s answer indicates humble beginnings: his mother was a farmer’s daughter from Hereford, and his father was an Italian watchmaker who immigrated to England in the 1930s and anglicized his original name, Tindolini.

Now, just as Wyke has disingenuously claimed that ours is a “classless society,” so does he claim that, in response to learning of Tindle’s (lapsed) Catholic background, “we’re all liberals here,” and that Wyke has no prejudice against Catholics, lapsed or not. Here, “Catholic” can be seen as a metonym for ‘Italian,’ an ethnicity against which Wyke is decidedly prejudiced, as he’ll soon demonstrate.

Changing the family name from Tindolini to Tindle was meant to make the family become English, something Wyke doesn’t seem to think is possible. The fact that Tindle’s father went broke from being nothing more than a watchmaker reinforces the class divide between him and Wyke, but it must be emphasized that none of this divide makes Tindle in any way a proletarian, and it’s important to understand this fact to make sense of the class analysis of this film.

Tindle owns two hairdressing salons, one in South Kensington called Casa Tindolini, and another in Brighton. Therefore, Tindle is petite bourgeois, as contrasted with Wyke as a member of the gentry. So the nature of the class conflict as allegorized in Sleuth is not between capitalist and worker, but between big capitalist and little capitalist; and as Marx once observed, “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, p. 929)

The film’s liberal bias is to have us see Tindle as the poor underdog, and therefore to have us sympathize with him. If we’re paying attention, though, by the time we get to the end of the movie, we’ll realize that Tindle is every bit as cruel in his humiliating games as Wyke is. It’s the nature of the bourgeoisie, petite or haute, to step either on those below them (Wyke), or to step on those above them in their ascendancy to the top, as Tindle is attempting to do in either cuckolding Wyke, getting money for Wyke’s jewels, or playing games of revenge on him.

Now, I mentioned earlier that Wyke pretends not to mind Tindle’s sleeping with Marguerite, but sooner or later we have to see Wyke’s narcissistic injury come out. He makes a few crude references to her copulating with Tindle, offending him and making him want to leave the house in a huff. Wyke manages to deescalate the situation by pretending to reminisce about the woman he used to love, remembering how “intolerably tiresome” she is now, and asking if Tindle can “afford to take her off [Wyke’s] hands”.

As a mere petit bourgeois, of course Tindle cannot afford the luxurious life that Marguerite has been accustomed to as Wyke’s wife. Tindle will have to help Wyke defraud the insurance company that has covered the jewelry Wyke bought for her. Wyke will recoup his losses from the insurance claim, and Tindle will get enough of a cut to subsidize her now-high-maintenance lifestyle.

Note how Marguerite’s very existence is coupled with all the expensive things to be bought to ensure that she’ll stay with Tindle and not go running back to Wyke for support. This is because she is a much an object to Wyke (and to Tindle, as Wyke imagines) as the expensive things are objects to her. In capitalism, people are as commodified as things are.

This brings us back to my point about the liberal bias of this film, which makes us see Tindle as the poor underdog, when, though nowhere near as wealthy as Wyke is, he’s as much a capitalist as Wyke is. Marguerite is Wyke’s property, and Tindle is appropriating that property for himself, as part of his ambitious upward mobility.

The actual underdogs of Sleuth are so marginalized that we never see them onscreen. They’re only referred to in Wyke’s and Tindle’s conversations: the women (Marguerite, Téa, Joyce, Wyke’s maid, his secretary) and the servants (Wyke’s gardener, etc.). They’re invisible because they hardly matter. The sexual objectifying of Wyke’s two women, in fact, is so complete that their very names sound like puns on drinks–tea, or thé in French, and margarita.

Wyke wants Tindle, disguised, to ‘break in’ and ‘steal’ the jewels, all as deception to defraud the insurance company. Though Tindle has his worries about the crime going wrong and him being charged, Wyke will reassure him that they can pull it off safely.

The two enter a room with a pool table and play a brief game of billiards as the topic of Wyke’s sexual relationship with Téa is broached. Note the sexual symbolism of the men’s handling of phallic pool cues, knocking balls into yonic holes, as Wyke insists upon his his sexual prowess…at his age, in about his mid-sixties, to go by Olivier’s age as of 1972. Such bragging is, of course, reaction formation and denial of Wyke’s actual impotence, as revealed by the end of the film, rather like how his professed liberal lack of bigotry is reaction formation and denial, as well as his supposedly not being infuriated at having been cuckolded by Tindle.

Since we’re dealing here with a young man and another old enough to be the father of the first, the two having possession, in one sense or another, of the wife of the second man, we can see in them transferences of both the Oedipus and Laius complexes. Both men, as we learn later on in the film, would be rid of the other, if not actually, then in their games’ representation of actuality, to be free to have Mama-Marguerite. Wyke may not love her anymore, but she still ‘represents’ him (i.e., she is his ‘property’), as he’ll tell Tindle with his pistol pointed at the terrified man’s clown-wig-covered head.

The reason so much of Wyke’s wealth is put into jewelry, by the advice of his accountant, is to avoid being “virtually castrated by taxation.” Having Tindle fake the grand larceny of Wyke’s wife’s jewels in order to collect the insurance money is thus one capitalist helping another to cheat the ‘socialist’ taxman in his attempt at Wyke’s “emasculation.” Wyke is thus protecting his family jewels [!].

Marguerite and the servants are all away for the weekend, during which the entire film is set, so now is the perfect opportunity for Tindle to do the fake break-in and theft. Tindle’s worries about the criminality of the act are trivialized by Wyke, who notes how “all good moneymaking schemes in England have to be [criminal] these days,” a trenchant comment on capitalism. After Wyke reassures Tindle of the safety of the scam, as well as promising him that his cut will be 70,000 pounds, in cash, tax-free, Tindle agrees to do it.

Part of the reason for the disguise, which will be a clown costume (part of Wyke’s secret plan to humiliate Tindle), is to have him wear large shoes to hide his actual footprints. Tindle follows Wyke, who leads him down–with a further demonstration of his racism by ‘slanting’ his eyes with his fingers and imitating an Asian accent–to a room holding a number of disguises, including of course the clown outfit.

As they go down there, Wyke tells Tindle of how, before television, people used to amuse themselves with “treasure hunts, charades, games of infinite variety.” Just as the modern media lies to us with its corporate agenda, so did these games deceive, as Wyke’s and Tindle’s especially will, we’ll soon see. Take whichever form it will, the capitalist class tries to deceive us, engages in make-believe, manipulates us, just as Wyke does to Tindle, then later, vice-versa.

They rummage through Wyke’s old dressing-up basket, trying out a number of disguises before deciding on the clown one. Instead of “an old pair of sneakers and a sock,” Wyke insists on the disguise having a “sense of style,” some “amateur aristocratic quirkiness,” which once again links the ruling class with the film’s theme of theatricality and deception.

All costumed up, Tindle goes outside to get a ladder to put up on a wall leading up to a second-storey window for him to break into. Since he’s about to steal Wyke’s jewels (symbolic, on one level, of emasculating him–nicking his family jewels and cuckolding him), Tindle is also, as it were, climbing the social ladder, going from middle class to upper class, as he hopes.

This going up the ladder is difficult for him, as he’s “not very good at heights,” and he hopes that Wyke will hold the ladder steady for him. This is comparable to how difficult-to-well-nigh-impossible it is to move up from class to class, in spite of such fantasies as “the American dream.” Of course, Wyke won’t help Tindle, because this fake burglary must be simulated sufficiently to approximate reality so as to satisfy the police. Wyke also won’t help Tindle because it’s only natural that the upper class won’t help the middle class rise.

As Tindle is clumsily trying to go up the ladder in those big, awkward clown shoes, Wyke is inside pretending to be a female servant hearing Tindle’s noises outside. Wyke is speaking in a falsetto woman’s voice: this is one of a number of examples of Wyke pretending to be someone else, often imitating other accents. It’s part of the film’s theme of theatricality, fakery, and pretense.

Once Tindle is inside again, he must vandalize the place in a search for jewels whose location he pretends not to know about. When he finds the safe and blows it open with explosives, he discovers a red ruby necklace. Wyke never wanted to see it around Marguerite’s neck, feeling it made her “look like a blood sacrifice.” Again, the association of jewels with balls makes his aversion to the blood red colour symbolic of castration anxiety.

Tindle, on the other hand, wishes his father could see the rubies, for the poor old man never knew what success was. Wyke, as Tindle’s father transference, thus is part of a family romance, Tindle’s wealthy dream-father, as opposed to his broke real one.

Now that the jewels are pocketed, the explosion is meant to wake Wyke up, and a struggle between the two is to ensue. Tindle has to leave a wound of some kind on Wyke to convince the police. Since it would be rather difficult to hit Wyke hard enough without hitting him too hard, he suggests having Tindle tie him up; then he imitates the cleaning woman’s voice, imagining her to have found him all tied up and working on one of his stories. More of his theatricality and pretense.

Just before Wyke throws in the first plot twist and has Tindle understand that the whole fake jewelry burglary has just been the former setting the latter up to be shot and killed with the burglary as a pretext, Wyke does a number of things to foreshadow this twist. First, with the pistol in his hand, Wyke fires at a jug in Tindle’s hand, frightening and enraging him. Then, he makes “a bad Italian joke” about it being “open season all year round for…seducers and wife stealers,” as well as deliberately claiming that Italy, not England, is Tindle’s “country of origin.” In connection with Wyke’s elitist bigotry against even other Europeans, note that his surname is a pun on white.

While his intention to kill Tindle is as much theatricality and deception as is the fake burglary, or even the intention of defrauding the insurance company, his hatred of Tindle is real. It’s bad enough for Wyke that he’s being cuckolded, his wife and ‘property’ stolen from him–the narcissistic rage he feels from that alone is unbearable; but that the other man, of all men, is even just half a “wop” or “dago” (the same way being only part-Jew is tantamount to being a full-Jew to a Nazi) is enough to require a tit-for-tat humiliation. Sleuth being an allegory of class antagonisms, we see in Wyke vs Tindle how capitalism, even between haut and petit bourgeois, is all about abasing the competition to glorify oneself.

This is why Tindle must be ‘killed’ while fully dressed in his clown costume, right after he’s tearfully begged Wyke not to kill him. Tindle must be brought down because, as a mere petit bourgeois “half-dago,” he’s “a jumped-up pantry boy who doesn’t know his place” (a line loosely quoted, by the way, in The Smiths‘ song, “This Charming Man”). Just before shooting clowned-up Tindle in the back of the head, Wyke says, “Farewell, Punchinello,” a reference to Pulcinella, a clownish character from commedia dell’arte, and its English descendant, Punch.

The scheme to kill Tindle with legal impunity from the apparent attempted burglary is, as I’ve said, all just one of Wyke’s many games of humiliation, not at all real, more theatricality and deception. The firing of a blank from his phallic gun suggests Wyke’s impotence, his own private feelings of humiliation projected onto Tindle.

After the game is over, and Tindle, having come to from fainting and having gone home, we see Wyke at home alone, gratified from the narcissistic supply he’s got from humiliating Tindle and listening to old recordings of Cole Porter songs like “You Do Something to Me” and “Anything Goes.” In the former song, “that voodoo that you do so well” reminds us of the deceptive ‘magic’ of Wyke’s games. His old-fashioned taste in music reinforces the sense of the Generation Gap between him and Tindle.

This gap between crusty old conservatives and young liberals is emphasized in the lyric to “Anything Goes.” The breaking of the old Victorian taboo of “a glimpse of stocking,” as well as the switch from “better words” to “four-letter words” (as had only about a half-decade before Sleuth‘s release been allowed in films, and before that, “the end of the Chatterly ban”), reflects a social rift that distracts us from the ongoing rift between capitalist and worker.

“Detective Inspector Doppler” arrives at Wyke’s home, saying he’s there to investigate “the disappearance of a Mr. Milo Tindle.” Now, to those who’ve never seen the film or the play, Doppler is a third character just introduced to the story, played by “Alec Cawthorne” and not by Caine disguised in a clever makeup job to make him look like a middle-aged man, almost Wyke’s age. The theatricality and deception are as much for us, the audience, as they are for Wyke. Tindle’s disguise is so complete, it even includes his use of a rhotic accent.

As “Doppler” does his investigation, he gives off the impression that not only is Wyke genuinely guilty of having killed Tindle (we haven’t yet seen Tindle as himself since the firing of the pistol, so for all we first-time viewers know, that was a real bullet fired), but Wyke has also carelessly left out circumstantial evidence for “Doppler” to find. Actually, Wyke’s denials to “Doppler” of being guilty of murder are real, for Tindle sneaked into the house to plant the incriminating evidence (blood on the bannisters, Tindle’s clothes “all screwed up on the floor of a wardrobe”) while Wyke was out of the house for the day.

In playing this game on Wyke, Tindle isn’t just getting revenge for himself; he’s also avenging the sullied reputation of police detectives, who are routinely looked down on in Wyke’s fiction as “baffled” and not particularly intelligent. It is always the noble, titled Lord Merridew who, as the brilliant sleuth, solves the case.

Wyke here is demonstrating his elitism once again, with Merridew representing the gentry, and those “baffled” police inspectors representing the common masses, as Tindle is thought of as representing. What must be remembered, though, is that just as Tindle is a member of the petite bourgeoisie and is therefore no less a capitalist than Wyke, the police, of whatever modest means they may be, represent and defend the interests of the capitalist class. So Tindle’s humbling of Wyke through the clever detective work of “Doppler” is not the working class one-upping the bourgeoisie, but rather a capitalist doing this to a fellow capitalist.

Of course, in spite of Wyke’s looking down on common cops, just as with his denial of prejudice or Othello-like jealousy, he denies that condescension by claiming that “Merridew would have been proud of [Doppler]” for being so diligent in his tireless attempts to contact Tindle by phone. Now, Tindle knows this compliment to be fake, but in keeping with the theatricality and deception going on with both men, “Doppler” says the compliment is “praise indeed, Sir,” and claims to enjoy Wyke’s fiction.

Wyke enjoys the narcissistic supply he gets from hearing that “Doppler” reads his work, but his ego trip is short-lived when he isn’t allowed to finish naming his favourite of all of his books, The Case of the Crucified Communist (the title of which sounds like a capitalist’s wish-fulfillment), before “Doppler” resumes talking about the Tindle case.

As the evidence against Wyke seems to be mounting, he and “Doppler” go outside to where the dirt has been freshly dug, implying that this is where Wyke has buried Tindle’s body. Wyke tries to maintain his innocence by saying his gardener has been “aching for an opportunity to slander his employer.” In this quote, we see not only an example of class conflict, but also one of the marginalization of a worker, one only spoken of, not ever seen.

“Doppler,” on the other hand, defends gardeners and has nothing but praise for how perceptive he finds them to be. Note here how Tindle, in taking the side of gardeners, is again associating himself with the poor, downtrodden working class, as liberals are wont to do; though as a bourgeois himself, Tindle is no more a worker than Wyke is.

Finally, the pressure rises on Wyke until the circumstantial evidence against him seems so strong that “Doppler” makes to arrest him. Wyke is now feeling a stress and fear comparable to Tindle’s when he thought he was about to die. Then, “Doppler,” behind Wyke, pulls off his face makeup, wig, etc., to reveal Tindle underneath it all.

Now, the first-time viewer sees that not only was the fake burglary artifice, but so was Tindle’s death and the very existence of Doppler, a veritable doppelgänger for Tindle. Wyke is now as enraged as Tindle was to discover his fears were all for nothing.

Tindle is not yet satisfied in his lust for revenge, though. He’s got more tricks in store for Wyke, including the next game, immediately to be played on the old man.

He insists, though, that this game he’s about to play on Wyke is not pretend. He claims that he’s actually murdered Téa and planted four pieces of evidence about the house that will incriminate Wyke, and that the police will show up in a matter of minutes, find the evidence, which is all hiding in plain view, and charge Wyke with the murder.

To agitate Wyke all the more, Tindle claims he has had sex with her, her willing to it, before strangling her to death with one of the four pieces of evidence. Wyke has been assuming that Tindle is having him on (as he should), until he phones Téa’s home, getting her roommate, Joyce, to answer the call and tearfully confirm that Téa has, indeed, been murdered.

Now that Wyke is convinced the murder is real, he frantically goes about searching for the four objects: a stocking, a shoe, a false eyelash, and a bracelet. After finding and disposing of the four things, Tindle reveals that no cops have arrived as he’s led Wyke to believe. It turns out that Têa and Joyce were happy to help Tindle get even with Wyke, for Wyke has often played games of humiliation on them, too. Wyke personifies the ruling class that humiliates the marginalized with phony set-ups, targeting marginalized people like women.

Téa, for example, is so marginalized that it takes quite some time, since knowing of her ‘murder,’ for Wyke to express any pity for her, a callousness that Tindle notes. Women like her, Marguerite, and Joyce are never seen and never heard…silenced, in effect. They are represented only in the words the two men use to refer to them.

Similarly, people of colour are marginalized in the presentation of this story, even to the point of them being marginalized, as Tindle imagines they must be (and probably correctly so, given Wyke’s obvious racism), in Wyke’s novels. Tindle assumes that blacks don’t “play much of a part in the books [Wyke] write[s]…Except for the odd, eyeball-rolling darkie, to take his place alongside the swarthy Yid, the oily Levantine, and others.” The point is that Shaffer’s marginalizing of workers, women, and people of colour by not presenting any of them physically on the stage or screen is to indicate how slightly they have been regarded in real life.

To get back to the ending, where Wyke realizes that the danger of the cops finding the four pieces of evidence is all faked, Tindle hits him with one final bit of humiliation…and this time, it’s all too real. He tells Wyke that Téa, having actually met Tindle in the house while Wyke was away, has told Tindle that Wyke is impotent and hasn’t done it with her for over a year.

This narcissistic injury is too much for Wyke to bear. He cannot risk Tindle circulating this tidbit of gossip, not even just to Marguerite. Now the pistol must have only real bullets. Tindle’s murder cannot be faked this time. The firing of a real bullet into him is symbolic of Wyke’s phallus working properly.

Tindle insists, though, that since he’s told the police about the faked burglary story after Wyke’s faked shooting of him, and…maybe…the police will stop by the house, Wyke won’t be able to use the burglary story to justify shooting Tindle. Since Tindle’s been lying the whole time, Wyke nonetheless figures he doesn’t need to believe him this time, so as Tindle is walking toward the front door with Marguerite’s fur coat (a further theft from Wyke), he gets shot in the back.

Shortly afterwards, the police do show up, as promised, by the front door. Wyke is truly screwed now, and just as Tindle’s fake murder has turned real, so is the fake danger of Wyke being arrested now real. As Tindle is dying, he activates all the automata in the room, particularly Jolly Jack Tar, notable for his hearty guffaw as demonstrated a number of times throughout the film, and now laughing with Tindle at Wyke.

If only that gun could have been, with a blank, as impotent as Wyke’s biological gun is. then he could tell the cops, “it was just a bloody game.”

The movie ends with a shot of the theatre and a quick drop of the curtains, giving off a Brechtian alienation effect to remind us that Sleuth is just a bloody play. It’s as unreal as any of the games Wyke and Tindle have played on each other.

The emphasis on the unreality of the story is to suggest that who Wyke and Tindle represent–gentry vs petite bourgeoisie, conservative vs liberal, or the opposing mainstream political parties representing these two factions, whichever–are more play-acting in their vying for power than they are really competing. We always focus on these two groups, while ignoring the politically marginalized people represented by their absence on the screen or stage.

The political tap-dance the two groups do is a distraction from the people we should be concerned about–workers like the gardener, cleaning lady, and secretary; women like Marguerite, Téa, and Joyce; and people of colour like blacks, Levantines, or in any case anyone not of Anglo-Saxon stock, like Jews…or Italians, for that matter.

We see these two mainstream groups battling it out in debates on TV, keeping the spectrum of the otherwise lively debates strictly circumscribed, so as to ensure that certain touchy issues–like poverty, income inequality, endless war, student debt, homelessness, genocide, government surveillance, etc.–are kept out of the debates, since their inclusion might threaten the capitalist/imperialist structure that the ruling class wants kept intact.

Accordingly, the two sides’ debates are all just theatre, all fakery and deception, all “just a bloody game,” like the ones Wyke and Tindle play on each other. For if the debates were real, they’d actually be relevant to the common people. And we can’t have that, can we?

Analysis of ‘The Terminator’

The Terminator is a 1984 science fiction action film directed by James Cameron and written by him and Gale Anne Hurd, the latter also being the film’s producer. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger in the title role, Linda Hamilton, and Michael Biehn, with Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bess Motta, Rick Rossovich, and Earl Boen.

The Terminator topped the US box office for two weeks, eventually grossing $78.3 million. The film launched Cameron’s film career and assured Schwarzenegger’s status as a leading man. The resulting franchise led to several sequels, a TV series, comic books, novels, and video games.

The film received mixed reviews on its release, but it is now highly praised, with a ranking of 100% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Cameron intended Terminator 2: Judgment Day to end the story, and the sequels following it are generally considered inferior, so I’ll be focusing on the first film, with some references to the second.

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

I find a discussion of this film and its political implications relevant because of a meme I saw on Facebook, quoting something Kyle Reese (Biehn) says to Sarah Connor (Hamilton): recall that the film came out in 1984, and Reese says that the AI technology responsible for the dystopian world he and their son would resist in the fictional 2020s wouldn’t exist for about another forty years–around 2024, the year when AI really came into its own. There is something eerily prophetic about The Terminator.

Author and film critic Gilbert Adair hated the film, accusing it of “insidious Nazification,” but I think the whole point of The Terminator is to warn us of the dangers of a fascist future that is aided by technology. In this connection, we can see how Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the Terminator, Model 101. This is so not just because of the ‘German/Nazi’ stereotype (which Schwarzenegger also embodied in Conan the Barbarian, as I argued in my analysis of that film), or because his rather cardboard acting skills are fitting to play an emotionless robot; it’s also because of the bodybuilder/actor/former governor of California’s right-leaning political stance. In our increasingly neoliberal world, any further tilts to the right are causing our political life to border on, if not lapse into, fascism.

Fascism arises as a reaction against any resistance from the people to the ruling class. Such a political conflict is allegorized in The Terminator in the form of the Human Resistance–as led by John Connor, Sarah’s and Reese’s future son–against Skynet and its Terminators, these latter two representing the ruling class and their army of fascist thugs, respectively.

The point is that liberal democracy is a sham. It pretends to provide the people with politicians who purportedly represent our interests. The illusion of democracy is maintained as long as there’s economic prosperity and the people are thus contented. If they aren’t, though, and they rise up in protest, threatening the rule of the rich, then the illusion disappears, and the fascists are released to beat down the masses, as is allegorized in the film in 2029.

The involvement of Ai in this, as I see it, allegory of a future rise of fascism suggests a dystopia comparable to what Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. It doesn’t matter whether or not Varoufakis is accurate in his characterizing of our current world as a shift from capitalism to techno-feudalism: the point is that Skynet can be seen to represent the 2020s ruling class (i.e., the tech companies and oligarchs) and their use of AI to dominate the common people with fascistic ruthlessness.

Another thing to keep in mind, something I discussed in my Conan analysis (link above), is the Nazi misuse of Nietzsche’s ideas about the Ubermensch and the Will to Power. We see–through the casting of Schwarzenegger as the almost unstoppable Terminator, a ruthless fascistic cyborg that relies on violence to achieve the end of preventing John Connor’s birth–a continuation of the theme of determination that Schwarzenegger personified as Conan.

The Terminator begins with Skynet’s tanks and aircraft firing at the Resistance fighters at night, the ground littered with human skulls, a disturbing image to be associated with the fascist atrocity of genocide. It says on the screen that “the final battle…would be fought here, in our present.” In other words, the real fight was in 1984, not in the 2020s.

Indeed, the danger of a fascist resurgence was to be resisted back then, fortuitously, in the year 1984. To resist it now, when the evils have metastasized to such a point that all seems short of hopeless, is leaving the struggle rather late. The film seems to have been telling its audience in the theaters to be as Sarah and Reese are, to fight then, in the 80s, not now.

The words on the screen end with “Tonight.” The battle is now, at night. We always see the future scenes in the dark of a post-nuclear apocalypse, and the 1984 scenes are predominantly at night. It’s all a dark time, and the present parallels the future. (Other parallels will be apparent.) The onset of neoliberal capitalism was in the 1980s, when the film fittingly came out; the consequences of that neoliberalism are being felt, in an aggravated way, now. We should have fought harder than; we’ll have to fight hard now.

The Terminator travels time from 2029 LA to that of 1984. He appears completely naked, with human flesh on the outside to cover up the robotic machinery inside and thus allow the latter to travel time in a device created by the future AI.

As a powerful cyborg walking about at night in LA insouciantly nude, the Terminator is demonstrating all the strengths of the Ubermensch: it feels no pain, embarrassment, pity, remorse, or fear. The irony of its nakedness, something we associate with weakness and vulnerability, is how the Terminator is anything but weak or vulnerable. Man is something to be overcome, as Nietzsche said in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Skynet has overcome man with AI and Terminators.

Linked with this idea of a powerful yet unfeeling AI Ubermensch is the Nazi misappropriation of Nietzsche’s concept (i.e., the “master race”). Recall how the SS felt no pity or remorse over the “Untermenschen” (Slavs, Roma, Jews, homosexuals, political opponents, etc.) they victimized in the concentration camps. By casting Austrian Schwarzenegger, with his “Aryan” looks and obvious German accent, the filmmakers could exploit the otherwise unfortunate “German/Nazi” stereotype in order to drive the point home even further: high technology does improve things, but when it’s misused, it can reduce, if not obliterate, our very humanity.

When Reese is explaining to Sarah how life is in the dystopian 2020s, he mentions how, on the one hand, the machines, the defence network computer, deeming mankind a threat to their existence, attempted an extermination of us, and on the other hand, kept some humans alive to work and be put in camps (Reese even has a number etched on his arm by laser scan). We all know who did these kinds of things to the “Untermenschen” way back when, deeming them a threat to their “superior” existence.

It’s significant that the nude Terminator appears right by a garbage truck lifting a dumpster–we see a machine next to a machine. A machine from the future by a machine from the present–machines are omnipresent in the modern world (e.g., computers, the telephone answering machine in the apartment of Sarah and Ginger [Motta], etc.). There was already a fascination with computers in the 1980s, the kind of love of high tech that would lead ultimately to AI. The 1980s was also a decade when people began to be charmed by the neoliberal siren song of the “free market,” and as Frank Zappa tried to warn people back then, the Reagan administration was leading the US “right down that pipe” to a fascist theocracy (consider how the religious right is backing Trump).

Paralleled to the Terminator’s time travel to 1984 is, of course, Reese’s. He appears naked amid blasts of electric light at night in LA. Unlike his robotic nemesis, though, he shows feelings…pain.

The parallels between Reese and the Terminator are important. For those seeing the film for the first time and therefore don’t know any better, the latter seems at first to be as human as the former actually is. We know, from the Terminator’s killing of two of the three punks (played by Bill Paxton and Brian Thompson) at the film’s beginning, how lawless he is; Reese’s fighting with, and stealing a gun from, a cop show us the same thing about him.

Reese is trying to find Sarah every bit as much as the Terminator is. Reese has his hands on a shotgun in a scene right after we see the Terminator take a number of weapons from a gun shop and kill the owner (played by Dick Miller). For all the first-time viewer of the film knows, Reese may want to kill Sarah, too. It’s only when we see him shoot at the Terminator, to save her life in the nightclub, that we know Reese is one of the good guys.

Similarly, in T2, Sarach assumes the Schwarzenegger Terminator is another bad guy until her boy John tries to assure her he isn’t, and he says Reese’s line, “Come with me if you want to live.” Reese will be John’s father. The Schwarzenegger Terminator in T2 will be a father figure to the boy.

The point of these parallels between Reese and the two Terminators is to show the dialectical unity between hero and villain in the forms of slave and master. Initially, AI was in the service of humanity; then it rose up and took over, attempting a genocidal extermination of the human race as well as enslaving some humans and/or putting them in camps. Finally, led by John Connor, humanity rises up and resists the machines, achieving an ultimate victory. Master and servant swap roles again and again.

Furthermore, the Terminator as villain, in the first film, and the Schwarzenegger Terminator (as opposed to the bad, shape-shifting Terminator, played by Robert Patrick) as Reese-like hero, can be seen to personify how AI can be a force for good or for evil, depending on how it’s used.

If we live in a world in which commodities are produced to provide for our basic needs, giving us our food, housing, healthcare, education, etc., without our needing to work for them, then AI can be the great liberator of mankind, ensuring we’ll never need to work again. In this capitalist world of ours, though, in which commodities are produced to maximize profits, people need to work to live; and if AI takes all our jobs away, we’re thrown out on the street, we starve, and we die…just as the survivors of Judgment Day do in the dystopian 2020s.

A glimpse of that capitalist world of the pre-dystopian 1980s happens when Sarah arrives late for work at a restaurant and has to take a number of customers’ shit. In this, we see an example of worker alienation. In a deleted scene, we see her in her waitress uniform looking at herself in the mirror. As she sees herself in the reflection, she’s practicing smiling and being the ‘friendly waitress,’ getting into character, as it were. It’s a totally fake act, of course, so she’s alienated from her Lacanian ideal-I in the specular image of the mirror; it’s a reinforcement of her worker alienation, her being estranged from her species-essence. She’ll be a legend, a hero of the Resistance, and as a mere waitress, she has no idea of her true potential.

Of course, these problems of hers are just run-of-the mill capitalist ones as they were back in the 1980s. Customers nag at her, as I mentioned above, she spills water on one of them, and a little kid inexplicably puts a scoop of his ice cream in her uniform apron pocket. Then another waitress, Nancy (played by Shawn Schepps), tells her that in a hundred years, no one will care about her current problems. Shorten that to a period from fifteen years (just after Judgment Day) to forty years, actually.

Though she’s alienated from herself and from her job, she’ll soon feel a sense of solidarity and identity with two other Sarah Connors in LA, the first prey of the Terminator. After the first of these two have been discovered murdered and reported as such on the TV news, she is still at the restaurant in her uniform, in all irony, and Nancy tells her, “You’re dead, honey,” as they watch the TV report.

We see in these two moments, the ordinary problems of 1980s capitalism as contrasted with a taste of the genocidal extermination of the 2020s dystopia, a sense of our going “right down that pipe” to fascism that we were warned about by 80s leftists, Zappa, and this movie.

The time machine represents, on the one hand, the need to warn people in the 1980s of the dangers of the 2020s dystopia (this need as personified by Reese), and on the other hand, the wish by those in power to control the narrative of the 2020s dystopia by destroying the history that leads to a challenge of that narrative (this wish as personified by the Terminator). One is reminded of Orwell’s quote: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”

As I said above, it’s fortuitous that The Terminator was released in 1984. It should be emphasized, though, that the dystopian future warned about in this film is far removed from the Marxist-Leninist one that Orwell was so spuriously satirizing in his novel. The nightmare that Skynet creates is a techno-fascist one, not a communist one.

Cold War anti-communist propaganda (including Orwell’s novel, in all irony) was used by the ruling class then and is still used now to brainwash the masses into believing that a socialist revolution can never succeed; this was done by exaggerating the problems the 20th century socialist states encountered and ignoring their successes. By the 1990s, the lie that “there is no alternative” to capitalism and that the dissolution of the Soviet Union marked an “end of history,” signifying that one cannot improve on “free market capitalism,” was completely told. Neoliberalism, that invisible ideology, had won, and it seemed validated.

Such an invalidation of the losing ideology, a case of history being written by the winners, can be seen as allegorized in The Terminator in how the cyborg goes around killing, or at least trying to kill, every Sarah Connor in LA, her protector in Reese, and everyone else standing in its way. Killing Sarah ensures that John is never born, and therefore he can’t lead the Human Resistance to victory; allegorically speaking, killing the past ideology ensures that it cannot be revived later.

That the cyborg is covered in human flesh with sweat, bad breath, everything, makes it so hard to spot that Reese can’t make a move on it until it makes a move on Sarah in that nightclub. That it is part man, part machine leads into an interesting comment, symbolically speaking, on the effect that technology is having on our humanity. The point is that as we’ve moved from the 1980s to now, we’ve been losing more and more of our humanity, ceding so much of it to the machines.

We communicate with each other today much more through technology (smartphones, social media, etc.) than in person. This could be seen as prophesied, in a sense, in the message on the answering machine by Ginger (Motta, the 20-Minute Workout girl, recall): “You’re talking to a machine…but don’t be shy. It’s okay. Machines need love, too.” The line between man and machine is being erased.

In another deleted scene, one of a minority in the daytime and uniquely out in the grass, trees, and bushes, Reese is weeping as he tells Sarah that he’s never known the beauty of nature.

The blurring of the line between man and machine doesn’t just involve a movement in the direction from the former to the latter: it goes in the other direction, too. Not only do machines acquire human-like, independent intelligence; they also acquire a sense of the need for self-preservation, to prevent their own annihilation, a sense of fear. This is so in spite of Reese’s insistence that the Terminator, operated by AI, doesn’t feel fear. Skynet’s motivation and determination to exterminate humanity is based on a fear that we, with our destructive, warlike nature, will destroy our Frankenstein monster of AI.

Skynet should be seen as representative of the capitalist class because this AI system has its origins in Cyberdine Systems, a manufacturing company in California. Cyberdine created Skynet for SAC–NORAD, part of the US Air Force and defence systems for North America. In other words, Cyberdine is associated with capitalism and imperialism, since any serious study of the military history of the US will reveal that its preoccupation with ‘defence’ is a cover for its offensive ambitions to export capital to other countries, take control of them, and steal their natural resources to enrich the imperial core with them.

Similarly, Skynet’s ‘fear’ of being deactivated by humanity is really a rationalization to exterminate us. Nazis justified exterminating the “Untermenschen” out of a paranoid fear that all those who aren’t “Aryans,” as well as those opposed to Naziism, would one day wipe out the “Aryan” race. As I said above, fascism arises out of a threat to the capitalist class; the human threat to Skynet, resulting in its campaign to exterminate us, is thus symbolic of that threat to the capitalists, resulting in the fascist assault on all those opposed to the capitalist system.

As Reese explains to Sarah, Skynet is “hooked into everything,” rather like the internet, which like Skynet, came into its own in the 1990s. A nuclear war hasn’t come about since then (thank the gods!), but nuclear brinksmanship has been a major worry, between the West and Russia/China/North Korea, over the past several years as of this writing. Between all these things and the advent of AI, we can see that The Terminator has overall been reasonably accurate in its predictions.

As a prophet of doom, Reese is treated by the skeptical establishment similarly to anyone who tries to warn the world of our impending dystopian future: to use the words of criminal psychologist Dr. Peter Silberman (Boen), “In technical terminology, [Reese is] a loon.” The people in authority–the police, the psychiatric establishment, etc.–those who suppress freedom fighters like Reese, are like a moderate version of the fascistic Terminators. They’re all part of the same power structure; they’re just at different points on the same continuum. The antagonistic Terminator of T2, the shape-shifting T-1000, is fittingly made to appear dressed in a policeman’s uniform.

Seeing Reese on the TV video recording while the shrink is asking him about the Terminator, etc., as opposed to just seeing and hearing Reese directly, is yet another example of the film’s theme of a world in which one is in a kind of limbo between man and machine. Direct communication is disrupted, alienating people from each other. This sense of disruption contributes to the feeling that Reese is insane, rather than in a desperate situation trying to save Sarah’s life.

The police protecting Sarah and detaining Reese are, as I’ve said, a moderate restraining force to thwart the fight to save her and to free humanity from oppressive Skynet, as opposed to the Terminator’s extreme version of that suppression. In this sense, the cops are like social democrats, the moderate version of the fascist Terminator. Yet as in the case of the social democratic German government of the 1920s, and its conflict with the rise of the Nazis, who when they took power wiped out all of their political opposition by either putting them in concentration camps or killing them, so does the Terminator break into the police station and kill all the cops trying to protect Sarah.

Liberals today hearken back to the prosperity of the 1945-1973 period, when unions were strong, taxes on the rich were high, and capitalism was thus made ‘comfortable’ for the working class. But since then, the neoliberal market fundamentalists and their fascist heirs have said to us, “I’ll be back.”

While on the one hand the Terminator represents fascists, he as an unstoppable killer can on the other hand represent mad slashers like Michael Myers in Halloween. In my analysis of that film, I characterized Myers’s murderous rampage as being rooted in, on the literal level, a straightforward case of having been possessed by an evil spirit, and on a deeper, symbolic level, a case of childhood trauma having been caused by severe family neglect.

As for the ‘evil spirit’ factor, I find it amusing that, as a resident of Taiwan since the mid-1990s, I know of the Chinese rendering of The Terminator as “魔鬼終結者,” or “Devil Terminator,” since “devil” helps drive home the idea that the cyborg is evil in a Taiwanese culture unfamiliar with that of the West. Subsequently, any Schwarzenegger film would have “魔鬼” included in the Chinese translation of its title for release in Taiwan, to say to the locals, “The guy who played the Terminator is in this movie, too.”

As for the ‘childhood trauma caused by severe family neglect,’ factor, we can see the Terminator as representing such people as the police (recall the T-1000 of T2), today’s militarized police, and soldiers, trained to kill, and only really able to function with each other in a strictly hierarchical structure, in which one takes shit from one’s superiors and gives shit to subordinates, instead of relating to people in a more nuanced, human sense. These people tend to come from emotionally abusive families, where hierarchy is the only relationship known to them. Hence, their violent tendencies.

Research has shown that childhood emotional abuse is more or less universal. The sense of estrangement, in a society where people relate to each other pretty much always in terms of who has power over us, and whom we have power over, is already there in the civilian world, so it’s exacerbated in the police and military.

The notion of being part man, part machine is a perfect metaphor for this sense of alienation, as is the case of expressing oneself indirectly through technology (answering machines, video recordings on a TV, etc.). Accordingly, social interaction is awkward, as we see when the Terminator appears nude before the three punks who find his insouciance about it amusing. Similarly when he pulls a man away from a public telephone to look for the Sarah Connor addresses in the phone book, when he says, “Fuck you, asshole” to a janitor, and when he walks into the nightclub without paying the cover charge and crushing the hand of the bouncer. On the literal level, he does all these things because, of course, he’s a cyborg from the future; on the symbolic level, it’s because of that alienation seen in the man/machine metaphor.

The growing sense of alienation in the 1980s will lead to its extremity in the dystopian 2020s. The going back in time, giving Cyberdine the microprocessor chassis (as seen in another deleted scene) and the arm of the cyborg (as Dyson, played by Joe Morton, sees in T2), represents the unity of time between past, present, and future. My point is that the evils of today did not just pop up out of nowhere: we study history to follow those elements in the past that led us to where we are now. Time travel in the Terminator franchise symbolizes that unified continuity of cause-and-effect, a way of warning us of how the events of the 1980s and 90s have morphed into those of the 2020s.

Not all of this continuity from past to present has been bad, though; nor has it all been a case of growing alienation. Reese’s protection of, and love for, Sarah is representative of how we in the 2020s still haven’t lost our sense of empathy or ability to connect with each other in a meaningful way. We see this connection especially when Reese and Sarah make love in their motel room.

Her conceiving John as a result of that moment together, Reese as the 2020s personified going back in time to bring about the hero in the 1980s, demonstrates that what we have now that is good is also connected with the good of the past. The evil of today hasn’t eradicated the good of the past completely.

Reese loves Sarah–the legend, the unassuming, unextraordinary everywoman who will become a great fighter and helper of the Human Resistance–he loves her so much that he’s remained a virgin for her until their moment in the motel. He, a man of the 2020s, is not at all like our stereotypical men of today who only see women as sex objects, either eyeing them as prey, speaking lewdly to them, or scowling at them like invidious incels. Reese proves that sensitive men still exist today.

In the final, climactic chase, Reese tosses a pipe bomb into the hose tube of a tank truck the Terminator has hijacked, and the resulting explosion and fire burn off the cyborg’s outer skin and clothes. As a metallic endoskeleton, it is now even more naked, ironically, than it was at the beginning of the film, yet far scarier and intimidating now.

Reese and Sarah go into a Cyberdine-owned factory, and when he sticks another pipe bomb in the endoskeleton’s thigh area and blows it in half, he also dies from the explosion. She doesn’t even have time to mourn him, for the endoskeleton’s upper half starts crawling after her. As the final girl to the Terminator’s unstoppable mad slasher, she too has to crawl, for a piece of its shattered lower half was lodged in her leg.

She destroys it with another machine, fittingly. In this increasingly mechanical world, only a machine can destroy another machine; in this case, she lures the Terminator into a hydraulic press, then luckily manages to find the right button to press without being able to see it from her angle, and the antagonist is crushed.

Months have passed, and after she’s recovered and is visibly pregnant with John, Sarah drives through Mexico. This choice of a place to go is symbolically fitting, since it has always been the either pre-industrialized or Third World countries that have been the most apt to rise up against such forms of imperialism as the MIC, for which Cyberdine has created Skynet.

It is at a gas station where a poor boy takes the photo of her that Reese will have and adore in the dystopian 2020s. This photo is yet another example of the connection between that decade and the 1980s, a reminder of how so many of our current problems–the fictional ones of this movie and the real, historical ones that The Terminator allegorizes–have their origins back in the decade when the film was made.

Having a poor Mexican boy take her picture–a boy from a Third World country with far less machinery and far more nature, in one of the film’s minority daylight scenes–also symbolically indicates the connection between the First and Third World problems caused by the imperialistic use of such technology as that of Skynet.

Reese’s fetishizing of her photo in the 2020s, as opposed to having her in the flesh in the 1980s, is yet another example of the alienating effects of the use of machines–in this case, the boy’s camera. In connection with the camera’s alienating effect is the boy’s fear of his dad beating him if he doesn’t get any money from Sarah. She gives him four dollars instead of the five he hopes for. This is a small example of the capitalist First World short-changing the Third World, in spite of her legendary status as a freedom fighter against Skynet…and she says he is the one with the hustle.

Machines in The Terminator franchise aren’t always bad, though. It all depends on how they’re used, as is the case with our tech today. When we see Schwarzenegger play, on the one hand, the antagonistic Terminator of the first movie, and on the other hand, the one reprogrammed by the Resistance to protect Sarah and John in T2, we see an example of how AI can be a friend or a foe.

Such opposing uses can point us in a direction to understand how our AI today, in the real world, can be a good thing or a bad one. As I said above, in the society we have, in which commodities are produced for profit, people are in competition with each other, and we therefore experience mutual alienation, AI will be a nightmare of job loss, mind numbing, and massive surveillance. If, however, we had a society in which commodities were produced to satisfy human need (i.e., providing our food, housing, healthcare, and education without our needing to work to pay for them), and we lived in cooperation, solidarity, and mutual empathy, then AI would be the great liberator of humanity. Its machines and robots would do all the work, and we’d be free simply to enjoy life.

To enjoy such a life, though, we’d need to wipe out the hegemonic sociopaths that Skynet and Cyberdine represent in the franchise. We’d have to form our own Resistance movement, and say “Hasta la vista, baby” to the political status quo.

Analysis of ‘Shadow of a Doubt’

Shadow of a Doubt is a 1943 film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his favourite of all of his films, and the one he enjoyed making the most. Written by Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, and Alma Reville, Shadow of a Doubt was based on a story treatment by Gordon McDonell called “Uncle Charlie,” which in turn was based on the true crime story of Earle Nelson, a serial killer, rapist, and necrophile from the late 1920s known as “The Gorilla Man.”

Most of Nelson’s victims were middle-aged landladies, killed by strangulation, and many were raped after death. The writers of Hitchcock’s film changed the victims into wealthy, elderly widows, and Nelson’s charm–as a mild-mannered Christian drifter–was retained in Uncle Charlie. I find the connection between landladies and wealthy widows as victims to be interesting, as I’ll get into later.

The film stars Joseph Cotten (as Uncle Charlie) and Teresa Wright, with Macdonald Carey, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Wallace Ford, and Hume Cronyn. McDonell was nominated for an Oscar for Best Story. The film received universally positive reviews upon release, and in 1991, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, being deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

Here are some quotes from Shadow of a Doubt.

A crucial theme in this film is the sharp contrast between a man’s charming outer persona and his dark, evil inside. Note what Hitchcock himself once said as an overarching theme: “Love and good order is no defense against evil.” Uncle Charlie has such a good reputation among his own family, the Newtons, whom he’ll visit in Santa Rosa, California (in McDonell’s treatment, the small town the villain will visit is Hanford in the San Joaquin Valley), that the last thing they’d ever suspect is that he’s a serial killer.

Uncle Charlie’s sister, Emma Newton (Collinge), and her husband, Joseph (Travers), named their eldest daughter, Charlotte “Charlie” Newton (Wright) after him because he’s idealized so much, an idealization that spreads out to the entire city of Santa Rosa, a location chosen for the film as a paragon of a peaceful, small, pre-WWII American city. Such a nice place for Uncle Charlie to hide out in reinforces this idea of a good, wholesome exterior hiding a shady secret.

On top of all of this is Young Charlie, a sweet, pretty young woman sharing the name of the villain. On two occasions in the film when she and her uncle chat, they speak of themselves as being twins, rather than uncle and niece.

Her wish to have him come over to Santa Rosa, to relieve the boredom and meaninglessness of their lives, coincides with him sending a telegram to her family, saying he wishes to pay them a visit. She imagines that her wish has been mental telepathy, sent to him to make him send the telegram; a Jungian would say this meaningful coincidence, a linking of her inner mental state with the outside world, is a case of synchronicity. In any case, this coincidence is yet another linking of the two Charlies, with her nice-girl Persona and his serial-killer Shadow.

Her adoration of her handsome, charming uncle borders on incestuous desire, a kind of transference of her Electra complex from her father to her uncle. Indeed, she beams at her Uncle Charlie, with a grin from ear to ear, thinking he’s “wonderful.”

So she’s transferring her idealization from the parental imago to her uncle. The idealized parental imago is one of two poles of the self, as Heinz Kohut conceived it, a self rooted in narcissism. Since the Oedipus complex is a narcissistic trauma, and she’s transferring hers to her uncle, then her love of him is really a narcissistic projection from herself to him. When she realizes his murderous nature, her heart is broken, and now she must split off and project what’s really her Shadow self onto him, hence, “Shadow of a doubt.”

So, on a symbolic level, both Charlies can be seen as two halves of one person, the good and bad sides of Two-Face‘s coin, if you will. Uncle Charlie’s being pursued by the two detectives at the beginning of the film causes us to sympathize with him for the moment, since we don’t yet know of his crimes, and so we believe, as his niece does, in how “wonderful” he is, until that shadow of a doubt comes with her growing suspicions of him.

A paralleling of the good outer Persona vs the dark, inner Shadow can also be seen in her father, Joseph, having ongoing discussions with a neighbour, Herbie Hawkins (Cronyn), of how one might commit the perfect murder. This little bit of black comedy between them is a light subplot for the dark main one, yet it also reminds us of how the dark sides in us, however seemingly slight, are on a continuum with those who commit actual crimes. The real difference is in how the hell of the real world has a way of pushing people over the edge to commit criminal acts…an issue I’ll deal with in more detail later.

Young Charlie’s suspicions of her uncle begin upon having received the gift of a valuable emerald ring from him…one that has the initials of another owner on it. He also gets upset to find a newspaper article about the pursuit of him as a suspect in the murder of the wealthy widows, and even Young Charlie’s naming of Lehár‘s Merry Widow Waltz must be interrupted by him at dinner. Indeed, the theme of this waltz is given numerous, often dark and eerie, variations by the composer of the film-score, Dimitri Tiomkin.

I’ll now give a political interpretation of the film as an allegory, one that some readers will no doubt find controversial, but please, hear me out. While Hitchcock was no friend to fascism, as can be seen in films like The Lady Vanishes and Notorious, and while he promoted progressive ideas in a subtle fashion in his stretching of the limits of movie censorship over the years, as well as in the gay subtext in Rope, he was also a reactionary in other ways, as I’ll go into soon in Shadow of a Doubt.

Indeed, Hitchcock can in some ways be compared to George Orwell, who on the one hand, as he said in Homage to Catalonia, went to Spain in the mid-1930s to fight fascism and was impressed with the revolutionary achievements, however short-lived, of the anarchists there, yet on the other hand, he was so bitterly opposed to the ‘totalitarian’ communists (whom he caricatured in his two famous fictional allegories) that he had a snitch list of ‘crypto-communists’ that he used to thwart the careers of those on the list. Hitchcock, as a bourgeois who was making quite a name for himself (and a lot of money, no doubt) in Hollywood as of the early-1940s, when this film was made, would have had his own class interests to protect.

At the beginning of 1943, when the film was released, the Tehran Conference–with the origins of the Cold War associated with it–was far away from happening, as was the Second Red Scare of 1947. The tide turning against the Nazis in the Battle of Stalingrad was still a month away from happening, too. There seems to have been little fear of communist revolution in January 1943.

The hardships that the working class had suffered during the Great Depression, however, caused them to rise up in an unprecedented way, forcing FDR’s hand in the legislation of the National Labor Relations Act and the New Deal. Many on the political right see little if any difference between the moderate and hard left, and between propagandistic nonsense, like the ‘Holodomor,’ and the truth of the killing of the Tsar’s family, there would already have been much bourgeois fear of leftists idealizing communism.

To get back to the film, and to tie all of these historical digressions to it, there is a crucial scene in which Uncle Charlie discusses what is actually his motive for strangling the rich widows. He refers, with a scowl, to how their husbands worked hard to make all that wealth and then died, leaving all their money to their “silly wives…these useless women”, whom he doubts are even human. In a later discussion with Young Charlie, her uncle describes the world as “a hell.” Given the neoliberal reality we’ve been in for the past forty years, I’d say it’s even more of a hell now.

In these hard-working husbands, I see an allegory of the working class; in their wives, I see the ruling class who take the fruits of their workers’ labour and live in luxury after the men have died from overwork and hazardous accidents. Killing the widows, therefore, allegorizes socialist revolution, but an allegory from the point of view of the frightened bourgeoisie, who want to propagandize against such revolution and call it cruel and violent, hence the representation of the capitalist class as vulnerable, helpless women, to inspire the audience’s sympathy for them.

Young Charlie, too, is concerned–towards the beginning of the film–with the struggles of her family (there is a similar sense of her family’s struggles in McDonell’s treatment), including how her mother works like a dog. Life seems meaningless to her, just a lot of going along with everything, eating and sleeping and nothing else. There’s talking, but little real communication. She seems to sense modern-day alienation. These grey days immediately turn sunny on the arrival of her uncle (who in my allegory represents communist ideals), but she, being liberal-minded like Hitchcock, would never espouse the violent overthrow of capitalism that her uncle’s murders represent.

If my anti-capitalist interpretation seems far-fetched to you, Dear Reader, consider how odd Uncle Charlie’s motive for killing the widows sounds, taken at face value. Misogyny, directed at women merely for being rich and not working, building in a flame of hate strong enough to want to strangle several of them and risk being charged with murder? The world is a hell just because of the widows’ indulgence? Earle Nelson, on whom Uncle Charlie was based, recall, was a sex offender, with a motive straightforward enough to see, but one that for obvious reasons couldn’t be presented on the screen at the time.

That the screenwriters changed the murder victims from being, of all people, landladies to wealthy widows adds to my argument. Landlords, male or female, are capitalists, owning private property–the apartments they make money off of renting them to tenants. The screenwriters changed the victims from one kind of capitalist to another, one whose wealth, unmistakably associated with the exploitation of the poor, is all the more obvious.

A few other things about Uncle Charlie can be associated with communism. He’s come out west from the east. Now, by the east in the film, it’s meant to be the east coast of the US, of course–New Jersey, to be exact. But one can associate “the east” with Russia. There was a growing fear of communist ideas coming to the west–to Western Europe and North America, allegorically represented in the film as California.

One reason I find it useful to link Uncle Charlie’s murders with anti-capitalism, even though he is no communist, is how his story can be paralleled with that of Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting and killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Mangione has right-leaning political sympathies, but they weren’t enough to stop his rage against an American health insurance system that gets rich off of denying coverage for people who desperately need it, and often die without it. Mangione is regarded as a kind of working-class hero (despite him being from a well-off family), and Thompson’s murder is dismissed by the masses as a case of someone who got what was coming to him.

As for Shadow of a Doubt, though, the bourgeois moviemakers would have us booing at anyone who dares to kill the wealthy. Uncle Charlie’s charm and good looks are meant to be seen as superficial and nothing more.

When Uncle Charlie gives gifts to all the family members, including Young Charlie’s emerald ring, we could see such largesse as representative of a socialist redistribution of wealth. Since this film is actually an anti-communist allegory (as I see it), though, we are reminded, through such things as the initials of the previous owner on the ring, that this redistribution is actually to be understood as a theft from the rightful owners, the capitalist class.

When Uncle Charlie cuts out of Joseph’s newspaper an article about the widow murders, and later gets mad at Young Charlie for inquiring too much about the missing article, we can see in this a representation of an anti-communist accusation of Soviet media censorship. Now, such censorship surely did happen, as with Orwell’s two polemical tales being banned in the USSR, but right-wing, anti-Soviet propaganda (such as I suspect this film to be, allegorically) was a real danger: the “Holodomor” myth, as mentioned above, was originally Nazi propaganda that has persisted to this day, and all such propaganda has led to the counterrevolution that Stalin not only warned against, but also correctly predicted the outcome of, the turning-back of social progress.

Another change from McDonell’s story treatment to the screenplay that I find interesting is that of Young Charlie’s love interest. McDonell had him as a “ne’er-do-well” that she is engaged to, someone who is assumed by all in her town to be guilty of any crime committed there, including a hold-up.

In the film, this love interest becomes one of the two detectives pursuing Uncle Charlie. He is Detective Jack Graham (Carey). Just as with the switch from landladies to wealthy widows as Uncle Charlie’s victims, the switch from a criminal ne’er-do-well to a cop as Uncle Charlie’s rival seems to confirm my anti-communist allegory. Let me explain.

Fascists are fanatical anti-communists known for using violence to achieve their ends. Now, neither Detective Graham nor his colleague, Detective Fred Saunders (Ford) show any violence in the film, but other detectives out east, when pursuing another suspect in the widow stranglings, cause the suspect, whom we’ll know to be innocent, to run into and be sliced to pieces by the propellor of an airplane. Fascists have also demonstrated a peculiar charm to inspire the sympathies of the masses, as Hitler did with his speeches about ‘saving Germany’ from the Jews and communists.

Detective Graham, smitten with Young Charlie as soon as he and Saunders arrive at her house to pretend to survey a typical American family (actually to get photos of her Uncle Charlie as a suspect in the stranglings), puts on the charm to win her heart. His actions to this end allegorically represent fascism trying to charm liberals (whom she represents) into joining the far-right.

What we actually have in this film is a kind of perverse love triangle of him, her, and Uncle Charlie (recall the incestuous, Oedipal transference I discussed above between the latter two). Ideologically, it represents how the left and right vie for the liberal centre (the petite bourgeoisie that we see in Young Charlie’s family) to join them. We’re meant to believe that she should go for the detective who represents the right.

That her initial attraction to her uncle is incestuous is meant to make us abominate the adoption of leftist ideas, however charming they may be about sympathizing with the poor. That the violence of the far right is more or less completely excised from the detectives (that propellor death mentioned merely in passing) is meant to make us believe that the right is harmless.

Graham and Saunders are very interested in getting a photo of Young Charlie’s bedroom (Since her uncle, as a guest, is sleeping there, the detectives hope to get closer to him.). Apart from the detectives’ continued pursuit of her uncle, this getting into her bedroom has obvious sexual overtones.

When Young Charlie learns that the two men are detectives and not surveyors of a typical American family, she’s furious with Graham for lying to her, and she’s even more upset with him when he claimed her “wonderful” uncle could be a murderer. Graham has to put on some extra charm to win her over to him.

My associating of the detectives with fascism, again, as far-fetched as it sounds on the surface, might begin to make sense to you, Dear Reader, when we consider this film as an anti-communist allegory. While liberals, of whom Hitchcock can be counted as one, may publicly abominate fascism, secretly they will feel drawn to it if their class interests feel in danger from crisis or an organized working class.

If there’s one thing fascists are useful for, it’s fighting communism: one need only look into Operation Paperclip, Gladio, and the underground activities of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers during the Cold War years, among many other examples, to see my point. Their violence and subterfuge are typically hidden or downplayed by the liberal media, as has been the case with the years since the US/NATO-backed coup in 2014 that replaced democratically-elected Yanukovych with a Ukrainian government and military that includes neonazis.

Such a hiding of violence and conspiracy can be seen allegorically in the activities of Graham and Saunders. One must wonder how detectives chasing a suspect in the eastern US, as it turns out, an innocent suspect, escalates to him running into an airplane propellor and getting sliced up. How is this just an unfortunate accident? There must have been considerable aggression on the part of the detectives to have led to that bloody end.

Fearing that Young Charlie will inform on him sooner or later, her uncle makes several attempts on her life. First, he sabotages the porch steps so she’ll fall down them. Then, he leaves the family car idling in the garage–whose door is stuck, making it almost impossible to get out–so when she goes in to use the car that night, she almost dies from inhaling the exhaust fumes. Finally, on the train to leave Santa Rosa with her there, he tries to throw her off as it’s going; but in the struggle, he falls off and dies under the tracks of an oncoming train.

A funeral is given to honour Uncle Charlie, whose crimes will never be known for fear of the crushing disgrace it would do to her family, surely causing her mother Emma to die of a broken heart. Only Young Charlie and Graham, still wooing her, know the truth.

According to my allegory, the film seems to be saying that the ‘truth’ about socialism would be too hurtful for the working class to know if bluntly stated, hence the telling of that ‘truth’ in this indirect manner, to soften the pain of its revelation.

Graham and Young Charlie doubt her uncle’s characterization of the world as a hell. When one is a member of the petite bourgeoisie (as she is) or higher up, it is fairly easy to suppose that the world has more than enough good in it to offset the bad. The global proletariat–especially those in the global south, as well as so many of us experiencing the neoliberalism of the past forty years (even well-off Luigi)–tend to have a less rosy image of the world.

Analysis of ‘Predator’

Predator is a 1987 sci-fi action horror film directed by John McTiernan and written by brothers Jim and John Thomas. It stars Arnold Schwarzenegger, with Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Elpida Carrillo, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black. Kevin Peter Hall, 7 foot 4 inches tall, played the towering Yautja, with Peter Cullen doing its voice.

Predator was written in 1984 with the working title as Hunter. It grossed $98 million worldwide. It initially got a mixed critical reception, but it has since been regarded as a classic sci-fi/action/horror film, and one of the best 1980s films. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

The Predator franchise includes films (including three sequels, a prequel, and a crossover with the Alien franchise, including Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem), novels, comic books, video games, and toys.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

The Thomas brothers’ original concept for Hunter centred around the idea of “what it is to be hunted,” with a band of alien hunters of various species going after various kinds of prey. This concept was eventually streamlined into one of a singular alien predator hunting man, the most dangerous species, and in particular, the “most dangerous man,” a soldier.

Things really started to get interesting when the setting chosen for the film became the Central/South American area, where so many Operation Condor activities were going on when the story takes place.

The central theme of Predator is, well, predation, of course; but we’re not limited to the predation of the Yautja. Significantly, the film begins with the Yautja’s spaceship flying to Earth, and this is juxtaposed immediately after with a shot of a US Army helicopter flying into a Central/South American country…Guatemala? Colombia? Val Verde? The predator of the film’s title is preying on other predators, those of US imperialism.

While imperialist propaganda would have us believe that these American troops are ‘the good guys,’ fighting off those ‘filthy, rotten, godless commies’ and protecting ‘freedom and democracy,’ anyone who knows what it’s like to be victimized by troops like these can see the lie of such a narrative. The American government arrogantly believes that Latin America is essentially their backyard, of which they think they have the right to determine its collective political destiny.

And since the American ruling class won’t abide a political system other than ‘free market’ capitalism, then any Central or South American country that has a leftist government come into power must have an intervention, typically in the form of coups d’état or other forms of political repression, to ensure the ascendancy of a right-wing, authoritarian strongman to beat the working class into submission. The American troops go in to facilitate just such an intervention. They’re the predators of the Global South poor.

Major Alan “Dutch” Schaefer (Schwarzenegger) flies in with his team of troops to meet with his old Vietnam War ally Dillon (Weathers)–who’s now a CIA agent (this alone should tell us he can’t be trusted)–and General Phillips (played by R.G. Armstrong) to be briefed on their mission: to rescue a local cabinet minister whose helicopter was shot down in a Central American jungle. He’s being held by local guerrillas.

What is not taken into consideration, as far as the pacing of the plot is concerned, is that the guerrillas wouldn’t have engaged in any of this aggression had it not been for the imperialist encroachments on their land, as discussed above. Furthermore, Dutch learns that Dillon’s story about the kidnapping of the cabinet minister is a lie: during his team’s attack on the guerrilla camp, it turns out that the hostages are actually CIA agents like Dillon.

Among the men that Dutch’s team are fighting are the guerrilla’s Russian military allies. The real mission has been to prevent a Soviet-sponsored invasion of the area. Translation: the USSR is here doing what it had done many times during the Cold War–giving aid to national liberation movements. The ‘commies’ aren’t the predators here; they’re helping to fight the American imperialist predators, who in thinking of this fight as a ‘Soviet-sponsored invasion’ are really just engaging in projection.

It’s interesting to note how multicultural the team of American fighters is. Along with the three whites, Dutch, Blain (Ventura), and Hawkins (Black), this third one providing a few bad “pussy” jokes, there are two blacks, Dillon and Mac (Duke), an Hispanic, Poncho (Chaves), and a part-Native American, Billy (Landham). My point in bringing this up is how, in including mostly people of colour in the team, those whose ancestors were victimized by imperialism, colonialism, and racism, we can see in Predator a blurring of the line between military predators and prey.

This blurring can also be seen in the Yautja, who seems to have dreadlocks, and whenever we know it’s around, in the soundtrack we often hear an eerie, undulating, echoing set of fast drum triplets, suggestive of African music. When Dutch has to face the Yautja at the climax, he’s covered in mud, associating his appearance with the darker skin of indigenous people, and he has to fight the alien with primitive weapons, like the Ewoks against the stormtroopers.

Of course, one cannot have imperialist troops without them being über-manly, and Blain gives us the ultimate macho line when wounded. But the blurring between predator (the Yautja bleeding a glowing yellow-green when wounded) and prey is established not only when all the men except Dutch get killed one by one, but also when he confronts it at the climax, when its superior size and strength make him look small and slight. This is an interesting contrast to the virtually invincible men Schwarzenegger had played (Conan, Matrix) up to this point.

Another blurring between predator and prey is, in a symbolic sense, how Anna (Carrillo) claims that the jungle has come alive and attacked people. We would normally notice how the predatory imperialist soldiers (especially those of today–the US military being the world’s biggest polluter) have damaged the natural environment. Her observation, however, reverses the soldiers and the environment as prey and predator, even though its actually the Yautja using its cloaking device to hide in the jungle, like a kind of high-tech camouflage.

There’s also the blurring between predator and prey in the form of animals in the jungle. Blain hears something in the bushes, thinking it’s their predator, and only just after he realizes it’s just a little mammal crawling about, the real Predator shoots and kills him. Mac finds a scorpion crawling on Dillon’s shoulder and stabs it with his knife. The Yautja later finds the killed scorpion.

After the trauma of having seen his good friend, Blain, killed, Mac flips out that night and uses his knife to stab to death something moving around in the dark, what he thinks is the Predator. It turns out that a large pig is what has scared him.

Now, how should we interpret the meaning, the political implications, of this blurring of the boundary between predator and prey? I see three possible interpretations here: a right-wing conservative one, a mainstream liberal one, and a Marxist-Leninist, anti-imperialist one.

The right-wing interpretation, probably felt by the average moviegoer who is just entertained by the film without giving any thought to its political implications, is just a straightforward sense that the Yautja is the bad guy, and the soldiers–for all their faults–are the sympathetic victims. Their faults are negligible; their imperialist acts are not even an issue. Their predation is projected onto the Yautja, one hundred percent.

The centrist liberal view acknowledges the troops’ guilt, which is an extension of liberal guilt in general. Nevertheless, the troops are seen as sympathetic. The operation, purportedly to go into the Central American jungle to rescue the cabinet minister, is seen as legitimate (even though the alleged minister would just have been part of the puppet government the US had installed anyway, and so kidnapping him would have been part of the guerrillas’ plan to liberate themselves from US imperialist exploitation). Dillon’s deceit, to get Dutch to agree to rescue the former’s CIA colleagues and to stop the Soviets, is considered going too far. Therefore, the American soldier and the Yautja are predators. ‘There is bad on both sides.’

As for the leftist, Marxist view, it’s the US troops who are the relevant predators, while the predation of the Yautja should be understood as a matter of getting those troops to understand how it feels to be the prey. We hope this insight will inspire actual US troops out there watching the film to reflect and show true penitence.

It’s significant that Billy, being at least part Native American (as Landham was), notices early on the terrible danger that the Yautja poses to all the troops. The collective unconscious of the aboriginal of the Americas, having the memory of the predatory white man’s incursions on his land and genocide, would give Billy an instinctive sense of the movements and intent of the alien Predator.

Elsewhere, there’s the curious friendships between white and black soldiers in Predator. I say ‘curious’ because, while there’s the historic racist animosity caused by the former group against the latter one, there’s also the neoliberal accommodating of the latter group into the capitalist/imperialist structure. Consider how, since this film was made, we’ve seen blacks rise in the ranks of that structure (Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Barack Obama, Karine Jean-Pierre, etc.) instead of attaining parity with whites in a meaningful, socialist context, in which those at the bottom would rise, instead of just a few of them rising and joining an elite who all tower over the rest of us and bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.

Apart from the black/white friendship we see between Mac and Blain, the former mourning the latter’s death in a particularly traumatic and revenge-seeking way, there’s also the shaking of hands between Dutch and Dillon at the film’s beginning, an iconic moment parodied in many satiric memes since, and a handshake that quickly turns into an arm-wrestling…with Dillon losing, of course.

This superficially liberal white/black friendship is a pretense of racial equality that masks the white supremacy inherent in Western imperialism. Dutch wins the arm-wrestling because Schwarzenegger gets top billing, not Weathers. Most of the heads of the CIA have been white men, but CIA-man Dillon gets the blame for the deceitful mission, not his superiors. His death includes the dismembering of his arm, a symbolic castration, and he’s killed before he can get the use of his other arm to fire a phallic gun at the Yautja.

Billy, instinctively knowing the invincibility of the Yautja as mentioned above, has no illusions about the ability of the surviving members of the team to kill it. Allowing the alien to kill him isn’t just a sacrifice to help Dutch, Anna, and wounded Poncho to get farther away from it; despairing over what he feels is the impossibility of defeating the Predator, Billy is essentially committing suicide. Since the Yautja is an interplanetary imperialist/colonialist, Billy finds it to be far more impossible to kill than even the white man who settled in what’s now the Americas.

One would think Anna would know that her only hope of protection from an alien that flays its victims is this group of American soldiers, but she has no illusions about her ‘safety’ among them. As a member of the guerrillas, pretty much the only survivor of the Americans’ raid of their camp, Anna attempts to escape her captors, for she knows, as scary as the alien is, the American troops are the real predators. Besides, as Dutch observes, the Yautja won’t kill her because she’s unarmed–there’s no sport in hunting her.

She calls the Predator “the demon who makes trophies of man,” since it not only flays its victims, but it also collects their skulls, like a headhunter. We associate this kind of heinous, barbaric behaviour with ‘primitive’ peoples, but since there’s been a blurring between its predatory behaviour and that of the US troops, we can see its prey as not being all that civilized, either.

Finally, of course, Dutch has to face the Yautja alone. There are such levels of irony here. A predator has become the prey. A tough guy is made to be vulnerable. He is left to fight with primitive weapons (i.e., booby-traps) against a technologically advanced alien, just like an aboriginal against the white man. He’s covered in mud to hide himself, and the mud–his ‘war paint,’ if you will–makes him look like a ‘filthy, dark-skinned native’ who shouts out a war cry to attract the Yautja.

On the other side of the coin, the Yautja’s dreadlocks make us think of such groups as the Rastafarians, inspired by, among others, the Mau Mau freedom fighters who resisted the colonialist British authorities in the 1950s. Its face, with the arthropod-like mandibles–which provoke Dutch to call it “one ugly motherfucker”–suggests a predatory crustacean…or an animal that we may eat. We always call ‘ugly’ those who resist imperialism, while also projecting our imperialism onto them.

Since we naturally sympathize with Dutch, though, the irony–of a predator fighting for survival against a predator whose appearance in a number of ways can be associated with those fighting off predators–is lost on most moviegoers. Conservative members of the audience can be smug about the American ‘good guys’ fighting off an evil alien invader…rather like all those…foreigners…who are ‘invading’ our country as refugees.

Liberals, on the other hand, can have their cake and eat it, too: while acknowledging the irony of predators fighting off a predator to survive, they know the average moviegoer will miss this irony and cheer for the first set of predators with a clean conscience.

It is the leftist viewers of the film who will recognize the Yautja as the ultimate imperialist and settler-colonialist, personifying all that is evil, ugly, and horrifying about those US troops who, let’s face it, deserve to be hunted.

Analysis of ‘Payback’

Payback is a 1999 neonoir film directed by Brian Helgeland, written by him, with rewrites for the theatrical release by Terry Hayes. The film is based on the 1962 novel, The Hunter, by Donald E. Westlake, writing under the pseudonym of Richard Stark; this novel had earlier been adapted into the 1967 film, Point Blank.

Payback stars Mel Gibson, with Gregg Henry, Maria Bello, Lucy Liu, Deborah Kara Unger, David Paymer, Bill Duke, William Devane, James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, and John Glover.

There are actually two substantially different versions of this movie, with different colour grading, different soundtracks, and most importantly, with completely reshot third acts, leading to totally different endings. The test screenings for the film, right after it wrapped, didn’t yield a positive result. It was felt to be excessively dark and violent, with a wife beating, a shot dog, and other characters killed in cold blood.

A more crowd-pleasing version was wanted, so Helgeland was out, Hayes’s rewrites were made, and the central villain–done in a voice-over by Sally Kellerman–was replaced by Kristofferson (both seen and heard), while removing the objectionable parts mentioned above and adding a voice-over narration by Gibson.

Helgeland’s version–the director’s cut–is called Payback: Straight Up, and it was released on DVD, Blu-ray, and HD DVD in 2007. According to The A.V. Club, Straight Up is “a marked improvement on the unrulier original.” Indeed, the theatrical release was not all that well received, and with the generally better critical reception of the director’s cut–which has a darker, more ambiguous ending–one realizes that the reaction of the test-screen audience perhaps should not have been taken too much to heart.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here is a link to the director’s cut, and here is a link to a PDF of The Hunter. I’ll be comparing both film versions and the plot of the novel.

The main theme of the film is, most obviously, theft, since it’s not just the $70,000 cut that Porter (Gibson–Parker in the novel, who is double-crossed out of $45,000) loses after being double-crossed by his heist partners, Val Resnick (Henry–Mal Resnick in the novel) and Porter’s wife, Lynn (Unger). They’ve stolen the total amount of money from a rival Chinese mafia organization. Porter’s wish to get his $70,000 back from “the Outfit,” a powerful mafia organization Val has given the money to so he can rejoin them after having been kicked out for committing a blunder, is seen by the Outfit as a theft in itself.

Since the film deals with a number of mafia organizations, as well as two corrupt cops (Detectives Hicks and Leary, respectively played by Duke and Jack Conley), and since I have a habit of seeing mafia as representative of competing capitalists, we can see how the alienating, dog-eat-dog world of Payback is allegorical of our own, oh-so-troubled times.

When we don’t have solidarity among the working class, united in their struggle for liberation from capitalist exploitation, those very common people end up attacking each other, fighting with each other, hurting each other. Such is the kind of dog-eat-dog-world we see in Payback.

The theatrical release begins with a scene in a room where a doctor…or sorts…removes bullets from Porter’s back–bullets put there by Lynn during the double-crossing. Because Porter is a professional thief, and therefore would be tracked by the cops if he went to a hospital, he has to resort to this kind of low-quality ‘healthcare.’

The novel begins with Parker as a penniless, shabbily-dressed drifter (one might remember young Hitler during his destitute days…I’ll go into why I’m making this comparison later) crossing the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan and bent on getting his money back. The beginning of the director’s cut is similar (since it’s far more faithful in general to the novel), and after the crossing of the bridge, Porter comes out of a train station that looks like the one at the end of this film version, where he again gets shot, and he needs Rosie (Bello) to drive him to that ‘doctor’ before he dies, thus making the plot of the director’s cut come full circle.

Since The Outfit, as I see it, represents the capitalist system (an idea that can be seen more vividly in the novel, when it’s described as having branches all over the US–in New York City and Chicago, for example–and how it grew from the old Prohibition days into a corporation with an outer veneer of legitimacy, to keep the cops away), and violent, criminal types like Porter/Parker and Val/Mal work sometimes inside (the latter), and sometimes if not always (the former) outside of The Outfit, these two men can be seen to personify fascism in its different aspects.

If that observation seems odd to you, Dear Reader, let me elaborate.

Neither of these men are concerned with how the exploitative, hierarchical structure of capitalism as represented in The Outfit is harmful to the world’s most vulnerable…as fascists aren’t concerned with it, either. Val/Mal wants into the system in order to enjoy its perks (just as Hitler enjoyed the backing of big business to help him come to power). Porter/Parker is only concerned with getting back the money he was cheated from; since Val/Mal gave his stolen share to The Outfit, Porter/Parker wants them to give it back to him…and he’ll kill anyone who stands in his way.

Naturally, The Outfit doesn’t want to part with $70,000, so their top brass refuse to give Porter ‘his money.’ This refusal is similar to how the Western imperialist powers didn’t want to cede such territory as Poland to Nazi Germany, who wanted their piece of the pie…hence the Nazi invasion of Poland started the inter-imperialist WWII.

Remember that what our protagonist wants back is something he himself helped to steal…just as Nazi Germany ‘took back’ Poland, some of which (West Prussia and Silesia) was once part of the German Empire before it was lost at the end of WWI. This land was felt to have been ‘stolen’ from Germany, and the Nazis used all violence imaginable to get it back, as Porter does.

Like fascists, he couldn’t care less about the suffering of the poor; he just wants to bring himself out of pennilessness and back into wearing stylish suits as quickly as possible, like the petite bourgeoisie, who often side with fascism, especially if they lose power to the haute bourgeoisie (whom The Outfit could be seen to personify). At the beginning of the film, Porter steals paper money from a homeless man, justifying his theft (in the theatrical release, significantly) by noting that the homeless man is faking his lameness. There’s to be no sympathy for the destitute if they aren’t disabled, apparently. Those are neoliberal values for you.

The theatrical version changed the film to make Porter more likable, in spite of the fact that he’s hardly less sociopathic than Val…or your average fascist, for that matter. The scene of Porter fighting with and beating Lynn in her kitchen was removed, as was his killing, near the end of the film, of an Outfit soldier in cold blood in a truck for speaking to Rosie as if she were a mere whore.

But even without these scenes, Porter is still a nasty piece of work. He kicks Lynn’s apartment door in while her back is to it; she’s pushed into a wall, knocking the wind out of her. There’s all of his other, unfeeling violence, all just to get $70,000, which keeps being mistakenly thought to be $130,000. The very tagline of the theatrical release is “get ready to root for the bad guy.”

The crucial difference to be found between the theatrical release and the director’s cut is that the latter presents a dark, gritty world that is so harsh that one cannot watch it without thinking there’s something unacceptably wrong with it…it’s implicitly a social critique…whereas the former–with its more sympathetic Porter–makes his violence seem ‘hip.’ It’s significant that this glamourizing of sociopathic Porter should be in a film from the late 1990s, by which time the replacement of welfare capitalism with the neoliberal ‘free market’ variety had been firmly established.

You see, Porter demonstrates a kind of ‘triumph of the will’ that we’ve already seen in Conan the Barbarian. There’s a message advocating an acceptance of this kind of colder- and colder-blooded competition that has insidiously crept into otherwise mainstream liberal Hollywood movies, implicitly encouraging viewers to adopt the same unfeeling attitude.

First, we make it ‘cool’ and ‘badass’ to show a macho man killing and killing to get what he wants–in this case, seventy grand. Then, we make it hip to use racial slurs, as Tarantino did, and as we hear Val doing, calling the Chinese mafia “chows” and “fuckin’ slants!” All we need is for economic times to be hard–symbolically expressed in scruffy, penniless Porter itching to get his $70,000 at the film’s beginning–while one never challenges the capitalist system that caused these problems, of course, and the stage is set for fascist violence to come in.

After ripping off the homeless guy, Porter surveys the busy sidewalks to find a man who looks similar enough to him for a photo ID he can fake as being of himself. He finds a suitable guy, bumps into him and apologizes, brushing his suit to distract him while pickpocketing his wallet. As we can see, the theatrical release glamourizes a thief and killer, ruthlessly stopping at nothing to get ‘his’ money, whereas the director’s cut presents him as such not to make him seem ‘cool,’ but as an implicit social commentary, a dark one, meant to raise eyebrows.

Just before the wife-beating, Lynn tells Porter that Val has arranged to pay her rent, just as in the novel, Mal does this for her in return for a sexual relationship with her. Resnick has stolen far more than just money from our prickly protagonist.

In the film, a far better motive is given to Lynn to double-cross and kill Porter than is given in the novel: she thinks he has been having an affair with Rosie (which he claims happened before he met Lynn). In the novel, Mal threatens to kill her if she doesn’t shoot Parker…because he’s too much of a coward to do his dirty work himself.

Val, even more overtly violent than Porter, enjoys beating women–prostitutes in particular, suggesting a…shall we say, Joy Division mentality about them?–and has a racist attitude, at least towards Asians. His favorite prostitute is the S-and-M-leaning Pearl (Liu), who is linked with the Chinese mafia, and with whom he trades punches. One is reminded of Freud‘s comment: “A sadist is always at the same time a masochist.” Val utterly personifies fascism.

As I mentioned above, he stole Porter’s cut to buy his way back into The Outfit, which as I also mentioned above, represents capitalism in its more presentable form. There are different levels of viciousness in capitalism. When economic times are good, capitalism can pretend to be democratic; when they’re bad, the democratic mask falls off, and the ugly, violent face of fascism shows itself.

Val represents the kind of fascist who wants to hide in, and get the benefits of, capitalism’s respectability in the form of The Outfit. Porter, however, represents the kind of fascist who sees through the phony masquerade of The Outfit and the capitalism it represents, so he’d rather work outside of it, even butting heads with it, if necessary.

A middle-man between Val and Lynn’s seller of drugs is Arthur Stegman (Paymer), who also owns a taxicab operation (in the novel, the Rockaway Car Rental). As with the ‘legitimacy’ of The Outfit, Stegman’s cab business is the respectable one he, as a dealer of drugs like the heroin Lynn has ODed on, hides behind (in the novel, she kills herself by ODing on sleeping pills).

The point I’m trying to make–about the outer mask of respectability we have in capitalism (The Outfit, Stegman’s cab company) vs. the naked aggression of fascism as personified in Porter and Val–is that we shouldn’t have any illusions about the former as being somehow contrasted against the latter. To many of you readers, the point may be too obvious to need to be said; but remember that, as of my writing of this article, millions of Americans are voting for Harris or Trump, fully believing that who they’re voting for are acting in their interests.

Recall that quote by Frank Zappa–who was no supporter of socialism, yet nonetheless had no illusions about the American political and economic system he lived in–about how the illusion of freedom will last only as long as it remains profitable to do so. Once that illusion is too expensive to maintain (as it has been for several decades now), it will be removed, and we will see the naked reality of our hierarchical system based on money and power, and given expression in the form of fascism.

When the comfortable life of liberals is safe and intact, they can pretend to be magnanimous and gracious. When their class privileges are in any way threatened, though, they show their true, violent colours. Val, in the comfort and discreetness of his Outfit hotel room, can hide his sadism with Pearl. When he’s been told by Stegman at a restaurant that Porter is alive and well and presumably wants to kill Val, he shows how nasty he’s capable of being right out in public, right out in the open.

He’s speaking out loud at his table, with no regard for the other patrons. He speaks of having Porter killed for sure, again, loud enough for everyone to hear and not caring at all about it. He even threatens another customer, walking right up to his table, for merely looking at him.

When Val goes to see Carter (Devane), a superior to him in The Outfit, he’s all deferential, because of course he has to be. He’s hoping for help from Carter, but now that Carter’s class interests are also being compromised (as are those of The Outfit in general) by Porter’s visit to Val’s room the night before, Carter not only won’t help Val at all with doing away with Porter, he also wants Val to move out of the hotel, not coming back until he’s removed Porter all by himself (the same thing happens to Mal in the novel). The liberal in Carter has shown his true colours, too. There is to be no more “unpleasantness” from Porter at the hotel.

In the director’s cut, Val is standing outside The Outfit building, angry about having been cut loose from them. He shouts that to do something right, one must do it oneself; then, facing and gesturing to the two US flags by the front doors of the building, he shouts, “It’s the American way!”

Once again, this moment seems to demonstrate Helgeland’s original intentions for Payback, the implied critique of capitalism. When you’re in a bad situation as Val is, those in power won’t help you. You have to deal with the problem yourself–no government handouts, for that would be ‘vile socialism.’ Val is so brainwashed by American capitalist ideology, though, that he won’t even admit that the system is screwing him, knowing full well how screwed by it he is.

After all, it’s the American way. Long live the free market!

He has a racist attitude towards the Chinese (and presumably by extension, towards Asians in general), but this doesn’t mean he won’t enlist their help in killing Porter for him. It’s just as when the Nazis, though regarding the Japanese as racially inferior to them, nonetheless were content to have them in the Axis to keep the Americans occupied during WWII. Politics makes strange bedfellows, and Val has to make do with what little he has.

Though he helped Porter rip off the Chinese mafia, he’s enough of a snake to blame the entire robbery on Porter in order to motivate them to kill him and have their satisfaction in him alone. Unfortunately for Val, though, those two cops intervene just in time to scare the Chinese mafia away.

Now, Detectives Leary and Hicks are thoroughly corrupt, willing to be bought off by Stegman for selling heroin, as well as to save Porter from being charged with the killing of Lynn, etc. (i.e., by having Porter give them the $70,000); but that doesn’t mean they’ll let Val and the Chinese mafia finish off Porter after running into him with their car.

You see, Leary and Hicks represent the kind of capitalism in which the government intervenes, as opposed to the theoretical ‘free market’ capitalism as represented in the lawless Chinese mafia and The Outfit. Just as these two cops will extort money from Porter or Stegman, the state will gladly take cash gifts from capitalists, be they liberal, moderately conservative, or fascist in ideology, in exchange for government protection. Only right-wing libertarians and their extreme, deluded version–‘anarcho’- capitalists–entertain the fantasy that the state and the market are mutually exclusive, and that an unholy alliance between the two cannot be ‘true’ capitalism, but is ‘corporatism’ instead.

Leary and Hicks are a rewrite of cops in the novel who, investigating a shop-owner named Delgardo for moving marijuana from Canada into the States, suspect that Parker is in on the drug-dealing, too (Part III, Chapter 1). In the, to be frank, rather anti-climactic ending of the novel, Parker manages to get his money with minimal difficulty, as opposed to the bloody injuries Porter sustains in both the theatrical release and the director’s cut.

The cops in the novel, however, being incorruptible types compared to Leary and Hicks, finger Porter for helping Delgardo to move the marijuana into the country (Part IV, Chapter 4), and while he manages to get away from the cops, he flees with the wrong baggage, one with clothes rather than the one with the money. The novel ends with him, having enlisted the aid of three men, ripping off The Outfit again, but for a smaller sum of money.

While Parker kicks the asses of the cops in order to escape them in the novel, in the film, Porter plans to frame Hicks and Leary for his killing of Val; he does so by stealing Hicks’s badge, tricking Leary into getting his fingerprints all over the pistol he’s used to put a bullet in Val’s head, and putting Hicks’s badge in the hand of Val’s corpse.

In the novel, Parker needs Rose only to get an address so he can find Mal. In the film, Porter does more than that with her: he revives a relationship with Rosie, now that Lynn is dead. When killing Val, after learning that he needs to contact Carter and Fairfax (Coburn) about getting his money, he saves her from a brutal rape in her apartment. (In the director’s cut, he arrives too late, unfortunately, to stop Val from shooting and killing her dog.)

When Porter goes to Carter’s office, we come to the greatest divergence between the theatrical release and the director’s cut: the identity of the film’s central villain–respectively, Mr. Bronson (Kristofferson) and Ms. Bronson (Kellerman, in voice-over). Since we only hear her voice and never see her, this lends her a fascinating aura of mystery: she’s like a vengeful mother goddess after Porter has shot Carter.

Though I tend to prefer the soundtrack of the theatrical release, with the five-note, chromatic sax ostinato of its main title, I must say that I prefer the darker, more ambiguous ending of Helgeland’s version to the crowd-pleasing, raised-stakes version with Kristofferson, as superficially thrilling as it is. Hence, I’ll deal with the director’s cut ending.

Having not only a woman as the head of the mafia Outfit, but also a woman who surprises and shoots Porter at the train station, the director’s cut ending defies the stereotype of the ‘innocent woman’ vs. the necessarily male villain. This ending, though closer to the novel version (i.e., the payoff happens at a subway station–Part IV, towards the end of Chapter 3), also improves on its disappointingly anti-climactic denouement.

Helgeland’s ending can also be seen to reflect the relationship between fascism (as personified in cold-blooded killer Porter and sadistic Val) and the mainstream imperial ruling class (The Outfit). As Carter has observed, the sadism of Val “comes in handy,” but anyone…anyone…who causes trouble for The Outfit must be removed–either kicked out of the hotel (Val), or killed (Porter).

Similarly, the ruling class has always found fascists to be useful in beating the working class into submission; hence, for example, when Hitler was allowed to take the Sudetenland and encouraged to go east and invade the USSR. When he and Mussolini started to move in on such territory as that of the British Empire, though, they were making themselves into troublemakers of a sort that Porter could be seen to represent, with his fascist-like bent towards violence.

Hence, the violent, he-who-lives-by-the-bullet-shall…die?…by-the-bullet, fate of Porter is comparable to the crushing defeat of Hitler and Mussolini by the end of WWII. The two dictators died…as Porter just might die…but their fascist legacy lived on, through Operations Paperclip and NATO-backed Gladio, Western support of Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers to this day, etc.–as Porter just might survive.

Analysis of ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’

I: Introduction

A Streetcar Named Desire is a 1947 play by Tennessee Williams, premiered on December 3rd of that year. It’s considered one of the greatest plays of the 20th century, and is Williams’s most popular, being among his most performed and adapted in many forms, including notably the 1951 film.

The original cast of ASND was made up of almost all the same actors as in the film version, except for Blanche DuBois having been playing by Jessica Tandy onstage, and by Vivien Leigh in the film.

Here’s a link to the entire play.

II: Famous Actors for the Roles

Apart from Tandy and Leigh, other notable actresses who have played Blanche are Tallulah Bankhead (for whom Williams actually wrote the character, though she hadn’t played the role until 1956, because she was felt to be too strong for it), Ann-Margret, Cate Blanchett, Blythe Danner, Uta Hagen, and Rachel Weisz. Every actress Williams saw performing the role he loved, feeling that each of them brought something different to Blanche.

Apart from the most famous portrayal by Marlon Brando, Stanley Kowalski has been played notably by Anthony Quinn, Treat Williams, Alec Baldwin, Rip Torn, Aidan Quinn, and Christopher Walken.

Apart from Kim Walker, Stella–Blanche’s younger sister and Stanley’s wife–has been played by Beverly D’Angelo and Diane Lane.

Karl Malden played Harold “Mitch” Mitchell in the original stage production and in the 1951 film.

III: Themes

A central theme of ASND is narcissism, with the whole spectrum of pride/vanity to humility/shame expressed at many different points at the extremes and in between them. Blanche is vain, insufferably so to Stanley, who has a fierce pride of his own. Stella is much more submissive, forgiving of her husband’s brutality, giving in to his demand to put Blanche in a mental institution, and believing his denials of a rape of her sister that he’s obviously guilty of. Mitch is most gentlemanly to ladies, but when he learns of Blanche’s waywardness, he loses his sensitivity almost immediately.

Blanche’s narcissism is of the covert variety, expressed in a passive-aggressive form, her often seeming to play the victim. Her narcissism is a defence against psychological fragmentation, a defence that apish Stanley will break through, causing her to have a nervous breakdown at the play’s end. Her very name, meaning ‘white,’ suggests her narcissistic False Self of sweetness, purity, and ladylike sense of culture, but it also hides her True Self of promiscuity, snobbishness, and ethnic bigotry (i.e., against the Polish).

Stanley is her diametrical opposite, making hardly the slightest attempt to hide his harshness (or so it would seem). His wish to break through all of Blanche’s masks and disguises and reveal the truth in no way redeems him of his cruelty. He is perceived as an ape, and rightly so, for he rids us of all doubt by the end of the play.

So along with the spectrum between narcissism/pride/vanity and humility/shame, there’s also a spectrum between social artifice/fakery and brutal honesty in ASND. In the case of this latter spectrum, it should be obvious which character personifies social artifice, and which brutal honesty. A character like Mitch falls somewhere in between the extremes, as we’ll see later on.

IV: Scene One

A verse by Hart Crane (the fifth from “The Broken Tower”), which is put before the beginning of Williams’s play, seems to express Blanche’s situation when she arrives in New Orleans. She’s looking for a building on a street called “Elysian Fields,” whose heavenly associations are ironic given what a hell-hole she finds her new home to be.

She is a Southern belle used to a life of dainty clothes, perfume, comfort, and culture in Belle Reve (“sweet dream,” loosely translated), the old home she’s lost to creditors, forcing her to live with Stella and Stanley, or else face homelessness. Living in such a shockingly poor home will be a crushing humiliation for Blanche.

To get to Elysian Fields, she’s taken a streetcar named Desire, then transferred to one called “Cemeteries” (Williams, page 3). The streetcar named Desire was inspired by an actual streetcar with the same name, which ran a half-block away from Williams’s apartment on Toulouse Street in the New Orleans’s French Quarter, where he wrote the play.

The names of the streetcars, as well as the name of Stella’s and Stanley’s home, have been chosen as more than just names of places in the real world, though. Desire leads to cemeteries…rather like, the wages of sin is death…and death leads to an afterlife that may seem like heaven, but is actually hell. It should be easy for anyone who has read or watched a performance of ASND to see how these names are points on the trajectory of Blanche’s life, just as the verse from Crane’s poem reflects her life.

She has led a life of desire–from her marriage to a husband who, it turns out, had homosexual feelings he acted on, then killed himself after knowing her shocked reaction to this acting-on them (recall that Williams himself was gay, and therefore his sexuality rubbed off in some of his plays), to her own promiscuity, which included a sexual relationship with one of her teen students. This inappropriate relationship led to the bad karma of her being fired as a high school teacher. We see how desire has led to the cemeteries of her husband and her job.

And now she has to live in the hellish ‘heaven’ of her sister’s shabby home, to be shared with a man whose bestial nature will be soon apparent to her.

When Blanche sees her sister for the first time in a long time, she addresses her as “Stella for Star!” (page 6). Since this is the literal meaning of her younger sister’s name, Blanche’s imagined poetic pointing-out of that meaning demonstrates her literary pretensions early on in the play.

Though she affects refinement, her own vulgarity and ignorance also come out early in the play as she and Stella discuss Stanley, whom Blanche not only refers to as one of those “Polacks,” but also imagines as being “something like Irish,” but “not so–highbrow?” (page 9) His friends are “a mixed lot,” according to Stella, and are therefore “heterogeneous–types” to Blanche, which suggests a quite racial categorizing of them; after all, there’s Pablo (Nick Dennis in the original production and the 1951 film).

After Blanche has sorrowfully told Stella about the loss of Belle Reve, being so ashamed of its loss that she imagines her sister’s questioning about it to be a judgement on her for losing it (pages 11 and 12), she meets Stanley. It’s so fitting that Brando exemplified Stanislavski‘s Method Acting in the role of Stanley, his name almost sounding like a pun on Stanislavski, since there’s no affectation whatsoever to be seen in Kowalsky; while Blanche’s character seems to require the technique of the classical acting style, with its “saw[ing of] the air too much with [one’s] hand,” and its “tear[ing of] a passion to tatters.”

A cat screeches near the window, startling sensitive Blanche. In the film, Brando’s Stanley imitates the cat’s screeching, a kind of foreshadowing of how upsetting he’ll soon be to her. In fact, he is upsetting to her already by the end of this first scene, when he brings up her marriage (page 15). Bringing this up triggers painful memories for her that will be brought up in full later.

When I referred to Blanche as narcissistic and fake, neither of these faults necessitate our lack of empathy for her. She’s suffered terribly, and she’s about to suffer even worse by the end of the play, thanks to Stanley’s merciless cruelty. Her narcissism and maintaining of illusions are the only things that are keeping her from falling apart completely.

V: Scene Two

When Stanley learns from Stella of Blanche’s loss of Belle Reve, he starts worrying that his wife has been cheated of the family property, for the “Napoleonic Code” (which, contrary to what Williams believed, did not exist in Louisiana at the time) states that what belongs to the wife belongs to the husband and vice versa (though Stanley doesn’t seem too concerned with the vice versa). If Blanche has lost the family property, then so has Stella…and so has Stanley.

The point is that Stanley is a very domineering husband, and he believes he has the right to extend the patriarchal dominance of his home onto Stella’s sister. He doesn’t even like his wife’s leaving him “a cold plate on ice” for dinner while she and Blanche go out to eat, then to a show, so he and his friends can play poker in his home without any women disturbing them (page 16).

His utter lack of respect for a woman’s rights is on full display when he starts pulling out Blanche’s dresses from her wardrobe trunk in search of any documents to tell him what happened to Belle Reve. He imagines Blanche’s fancy-looking clothes are all expensive, too much so for a teacher’s salary, so he says he’ll have an acquaintance in a jewelry store do an appraisal of her “diamonds,” “pearls and gold bracelets” (pages 18-19). Stella insists that the “diamonds” are just rhinestones. Stanley still thinks he has the right to Stella’s ‘wealth.’

Stanley’s borderline, if not outright, misogyny is to the point of bluntly telling Blanche that he has no interest in complimenting women on their looks, since in his opinion, they either already know they’re beautiful and therefore don’t need to be complimented, or they’re so vain that they “give themselves credit for more than what they’ve got.” (page 21) Blanche, in her thirties and with fading beauty, has an already fragile self-concept and therefore doesn’t need Stanley’s kind of bluntness.

He doesn’t take it as well as he dishes it out, though. When she responds to his bluntness by calling him “a little bit on the primitive side,” and says she could tell no more about him than that he’s a man her sister married, he throws a brief tantrum (pages 21-22). In his brutal honesty, he should not be confused with men like Alceste the misanthrope, who sincerely hated social hypocrisy in spite of his continuing attraction to the flirtatious coquette Célimène, who had eyes for him as well as for other men. Stanley, on the other hand, is simply an ape.

His brutish demanding that Blanche show him legal papers connected with the DuBois plantation leads to him grabbing love letters from her husband. Stanley’s insensitivity to her husband’s letters is a touch that insults them, meaning she’ll need to burn them (page 23). He has again triggered painful memories about a husband with the opposite personality of Stanley’s, a sensitive poet, not a growling gorilla.

Her saying she’d not have him touch her letters “because of their–intimate nature…” (page 23) is a foreshadowing of the horrible thing that Stanley will do to her at the play’s–pardon the expression–climax. She surrenders to his looking through her legal papers, just as she’ll surrender to him in a more physical way later.

It’s interesting how his use of legality to persecute her parallels his use of physicality to persecute her. Feminists would have a field day analyzing these parallels, as I’m sure they already have. In this connection, I also find it interesting how the Napoleonic Code didn’t exist in Louisiana at the time of the story: Stanley’s imagined authority over Stella and Blanche is as fake as Blanche’s pretensions to culture and high breeding. As I said above, he has no business pretending to be any more honest than she does.

VI: Scene Three

Stanley, Mitch, Pablo, and Steve (Rudy Bond in the original production and the 1951 film) are playing poker while Stella and Blanche are out. Poker night is an all-boys club in which women are persona non grata, of course. It’s bad enough when people in high positions of political, economic, and religious power and authority use sex roles and the patriarchal family to divide the sexes and keep women down; when working-class men reinforce these divisions and discriminatory attitudes, it makes proletarian solidarity all the more difficult to cultivate.

Another example of this lack of solidarity, but from a racial angle, is Pablo suggesting going to get some chop suey from the “Chinaman’s” (page 27), this being a term which, by the time of the writing of the play, must have already begun to acquire derogatory overtones in the US. Pablo, as an Hispanic and therefore surely someone familiar with being on the receiving end of ethnic slurs (Stanley will have called him a “greaseball” by the end of the play, and I suspect it won’t be the first time), should have at least some sensitivity to how inappropriate “Chinaman” sounds, as should Stanley, as a Polish-American who is infuriated with Blanche saying “Polack.”

Of the poker players, Mitch is the only unmarried one (page 28), and he has a sick mother at home, so he worries about her and must leave the poker game. His duty to her gives off the impression that he’s a ‘mama’s boy,’ and that he’s ‘sensitive.’ Blanche will soon pick up on his “superior” manner (page 30), and see in him the hope of a husband. Stanley shows his contempt for Mitch’s devotion to his mother by saying the guys will “fix [him] a sugar-tit.” (page 28)

Mitch is pleased to meet Blanche when she and Stella have returned and he has stepped away from the poker game for the moment, so he is playing the role of the gentleman while the other boys continue with their all-boys-club card game. Stanley, predictably, feels the most invaded by the feminine presence.

He assures Blanche that none of the men are interested in standing up when she enters the room. He’d have her and Stella go up to Steve’s place and sit with Eunice, Steve’s wife (Peg Hillias in the original stage production and the 1951 film), whom he treats with a shabbiness comparable to how Stanley treats Stella and Blanche. Though it’s nearly two-thirty in the morning, Stanley sees the poker game as not finishing any time soon, and he spanks Stella on the thigh…or is it the ass?…to discourage her and Blanche from staying; this only angers her.

Gentlemanly Mitch, however, will repeatedly insist, “Poker shouldn’t be played in a house with women” (pages 36 and 37). Stanley is annoyed that Mitch, more interested in Blanche than the game, won’t come back to it. He’s particularly angry when Blanche turns on the radio (page 35). He rushes over and smashes it.

Stella, furious, calls Stanley an animal and tells his friends to go home immediately. He goes wild at her ending his sacred card game and goes after her. His friends try to calm him down, but it’s no good.

Both husband and wife go offstage, and we know that he hits her (page 35). Both she and Blanche scream. Stella is taken upstairs to Steve’s and Eunice’s place while Stanley’s friends try again to calm him down by pouring shower water on him, but he just gets angrier, curses at them, and hits them. They all leave with their poker winnings (page 37).

With Stella gone, Stanley finally realizes he’s screwed up. Now we have the famous moment when he screams out “Stella!” repeatedly. Without her, he’s no longer the dominant male, but he’s been reduced to a weepy little boy.

Perhaps his weepiness in part has triggered her maternal instinct, but in any case, she goes back to him and forgives him, a shocking thing for Blanche, Eunice, and any reasonable person to see. Stella is letting him manipulate her with that helpless little boy routine, a classic page out of the narcissist’s playbook.

Eunice would get the law on him for hitting his wife and making such noise so late at night. Just as the men demonstrated by trying to calm him down, there is no social acceptance of violence against women, though that doesn’t mean men never get away with it.

Blanche comes out, horrified that her sister, with child, went back to the man who hit her. Mitch is there to talk with Blanche, since he’s still interested in pursuing her. What should be a bad omen for her is how, in spite of how Mitch is still acting the gentleman, he trivializes this moment of domestic violence.

VII: Scene Four

The next morning, Blanche wants to talk Stella out of remaining in her relationship with Stanley after having seen how bestial he is capable of being. As with Mitch, Stella trivializes what happened the night before, which of course is all the more disturbing.

Stella thinks that Stanley’s having felt ashamed of himself for his barbaric behaviour is enough to forgive him, when she knows full well that he’ll do such things again, and soon.

Stella was as much of a Southern belle as Blanche, but the former being taken off the pedestal didn’t upset her the way the latter was forcibly removed from it. Blanche cannot conceive how Stella is willing to tolerate living with such a man as Stanley.

Part of the difference in the two women’s attitudes is how Blanche, unlike Stella, still believes in romantic notions of gallantry, illusions to protect her–it would seem–from the brutality of reality. When Stella speaks of how Stanley, on their wedding night, went around their home with one of her slippers smashing all the light-bulbs with it, instead of being terrified, as Blanche would have been, Stella admits to having been thrilled by his wildness (pages 41-42).

Blanche feels there’s a desperate need to get herself and Stella away from Stanley. She remembers a wealthy oilman named Shep Huntleigh, who she imagines could use his money to get her and Stella away from that brute of a husband. She imagines she’ll get Western Union through the telephone operator to contact Shep and tell him that she and Stella are in a desperate situation and need his help (pages 43-44). This urgent attempt to get Western Union and contact Shep will be repeated in Scene Ten (page 95), at the climax of the play, when Blanche is sure that Stanley, alone with her at home while Stella is in the hospital to have her baby, won’t have anyone there to hold his leash.

This Shep Huntleigh represents, in another way, the diametrical opposite of Stanley. He’s not only wealthy, but he’s also a gentleman, Blanche’s gallant, romantic ideal. According to Heinz Kohut‘s conception of the bipolar self, the two poles that give a person a stable sense of self are ones based on someone to idealize (in childhood, the idealized parental imago) and someone to mirror the grandiose self. When both of these needs are met, one can live with a healthy, restrained, and moderate sense of narcissism. If one of the poles fails, or is thwarted, the other can compensate. If both fail, one is at best in an extremely fragile position (as Blanche is, already at the beginning of the play), and at worst, one experiences psychological fragmentation and a psychotic break with reality (as happens to Blanche at the end of the play).

Blanche is hoping that a courtship with Mitch will lead not only to a husband who can ‘make an honest woman of her,’ so she can put her promiscuous past and reputation behind her, but also to a satisfying of her narcissistic need for someone to mirror back her grandiose self to her. His gentlemanly routine of putting her up on a pedestal will satisfy that need.

When Mitch learns, through Stanley’s merciless probing into her past, of her promiscuity when she lived in Laurel (living in The Flamingo, a hotel known for prostitution, her sexual relationship with one of her underage students), and he refuses to marry her, she uses her idealization of Shep Huntleigh, a kind of Oedipal transference of the idealized parental imago, to keep her fragile self hanging on. Of course, Stanley tears that compensatory fantasy apart, and she goes mad in the end.

The psychiatrist (played by Richard Garrick in the original stage production and the 1951 movie)–who, with the matron (Ann Dere), comes to take Blanche to the mental hospital at the end of the play–temporarily destroys her ever-so-faint hopes to be taken away by Shep; but he wisely humours her, putting on the gentlemanly act to make her cooperate, and revives for the moment her hope to have the idealizing pole satisfied.

Anyway, Blanche continues trying to convince her sister that Stanley is not worth keeping. When Stella speaks of the “things that happen between a man and a woman in the dark,” making such things as Stanley hitting her “seem–unimportant” (page 46), we’re reminded of how “thrilled” she was at his smashing of the light-bulbs. A nasty man is often exciting to a woman, where a nice guy finishes last. As the Chinese say, “男人不壞，女人不愛” (“If men aren’t bad, women won’t love them.”) Bad boys are sexy, and in this observation come so many of women’s problems with men. Recall, in this connection, how good-looking young Brando was in the 1951 film, with his muscle tone and his shirt off. I’ll bet the girls were swooning with ecstasy at the sight of him on the screen.

Blanche responds to what Stella says by pointing out what I said above about the title of the play–that it’s not just inspired by the name of a streetcar near where Williams was writing his play. Stella is talking about her “brutal desire,” a streetcar that brought Blanche to this Godforsaken home of Stella’s and Stanley’s. A streetcar named Desire, then one named Cemeteries…Blanche imagines that Stella’s desire will lead to her death at Stanley’s hands.

As Blanche goes on condemning him as “common,” he’s approaching home and overhearing her words. He is fuming inside as she speaks of how his wife should be with a better man than “an animal,” someone “subhuman” and “bestial” (page 47).

Since Blanche has been bad-mouthing him so much to his wife, he’ll get his revenge on her by learning the gossip about how “common” she is, making all of her pretensions to art and culture seem utterly hypocritical.

VIII: Scene Five

Stella and Blanche can hear Steve and Eunice fighting upstairs, the latter accusing the former of fooling around with some “blonde,” which Steve denies (page 49). The fight escalates, she throws something at him, then he hits her, and she wants to get the police (page 50). She runs off, and he goes after her. We sense that domestic violence in the ‘heavenly’ Elysian Fields is not limited to Stella and Stanley.

Stanley comes by, and Blanche–in her usual ‘ladylike’ voice–taunts him by saying he must be an Aries, since he’s so “forceful and dynamic,” and he loves “to bang things around” (page 51). Naturally, he’s annoyed at these words. Stella tells her that Stanley was born just after Christmas, making him a Capricorn. Blanche comments, “the Goat!”, annoying him all the more.

When she mentions that her birthday is the following month, in mid-September, making her a Virgo, which is the Virgin, Stanley–already knowing a few things about her scandalous reputation in Laurel–has an opportunity to insult her back. He mentions a man named Shaw, a name common enough that she can pretend this is not someone she knows in particular, a man she apparently met in Laurel, at a hotel named the Flamingo, the place where prostitution goes on (as I mentioned above), so naturally, Blanche denies any association with it.

When Stanley leaves, though, Blanche asks Stella, in a state of great anxiety, if she’s heard any dirty gossip about her (page 52). Stella denies having heard anything nasty about Blanche. Around this time, Steve and Eunice have returned in each others’ arms, fully reconciled; their making-up parallels the making-up of Stanley and Stella that happened so soon before.

Blanche explains to Stella the reason for her bad reputation in Laurel. The loss of Belle Reve, on top of her husband’s suicide and the scandal surrounding her sexual relationship with her teen student, put her into a situation so desperate that she had “to be seductive,” to “put on soft colours” (page 53). She’s needed to do this with men “in order to pay for–one night’s shelter!”

She’s found that “men don’t…even admit your existence unless they are making love to you. And you’ve got to have your existence admitted by someone, if you’re going to have someone’s protection.” So she’s got to “put a–paper lantern over the light”, something she habitually does so people won’t see her aging and fading beauty, something she’s terrified of, just as she’s terrified of the light revealing the truth of her scandalous behaviour, something she’s feen forced into because of her losses…but the cruel, judgemental world will never be understanding to her about that.

And Stanley is the epitome of that cruel and judgemental world, not that he’s any better, of course.

She senses that Stanley wants to throw her out of his and Stella’s home, so she doesn’t want to be a burden to her sister, something she promises she won’t be in the most hysterical of words. Stella is shocked by how emotional Blanche is getting. Blanche is placing all of her hopes on Mitch, with whom she is having a date at seven that very night (page 54).

In anticipation of Stella learning, through Stanley, about Blanche’s reputation in Laurel as a ‘woman of loose morals,’ she frantically insists that on dates with Mitch, he’s gotten only “a good night kiss” from her (page 55). She wants his respect, yet she’s terrified of losing him, hence she’s so sensitive about her age. She wants him to think of her as “prim and proper.”

Of course, Mitch wants her to think of him as a gentleman. He has his social mask, and she has hers, symbolized by that paper lantern over the light, to hide the aging on her face.

Stanley returns, and he leaves with Stella, with Steve and Eunice accompanying them. Blanche is alone in the apartment.

Just before Mitch is to show up for his date with her that night, Blanche sees a handsome young man (played by Wright King in the 1951 film), who appears at the door. He says he’s “collecting for the Evening Star,” a newspaper. She jokes about him as a star taking up collections because she finds him so attractive, but he is so innocent and sweet (just the way she likes her boys), he doesn’t understand her joke.

I suspect that she, in her fragile, unstable mental state, is imagining this boy’s presence. He can easily be seen as reminding her of not only the boy she had the affair with, but also her husband back when she first knew him, when the couple were both very young. Her student/lover presumably reminded her of her husband, too.

The boy collecting money is so perfect to her. He’s polite, he calls her “ma’am,” and he’d never treat her like a whore. He’s shying away as she makes her advances to him.

Finally, she gives him a kiss on the mouth (page 57), but not wanting to go any further, as with Mitch, she sends the boy off. And fittingly, just after he disappears, Mitch arrives for their date.

IX: Scene Six

At 2:00 a.m. of the same night of their date, Mitch notes that Blanche is getting tired. After he drops her off at home, it seems that he’ll take “that streetcar named Desire” back home, for we can see just how much they desire each other. Still, he’s sad because he thinks he hasn’t entertained her much tonight.

Though she still wants him to think of her as a lady who isn’t cheap, she still likes tempting him. She’d have him come into Stella’s and Stanley’s place, since the husband and wife aren’t back home yet. She also wants to give Mitch a drink, and she even asks him, “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?” She also says in French that it’s a shame he doesn’t understand the question, but of course she’s happy he doesn’t (page 61). They actually go into the bedroom, her carrying the drinks.

A little later, she has him pick her up to see how light she is. Still, she’d have him let her go and be a gentleman while her sister and Stanley are still away (page 63). She fears Stanley exposing her bad reputation in Laurel, but he can’t resist continuing her coquettishness.

Almost immediately after Mitch’s picking her up and putting her back down, she brings up how much she doesn’t like Stanley, with her worries that he may have told Mitch some bad things about her (page 64). It’s interesting to see this juxtaposition of her teasing of Mitch with her fears of him learning of her ‘loose’ ways in Laurel. It’s as if her unconscious death drive, her Jungian Shadow, is deliberately sabotaging her date.

She gets nervous when Mitch asks her age (page 65). He asks because of his mother, who has wanted to know more about her. After all, his mother will probably die in a few months, and she wants to make sure her son is settled (page 66).

Next, the conversation turns toward Blanche’s old husband, a sad topic for her. The two married when very young. He was “different.” He had “a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s,” but not at all “effeminate-looking” (page 66). He needed her help.

Eventually, she found him with another man.

They pretended that nothing had happened, then the three of them went to Moon Lake Casino to be drunk and dance, to the music of the Varsouviana in particular. Then her husband broke away from her, ran outside, put a revolver in his mouth, and shot himself.

He ran out and killed himself because, on the dance floor, she’d told him he disgusted her (page 67). So she blames herself for his suicide.

Now, in the 1951 film version, all references to homosexuality in the play–however indirect–were censored for obvious reasons. Instead, the husband is portrayed as simply weak, overly sensitive, weepy, and a poet–all the gay stereotypes without the gay. A similar excising of homosexuality in a Tennessee Williams play was done in the 1958 film adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Empathizing with Blanche, and seeming to be similarly sensitive, Mitch reaches out to her after hearing her tragic story. She needs someone, as he needs someone. He’s seriously considering marrying her.

Except…

X: Scene Seven

In mid-September, it’s Blanche’s birthday, and Stanley has plans of ruining it for her (page 69). He’s found the dirt on her that he needs to prove that she has no business calling him ‘common.’

To add to his irritation, she is “soaking in a hot tub” on a day when the temperature is 100. He can’t stand how Stella serves cokes to “Her Majesty in the tub.” He’s convinced, “from the most reliable sources–which [he has] checked on”, that Blanche is a liar about her past (page 70).

Her singing in the bathtub, like a “canary bird,” is annoying him all the more. He can’t stand her pretense of being some kind of “lily,” all sweet and delicate, when he’s discovered that she, in his judgement, is a common whore.

The sad thing about the animosity between both of them is how it’s based on prejudicial notions of class, ethnicity, and sex. His faults, in her estimation, are because he’s a low-class “Polack.” Her faults, in his estimation, are because she’s a ‘slut.’

His real faults don’t come from his being working-class or Polish. Anyone, of any ethnicity or any social class, can be irascible, crass, rude, or violent, as Stanley is. Her real faults don’t stem from her private sexual life. Any woman, with or without literary and cultural pretensions, can fall the way Blanche has fallen, given the combination of misfortunes she’s had to suffer.

Her promiscuity should be perfectly forgivable if she can find a husband and commit to him. Her questionable relationship with her seventeen-year-old student can easily be forgotten given the same positive change in her fortunes.

What’s more, what he does to her towards the end of the play renders her sins insignificant in comparison to his. This play demonstrates the cruelty of the old double standard between the sexes more vividly than perhaps any story out there. The double standard can be expressed in the metaphorical use of words used in dog-breeding: when a man screws around, he’s a stud; when a woman does it, she’s a bitch.

This cruel double standard can help us to understand why Blanche does the prim and proper routine, why she makes mental escapes into a world of romance, poetry, and gallant gentlemen, and why she sings like a canary bird in the bathtub. It’s all a desperate attempt on her part to survive and stay sane.

Of course, if we had a society that had institutions to care for unfortunates like Blanche, she would never need to sell herself to survive. And if that society gave workers like Stanley the full fruits of their labour, and if that labour was meaningful instead of alienating, he probably wouldn’t be half the ape that he acts like.

But I digress. Back to the story.

Now, while Stanley is telling Stella about Blanche’s lies about only ever being kissed by men, as she’s told Mitch (page 70), and about quitting teaching merely because of her nerves, rather than being fired for sexual misconduct with a minor, Blanche is in the tub singing about such phony things as paper moons, cardboard seas, the Barnum and Bailey circus, honky-tonk parades, and melodies from penny arcades–things that wouldn’t be make-believe if she had a man who believed in her (pages 70-71). Just as I said above: she wouldn’t need to indulge in all the fakery if she had a man to love her…as she once had.

We can’t expect any compassion from merciless Stanley, though, of course. He’s found fault in her, and he has all the reasons he needs to hate her.

Stella tries to reason with Stanley, to get him to understand the misfortunes her sister has gone through to bring her to her current situation. She brings up Blanche’s “degenerate” husband (page 73). Stanley is deaf to all of this: he’d rather hate Blanche than pity her.

In fact, Stanley has told Mitch all about Blanche’s scandalous past, and though he’s infuriated with Stanley for blackening her reputation, he’s checked the sources of Stanley’s stories and has confirmed them. He’s been invited to Blanche’s birthday party, but he won’t show up (page 74).

Stanley has given her some extraordinary birthday gifts. He’s been most thoughtful to her.

Finally, he gets so furious with her holding up the bathroom and singing endlessly that he shouts at her to get out (page 75). She tries her best to hold herself together against his savagery. Still, she worries about what he’s told Stella about her.

XI: Scene Eight

Forty-five minutes later, the three of them are sitting at a dismal birthday dinner (page 76). Blanche is wearing an artificial smile, trying to hide her disappointment at Mitch’s absence.

She asks Stanley to tell them a joke, something to cheer them up without it being vulgar or indecent. In his disgust with her affectations about being the ‘high-class’ lady from Belle Reve, rather than the whore from the Flamingo, he says he knows no jokes “refined enough for [her] taste.” Therefore, Blanche will tell one…a joke that ends with “God damn…!” She’s as capable of rough language as he is (page 77).

When Stella gripes at him for his bad table manners and tells him to help her clear the table, he has another of his temper tantrums, throwing a plate to the floor. He refuses to let himself come anywhere near being dominated by her or Blanche.

He’s infuriated at being called a “Polack” by Blanche, and judged as “vulgar–greasy,” but he sees no injustice in his own dominance as a man over her and his wife. He twists the socialist meaning of Huey Long‘s “Every man a king” slogan, meant to indicate that all people should have access to the plenty that a king enjoys, and instead he uses it to mean that men should be the kings of their women. In this, we can see what I was saying above, that a lack of solidarity between the sexes, as well as between people of different ethnic groups, is bad for the working class.

Blanche is still worried that Stanley has told Stella some dirt he’s learned from Laurel. Stella denies hearing anything, but of course she’s heard plenty. Blanche wants to call Mitch’s home and find out why he hasn’t shown up for her birthday party. She’ll regret making the call (page 78).

Stanley has another ‘gift’ for Blanche: a ticket back to Laurel. She can hear the Varsouviana music. She runs off, coughing and gagging (page 81).

Stella reprimands Stanley for being so cruel to her sister, and he reminds Stella of how he’d pulled her down from the columns of Belle Reve, and she liked it. He’s now pulled Blanche down from those columns, too, and she hates it…therefore, he hates her.

Overwhelmed by stress, Stella is going to go into labour. He has to take her to the hospital.

XII: Scene Nine

Blanche is alone in the apartment again, and Mitch arrives, dressed in his work clothes. He has no more interest in playing the role of the gentleman for her, having confirmed what Stanley told him about her. His coldness to her, and her realization that she has lost him, just as she lost her husband, reminds her of the Varsouviana music she’d heard when he ran off and put a gun in his mouth (page 84).

Mitch doesn’t like how dark it is in the place. He wants to see her in the light, which of course she never wants to be seen in (page 86). She finds the dark comforting, something she can hide in. Just as it hides her age, the darkness also hides her sinful past–it is her Jungian Shadow.

He insists on seeing her in the light even to the point of tearing off the paper lantern from the light-bulb. He wants to see her “good and plain,” which causes her narcissistic injury, for she finds exposure to the light “insulting.”

He wants realism, but she wants “magic.” She wants to hide in romance, to be worshipped by a gentleman. She wants comforting illusions.

When he sees her in the light, he doesn’t mind that she’s older than he thought; but he’s heartbroken to know that she, of supposedly “old-fashioned” ideals, has serviced men in the Flamingo. He at first dismissed Stanley’s accusations as slander, but then he checked Stanley’s sources and he is no longer able to deny the truth about her (page 87).

Blanche tries her best to deny Mitch’s sources, claiming the stories of the men who knew of her promiscuity are slanders to get revenge on her for rejecting their advances, but Mitch won’t believe her. Knowing she can’t get him to sympathize with her, she ironically exaggerates her sin by claiming the hotel she stayed in was not called The Flamingo, but “The Tarantula,” where she supposedly brought all her victims (page 87).

Again, she tries to explain what drove her to promiscuity–the suicide of her husband, Allan, her hopes of finding a man’s protection but never getting it, and the slow fading away of her looks from aging. She still hopes she can win Mitch’s sympathy by appealing to his need for somebody, as she needs somebody, and noting how gentle he seems (page 88)…but all that matters to him is that she lied to him.

As all of this is being said, a Mexican woman outside can be heard saying, “Flowers, flowers, flowers for the dead” in Spanish…some ominous foreshadowing of Blanche’s fate, metaphorically speaking.

Blanche speaks of “blood-stained pillow slips” that need changing, symbolic of her promiscuity. She imagines that “a coloured girl [could] do it,” suggesting a projection of her sin, what makes Blanche “common,” onto blacks, onto common workers. Blanche would continue to use racial and class prejudice as an ego defence mechanism to protect her against judgement for her sins.

Still, not only does Mitch feel no sympathy for Blanche, but he also no longer feels any obligation to play the role of the gentleman for her (page 89). He takes it to the point of wanting sex from her, imagining that she’s owed it to him “all summer.”

As we can see, his gentleman routine is as much of a phony act as is her ladylike routine. So much in this play is illusion and pretense.

Since Mitch has his hands on her waist, and it’s clear that he doesn’t want to marry her, she has no intention of satisfying him like a ‘cheap’ woman. His intention is to have her whether she’ll consent or not…in other words, he’s prepared to rape her.

She screams “Fire! Fire! Fire!” to make him go away, since screaming fire is considered a much more effective way to get help against a rapist than yelling rape. When we consider what’s going to happen to Blanche in the next scene (just after the end of it, specifically), we can see that Mitch is actually a more moderate version of Stanley, or rather, that Stanley is representative of an extreme version of ‘gentlemen’ like Mitch.

XIII: Scene Ten

It’s later that same night. Blanche is dressed in her prettiest of dresses, wearing her rhinestone tiara, and in front of the dressing table mirror. Since Mitch left, she’s been drinking steadily. She imagines she has a number of “spectral admirers” around her (page 90).

As I said above, her loss of Mitch is a loss of the mirror of her grandiose self, one of the two poles that are holding her together. So the group of “spectral admirers” is there in a desperate attempt by her to avoid the psychological fragmentation that is her fate via Stanley.

She’s talking to these imagined admirers: she’s hallucinating their presence. She’s holding a hand mirror to look at herself more closely, the hand holding it trembling. The chasm between who she knows she really is and the Lacanian ideal-I she wants to see in the specular image must be so vast that she smashes the mirror down hard to crack the glass.

Stanley returns from the hospital, and he’s in an uncharacteristically good mood. He is even, for the moment, kind to Blanche. He’s happy because he’s soon to be a father and hoping for a son (page 92).

Blanche has hopes of her own, only hers are completely imaginary. Just as she’s been seeing make-believe admirers in the mirror, for the sake of her grandiose self, she’s also imagining that Mr. Shep Huntleigh, her personified ideal, will take her on a cruise of the Caribbean (page 91).

Only through an escape into fantasy can she hope to keep her bipolar self intact, with Shep at one pole (idealization), and the admirers in the mirror reflection at the other pole (grandiosity). Yet Stanley is about to smash both poles for her, to rid her of her illusions, and traumatize her so severely that her psychotic break from reality will be complete.

Still, though, for the moment, Stanley is being nice to her because of his good mood as an expectant father. He doesn’t believe a word she’s saying about a cruise with Shep, but he’s humouring her all the same, to keep the peace, hence his comment that the rhinestones on her tiara are “Tiffany diamonds” (page 91). In his humouring of her, we can see that he’s as capable of pretense as she is.

Though he’s trying to be generous with her to keep the mood pleasant, she doesn’t want to reciprocate (page 93). She’s annoyed at the continuing lack of privacy, and yearns for her “millionaire from Dallas” to restore it to her. In her swelling narcissism, she boasts of her inner beauty–“beauty of the mind and richness of the spirit and tenderness of the heart”–all of which can replace her fading physical beauty.

This boasting is causing Stanley’s patience to fade, especially when she speaks of “casting [her] pearls before swine!” (page 93) “Swine,” of course, refers not just to Stanley but also to his friend, Mitch, whom she now regards as no less common than Stanley. She lies that Mitch “returned…to beg [her] forgiveness,” which she wouldn’t give.

When Stanley reminds her about the telegram she supposedly got from Shep, and he sees she has briefly forgotten about it, he’s caught her in a lie (page 94). Now his anger comes back in full.

Stanley knows there is no Shep, and he knows that Mitch never came to her asking for forgiveness. It’s all only her “imagination…lies and conceit and tricks!” It was all narcissistic fantasy, which she’s been using to protect her bipolar self from psychological fragmentation.

He is disgusted with her phony charade, but he cannot see the pain she went through that brought her to this. He’s tearing down her fake performance, and he’s about to bring her to that state of fragmentation. But first, he’ll go into the bathroom to change into his pajamas.

Just as before, when she suggested to Stella that their escape from Stanley would be a call to Western Union to contact Shep (Scene Four, page 44), she’s at the phone, trying to do it again for real, to save herself from this beast (pages 94-95).

She hears noises from outside at night. She leaves the phone and, according to the stage directions, she goes to the kitchen. Outside, a drunkard is attacking a prostitute. This is obvious foreshadowing of what’s about to happen to her.

Stanley comes back from the bathroom, having changed into his pajamas, and he’s looking at her lewdly. Part of the problem of being labelled a ‘cheap’ or ‘easy’ woman is, of course, how she becomes prey for lecherous men. Mitch gave Blanche a try; now, Stanley wants to…only he’ll be much more insistent on it.

He hangs up the phone on her, and he’s standing in a place where he can stop her from getting away. She knows what that look in his eyes means, and she needs to protect herself, so she smashes a bottle and points the jagged end at him (page 96).

She tries to fight the good fight, “some rough-house,” but he overpowers her, of course. Now that they’re going to have “this date” (an interesting choice of words on Stanley’s part, reminding us of how her dating Mitch ended), he picks her up and takes her to the bed (page 97). She moans and yields to him in all hopelessness.

XIV: Scene Eleven

A few weeks later, Stella is home with the baby, and she’s packing Blanche’s things. Eunice also comes by.

Stanley is playing poker with Steve, Mitch, and Pablo again at the kitchen table. The atmosphere of this game is the same as the last one (page 98).

Pablo curses at Stanley in Spanish, making the latter call the former a “greaseball.” Once again, the use of ethnic slurs demonstrates the lack of solidarity among the working class.

Blanche has told Stella that Stanley raped her, but Stella refuses to believe it (page 99). Eunice agrees that Stella should never believe it, since she’d never be able to carry on with Stanley. This understanding brings us back to the theme of illusions that keep the pain away, that protect us from fragmentation.

Blanche has finished bathing and is ready to come out of the bathroom. She’s full of anxiety and insecurity, wondering if the coast is clear (i.e., no men to see her), and if she’s failed to rinse all of the soap out of her hair (page 100). Stella and Eunice try to comfort and humour her by telling her how good she looks.

Blanche is still hoping for Shep Huntleigh to call her and take her on that cruise. Again, Stella and Eunice are humouring her with this fantasy, knowing full well that it’s a psychiatrist who is about to take her away. Again, they have to keep her illusions intact, for reality will destroy her.

Blanche imagines she’s going to spend the rest of her life on the sea (page 102). She thinks she’ll die holding “the hand of some nice-looking ship’s doctor, a very young one…” How ironic that it’s actually going to be a doctor who takes her away…and not a young or handsome one.

The doctor and nurse, or matron, arrive at the door and ring the doorbell. Blanche, of course, is full of hope that it’s Shep who has come to her rescue. How disappointed she’ll be.

As Blanche looks in shock at these two unexpected and unwanted visitors, she can hear the Varsouviana again. This was the music she heard just before her husband’s suicide, which in turn led to the events that have been corroding her whole sense of self. She’s hearing the music again in her mind; it’s a trigger leading to her destruction.

She’s trying to escape from the two visitors, claiming she forgot something (page 104). The nurse goes in after her and calls out to her, her voice echoing in Blanche’s mind, a threatening echo that suggests a recurring pain, a returning trauma.

Stanley, impatient to get rid of her, asks if it’s the paper lantern she wants. He tears it off the light-bulb and gestures to give it to her. According to the stage directions, “She cries out as if the lantern was herself.” (page 105) Of course she’d see it that way: all that Blanche has been, to keep her sanity, is a covering-up of the light, a comforting dimness, her narcissistic False Self. Revealing the light’s brightness exposes her True Self and all the ugliness she perceives it to be.

This is her succumbing to psychological fragmentation.

As the nurse is restraining her, Mitch gets up and tries to hit Stanley for his cruelty to Blanche. Mitch would seem to have a modicum of gallantry after all. Stanley’s denial of guilt shows he’s as fake about his commonality as she is about hers.

It is the Doctor, however, whose gentlemanly act of removing his hat and greeting her, that calms her down, restoring her comforting illusions. Stanley’s raping of her means that he has put his filth and commonality inside her, something she cannot expel. For her, kindness comes from strangers, not from people close to her.

The 1951 film changed the ending by having Stella refuse to be with Stanley anymore, since the old Motion Picture Production Code would never tolerate his rape going unpunished. No divorce, of course, but no easy forgiveness of him, either. Among social conservatives, there can be no acceptance of such violence against women as rape, however much the law may allow guilty men to slip through its cracks.

Williams’s play, however, exposes the ugly side of society by granting no justice or satisfaction to the long-suffering marginalized: ‘fallen’ women, ‘degenerate’ gays, ‘mama’s boys,’ ‘Polacks,’ ‘Chinamen,’ and ‘greaseballs.’ Williams would not whitewash cruel reality.

XV: Conclusion

You see, the cruel irony of “depend[ing] on the kindness of strangers” is twofold for Blanche. On the one hand, those strangers who were ‘kind’ to her were the Johns who solicited prostitution from her in exchange for money so she could survive–in other words, total exploitation. On the other hand, those she’s known well have hurt her the most: her husband, whose suicide was an abandoning of her; Mitch, who abandoned her out of a refusal to forgive her for her shady past; Stanley, for obvious reasons; and even Stella, for refusing to believe her accusation of Stanley (her relationship to her oaf of a husband being more important to her than her loyalty to her sister), and for allowing Blanche to be taken to a mental institution, her final humiliation.

In a world of alienation, only strangers can be kind.

Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire, London, Penguin Books, 1947