Basic Decency

I: Introduction

When the scapegoat of a toxic family tries to confront them about their constant emotional abuse, one of the many forms of invalidation that the narcissistic parent and his or her flying monkeys respond with is to trivialize and minimize the pain and trauma they’ve put the victim through.

One manipulation tactic they may use in the service of this trivializing and minimizing is to say that one cannot hold the abusers up to some lofty and unrealistic standard of moral perfection: the narcissistic parent, after all, was never “given an instruction booklet” on how to deal with every single problem that inevitably comes along when raising children.

Never mind that the victim never required such unattainable ideals of parental and familial perfection. All the victim ever wanted was to be treated with basic, common decency.

As every reasonable person understands, even in the best and healthiest of families, there will sometimes be fighting, there will be moments of frustration, and otherwise beloved family members will have certain quirks and foibles that will drive us a little crazy. There is nonetheless a certain baseline that any decent family will not go under, despite those frustrating moments that are otherwise unavoidable.

I wish to discuss those things that a decent family would never do…or if they every now and then did lapse into such nastiness, they would snap out of it soon enough, apologize, and work hard not to repeat such nastiness. I write this as a guide that I hope will help anyone out there who may be in an emotionally abusive family, or suspects him- or herself to be in one, and who would like to have a kind of yardstick with which to measure whether or not he or she is in a situation sufficiently bad to need to plan an escape from it.

Naturally, as the scapegoat of my own family-of-origin, I’ll be using examples of my own experience of them to illustrate what I mean by those lows that go beneath the level of basic decency that one should expect from one’s family, that it–however imperfect–wouldn’t be a case of lowering itself to emotional abuse.

Families of basic decency won’t be consistently guilty of the following habits:

II: Gaslighting You Into Believing You’re Less Capable Than You Really Are

Your family is supposed to have your back, and while some criticisms of you, when necessary and appropriate, are unavoidable, being truly supportive of you means that they should be, under normal circumstances, helping you to build your self-confidence, not undermining that building of it.

Imagine being in a family with a narcissistic mother who tells you, a child, that you not only have autism, but that the psychiatrists who evaluated you had you do an IQ test on which you’d apparently scored in the early 60s. She tells you such a score means you’re retarded; yet, by “a miracle from God,” you turned out to have normal intelligence, that this “miracle” pulled you out of retardation.

She’s emphatic in stating that the psychiatrists recommended locking you away in an asylum and throwing away the key. She says she didn’t know if you’d even make a good garbageman–as long as you were happy. She says, on another occasion, that prior to the “miracle” recovery, she’d worried about herself and your aging father, decades into the future, having to continue caring for “a forty-year-old moron.”

It doesn’t matter that she said you’d grown out of your “retardation.” The damage has been done: you have been associated with the mentally deficient, and that’s damage enough for an impressionable child to have to grow up with.

Then, decades later, you learn, bit by bit, through therapy sessions with other psychiatrists and having done the Autism-Spectrum Quotient questionnaire, that you don’t, in fact, show any signs of autistic symptoms, not even the mildest, high-functioning ones. (Read this for the story in full detail.) You realize that you weren’t merely misdiagnosed as a child: your mother had been lying to you.

That happened to me. I was about nine when those lies were first told to me. Imagine the effect such lies have on the psyche of an impressionable child…heard from the mouth of my own mother! That’s an example of what I mean by a lack of basic, common decency.

Now, add to this psychological damage that a child suffers the constant verbal taunts, insults, and four-letter abuse coming from the mouths of his elder siblings. He gets called, for example, “You dip!” over and over again…on his thirteenth birthday, right at the party when he receives the cake; and thus begins a constant verbal barrage of being called “dipstick,” and “dork,” again and again, throughout his teenage years, those fragile years when a kid’s identity is just developing. Talk about undermining a kid’s ability to develop basic self-confidence.

Those taunts, of course, are just the mild end of the spectrum, for the kid is also being called “stupid,” “idiot,” “asshole,” and “you little shit!” any time those elder siblings are in a bad mood. And the kid is just a teenager, during an already emotionally confusing time in his life.

Now, while all of this, among other forms of bullying, is going on–much of it right in front of the narcissistic mother–she does nothing to stop it. She doesn’t help the bullied scapegoat, except in the rarest of exceptions, when she deems the bullying has ‘gone too far.’ Somehow, all the ‘moderate’ forms of bullying are acceptable to her. Well, naturally: they serve the same purpose as the gaslighting and lies: to control the victim.

III: Bullying

The bullying isn’t limited to verbal abuse and constant insults. There is physical intimidation going on, too. At least one elder sibling is threatening physical violence on the victim, if not actually hitting him. Sometimes the elder sibling orders the victim around, even calling him “slave.” Sometimes, the bully spits on the victim, then laughs.

Of course, the bullies will rationalize the awful way they treat the victim, listing his many faults: he ‘doesn’t care about anybody but himself’ (somehow, bullying is an example of caring about others); he’s ‘lazy and poorly motivated’ (hating him will surely fix that). Let’s consider a hypothetical situation: certain children have a problem with rhinotillexomania, which one understandably finds disgusting (will hitting them keep their fingers clean? Incidentally, the filthy childhood habit has been explained [as are other body-focused repetitive behaviours] as one not merely being an ignorant ‘pig,’ but as a way to reduce anxiety…oh, such children would never feel anxiety in an abusive family!). And, of course, there are many other such flaws used as convenient excuses for bullying.

Being mad at the victim for having this or that annoying habit or fault is far from the only reason he is being bullied, though…by the very people who are supposed to love him. The bullies frequently, freely admit to him that they do it for the sheer fun of tormenting him. And the narcissistic mother does nothing to stop the bullying. It’s as if she were telling the bullies, “Go ahead, throttle the little bastard, see if I care.” Indeed, one gets the sneaking suspicion that she’s been secretly fanning the flames of the bullies’ hate.

It’s well-known that narcissistic parents will pit their sons and daughters against each other, goad them into competing–and even fighting–each other for the parent’s (very conditional) love…to seem ‘the worthiest’ one of having that love. Though sibling rivalry is a reality in even the best and healthiest of families, any reasonable parent will do his or her best to minimize any feelings of jealousy among siblings. Narcissistic parents, on the other hand, thrive on that very jealousy, enjoying the ego trip they get from it, and so will intensify that jealousy at every opportunity, pointing out–right in front of the siblings–which one he or she supposedly favours the most.

This inflaming of jealousy can be a powerful motive to bully a sibling. That narcissistic mother I was talking about…mine…who lied about a mental condition I don’t have, who was capable of such mendacity, would have been all the more capable of telling my elder brothers and sister all kinds of lies about not only my faults–either exaggerating them, taking them out of context, or mixing in false faults with true ones–but also lying about preferring me to them, making them want to hate and torment me all the more. If that was true about her, in every detail, and I have every reason to believe it was all true, then she was being especially cruel to me.

Knowing the whole time that the bullying was going on, and doing nothing about it, she’d sigh and act as if it were just an inescapable reality, when a few sharp reprimands from her–given the respect she commended as our mother–my three elder siblings would have chilled right out…immediately. You see, one could make the argument that older siblings’ bullying you when you and they were kids is simply a matter of them having been immature at the time; yet even there, it was still the parents’ responsibility to intervene and stop the bullying. So many years having gone by with this abuse going on, without any substantial parental intervention, is simply a matter of childhood emotional neglect.

It thus still demonstrates a total lack of basic decency.

IV: Teaching a Child One’s Bigotries

One form of emotional abuse that shouldn’t be ignored is when a parent teaches his sons and daughters his bigoted attitudes. Again, an impressionable child is having his or her world view distorted by a parent’s biases and prejudices, thereby stunting the child’s growth and development, making him or her as ignorant and ill-informed as the parent.

I’ve written at length over the years on this blog about how I was emotionally abused by my mother and three elder siblings, with little complaint about my father’s contributions to the problem. In doing so, I haven’t been all that fair. It’s high time I discussed how he, too, contributed to messing my mind up.

He was a right-wing reactionary who justified his attitude with his euphemistic self-description as “conservative.” Just about every “ism” applied to him: racism, sexism, antisemitism, anticommunism, homophobia, etc. He not only had these attitudes, he also expressed them with a bitter, angry vehemence and vitriol. He was, to be perfectly blunt, a mindless, bigoted old fool; he was Archie Bunker with a Master’s degree in history–the one subject that, if anything, should have taught him to have leftist sympathies, had the subject been taught properly to him.

As a young man with liberal tendencies at the time (in the early 1990s, as I was attending university), I tried to resist his reactionary thinking, which even included defenses of evangelical Christian fundamentalism (not that he ever attended church or read the Bible for moral guidance, mind you; it was all just an excuse for supporting authoritarian thinking). But just as mainstream media saturations of bourgeois propaganda sooner or later tend to influence the thinking of the masses, I eventually was swayed, for a time, to his way of thinking…not completely, but to far too great an extent, anyway.

Indeed, from about the mid-1990s to about the late 2000s, I went through a period of lost years, growing increasingly reactionary in my own thinking, in part due to my own personal frustrations at the time, but also due in great part to his toxic influence. First, I became stridently antifeminist. Then, during the early 2000s as a reaction to 9/11, I went full neocon for several years, even supporting the Iraq invasion and Israel (yes, I sank pretty low).

It took a slow, sad and disappointed realization, confronting how the Bush administration had lied about Iraq’s “WMDs,” to turn me around; their bailing out of the banks in 2008 was the last straw. Since then, I’d slowly resumed a socially-liberal/fiscally libertarian stance; and after Dad’s death in 2009 and some temporary grieving of him, I felt psychologically liberated from any need for his approval of my political beliefs, and I thus embraced leftism.

And here I am now, a total commie red, with no qualms about it at all.

V: The Toxic Influence of the Petite Bourgeoisie

One thing related to my father’s bigotry, and also linked to my family’s toxicity (as well as, I imagine, the bigotry and toxicity of many families out there), is the issue of class. I’m the only member of my family–to my current knowledge–with any left-wing sympathies (and recall, my own sympathies in that way are only a little over a decade long as of this writing, and I’m 56 going on 57); none of the rest of those in my immediate family has a socialist bone in his or her body, which should tell you something, Dear Reader, as far as their empathy levels are concerned.

As owners of a Smitty’s Pancake House restaurant in the 1980s and early 1990s, my parents were petite bourgeois, and with that social position come the values and politics of such a class. The worker was looked down on by my father as a “lazy lout” (his exact words), and anyone receiving welfare was just mooching off the government and taxpayer. Just as my dad had tried to influence my political thinking rightward, so did my sister, J., though more liberal herself, try in the early 1990s to stamp on my identity that I’m “an upper middle-class young man.” No, J.: as a teacher of English in East Asia, I’m a worker, a proletarian.

When I was a teen and doing some of my first work in the mid-1980s, which in this case was some jobs here and there for the family restaurant, I was working for…$1 (Canadian). My father tried to drive into my head, “Oh, if you wanna make that dollar, you have to work really hard for it…” as if that precious dollar was a mint of gold or something. Later, as a young man and without work with sufficient pay that would allow me to leave home and live independently, my father, rationalizing that “You have to pay your way in this world,” made himself my landlord, requiring me to give him some of the meagre pay I was making for ‘rent’ each month. Granted, it wasn’t as high a ‘rent’ as one normally would pay, but still, this was my father, with his Attila-the-Hun right-wing mindset. One normally expects a more charitable attitude from one’s own family.

My mother was also somewhat more liberal than my father, though as a comparison to him, “somewhat liberal” isn’t saying much. She fiercely supported Israel to the point of flipping out on me one day in the restaurant for appearing there wearing an Arab scarf, something I’d bought on my university campus and–being too young and politically naïve to know anything about the Israel/Palestinian conflict–was wearing it just to be fashionable. In her hissy fit, she shouted that the scarf–looking like Yasser Arafat‘s black-and-white keffiyeh–made me look like a supporter of the PLO; she spoke of how awful it was that Palestinians throw rocks at the IDF, yet it didn’t matter at all to her how the latter have always brutalized the former, with state-of-the-art military technology provided by the US and other countries. My father had nothing kind to say about Zionism, of course, but that was because of his hatred of Jews, not from sympathy for the Palestinians, whom he called “murderers.”

Getting back to my sister, I mentioned in another blog post (I forget which one) how she was annoyed with the politics in Bruce Cockburn songs, in particular, “Call It Democracy.” She’d sneer at the title, imagining the singer “takes himself way too seriously.” Well, J., if you’d ever gone to Third World countries like Guatemala, as he did in the 1980s, and seen the appalling poverty there, caused in no small part by US imperialism, you’d understand why “democracy” in the West is and always has been a sick joke.

All of these examples show the connection between the microcosm of family toxicity and the macrocosm of toxicity in capitalist imperialism, the political gaslighting involved in the narcissism of capital. Capitalism causes alienation, causing in turn the lack of empathy easily seen in toxic families ruled by narcissistic parents. Accordingly, the use of psychological aggression by parents on their kids in the US (the bourgeois country par excellence) is almost universal, according to a study.

VI: Explosive Anger

Now, speaking of “psychological aggression,” one of the defining features of emotional abuse in toxic families is the propensity towards explosive outbursts of anger, happening all too frequently, and typically provoked by only minor offences. Everyone flies off the handle every now and then, even the best of people; but in toxic relationships, frequent explosive anger is a tool of control, meant to terrorize the victim to keep him or her in a state of timid submission.

I’ll now give some examples of sins a victim may have committed “to deserve” to be yelled and screamed at psychotically by a narcissist:

Being late with a birthday gift.
Interrupting someone.
Treating someone’s birthday as if it were of only minor importance.
Not bringing a bottle of milk home.
Eating all of the cereal (on multiple occasions).
Failing to respond when called to make tea for someone.
Slamming doors a few times too often.
Opening a package of ice cream incorrectly.
Rhinotillexomania (and messing up the furniture with the greeners).
Failing to wash the dishes when required to.
Failing to say ‘thank you’ for a ride to school.
Listening to music that others don’t like.
Saying someone does nice things for others only to get attention.

Granted, it isn’t easy to be patient with people who do these kinds of bad things, but surely one can deal with such problems in a healthier manner than by yelling and screaming at the offending party. Such excessive reactions won’t improve the behaviour of the offender by a long shot, either; in fact, the bad behaviour is likely to get even worse.

Such over-the-top reactions demonstrate clearly a lack of basic decency.

VII: Making the Bad Even Worse

That yelling and screaming at someone will make his or her offending behaviour, in all likelihood, worse rather than better leads me to my next topic.

The rationalizations often used for pressuring the victim in a toxic relationship to conform to more desired behaviour is that it’s meant “to help” the victim, “to improve” him or her in some way. Yet it is the very nature of abuse, abuse being by definition doing bad things to someone, to do the diametrical opposite of helping or improving somebody.

A common tactic used in attempts to deter undesirable behavior is to dump shame on the offending individual. The–frankly–Neanderthal logic behind using shame is that the offender will not want to be thus shamed, and so presumably he or she will be motivated to break the bad habits.

A modicum of understanding of human psychology, however, will demonstrate that the very opposite of the desired effect will result from shaming. The fact is, shaming the offender will only cause him or her to feel such self-loathing that he or she believes that it is in his or her nature always to be of such a defective nature…so the bad habits can never be stopped.

Object relations theory helps explain how one’s early experiences with caregivers and others in a child’s everyday life create a kind of blueprint, or template, if you will, for how just about all of one’s later relationships will be with others. So a healthy and happy early relationship with one’s parents and siblings should generally result in similar relationships with most other people, and the same goes with negative, abusive relationships. Such relationships become one’s “normal,” and anything different from that tends to be shunned, whether good or bad, because one isn’t used to such a contrast in human dynamics. Not being used to it means not being comfortable with it, so it is shunned, even if it’s good.

So the abusive way of dealing with unwanted behaviour, far from correcting it, will instead usually reinforce it, because it feels “normal” to be in such a negative social interaction. Instead of learning to depart from the undesirable way of behaving, one believes that it is an indelible part of one’s nature, thus perpetuating it.

I’ll give some examples from my family-of-origin. My eldest brother, R., was performing badly at school when he was a teen, probably far more because of difficult, emotionally confusing issues he was dealing with rather than a lack of intelligence. Our father’s Neanderthal way of dealing with R.’s poor academic performance was to shame him with notions that he was “too stupid” to do better. Shock and surprise!…instead of pulling up his socks and studying harder, R. ended up dropping out of school and leaving home; he was made to believe he could do no better. Our father took a bad situation and simply made it worse.

Several years later, when R. was at the end of his tether and could do more as a worker without even a high school diploma, he was finally motivated to come back home, go back to school, and study hard…all of which he did, and he succeeded–not because of Dad’s shaming, of course, but from sheer desperation to turn his life around.

R.’s successful bouncing back (he got into computers, and he’s surely the most successful family member now, having proven his smarts, now that he’d gotten past those adolescent emotional problems) came with some nasty side effects, though, much of which got taken out on me, who’d had a somewhat better relationship with Dad (from somewhat better grades at school). R. had come back home with a great big chip on his shoulder, imagining we all saw him as “the idiot of the family” because of those old bad grades (Really, R.? Ever get called “retarded” by Mom? You haven’t even got a clue!)

So R. had a motive (envy of Dad’s somewhat better evaluation of me), totally unjustified, for joining my other two elder siblings in bullying me. R. was too out of touch with his feelings to realize it was Dad he was mad at, not me, and he was too much of a coward to confront Dad with that anger, preferring to take it all out on me (then a shy teenager going through emotional problems of my own), which was so much easier for him to do.

As for me, there were many things I did that the family, of course, didn’t like me doing, but instead of finding constructive ways of making me stop doing those things, they shamed me for all of it, causing me to do those things all the more.

Apart from having been bullied regularly by my elder brother, F., when I was a little kid, I had to move with my family from the Toronto area to Hamilton in 1977, making me leave my best friend, Neil McIntyre: I was emotionally devastated from not being able to be with him anymore, and the pain stayed with me for years. Research has been done to show that such adverse childhood experiences as bullying and relocation can be traumatizing enough to cause a child to do such things as self-isolate and socially withdraw–it’s a trauma response.

By the late 1970s, my family was growing more and more concerned with my habit then of playing all alone, what was actually maladaptive daydreaming. Granted, they should have been concerned that I didn’t want to go out, find friends, and play with them; but their methods to get me to stop the maladaptive daydreaming were all poorly thought out, and they only served to make me do more of it. Rather than trying to understand why I self-isolated and showing compassion, they shamed me for my maladaptive daydreaming; me elder sister, J., coined a pejorative expression, “tooka-tooka,” to describe it and make me feel foolish for doing it. Such toxic tactics only increased my self-loathing, and made me do more of the maladaptive daydreaming.

My mother exacerbated my problems exponentially with her autism lie, which served only to make me feel as though I could never fit in with social groups. I’m convinced her reasons for pinning that label on me were outright malignant, a wish to make my life harder and undermine my ability to develop self-confidence. Other motives that I suspect she had were to act as if she were some kind of expert in psychiatry (she, while having training as a nurse, had no psychiatric training whatsoever), and fancying oneself to have abilities and knowledge one lacks is a narcissistic trait; another motive I suspect in her was to project her narcissism onto me, since her characterization of autism was by the original use of the word, meaning an excessive involvement in oneself (Sounds rather like narcissism, doesn’t it?), a retreat into one’s own private, inner world, as opposed to how autism is understood to be now–characterized by difficulties in social interaction and in communication, and restrictive, repetitive behaviours.

Needless to say, all of these things the family was doing to me were making my dysfunctional behaviour go from bad to worse, for, far from doing anything to help me, as they imagined was their intention, their true intention was to try to control me and make me into something they wanted me to be. This leads me to the next topic of what makes a family lack basic decency.

VIII: Forcing Conformity

A healthy family will want each member to grow and become who he or she really is and aspires to be, nurturing and encouraging one to be, in the parlance of our time, ‘the best version of oneself.’ In a toxic family, though, this is not so.

Instead, one is expected to become, if you will, the best version of what the toxic family wants one to be. One of the key components of emotional abuse is having power and control over the victim, and so forcing conformity is part of the abusive nature of the toxic family.

Now, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable that a family will want to deter any member from doing genuinely bad things, such as getting involved in crime, doing drugs, or performing badly at school. But the kind of enforced conformity that I’m talking about is of a far less reasonable sort. Healthy families don’t set precise agendas for their members, making them extensions of one’s ego (we see examples of this in the film, The Graduate).

As far as examples from my family are concerned, I already mentioned how my mother’s agenda was to trick me and manipulate me into believing I have a mental condition that I don’t have, so that–as I suspect–she could, via projective identification, split off and expel the narcissism in herself and impose it on me, a kind of exorcising of her personal demons (a plan of hers that never worked, for she stayed narcissistic to the end). I also mentioned how my father tried to push R. to become a superstar student, and in his frustration at teen R.’s having failed to do that, Dad shamed him for it. Now I’ll discuss some other examples.

Just as my mother wanted to project the worst or herself onto me, so did she manipulate J. into embodying what Mom saw as an idealized version of herself. The golden child of the family, J. was pressured into being the perfect daughter, the perfect sister, the perfect aunt, and the perfect mother–the perfect ‘family woman.’ Totally enmeshed in the family dysfunction, J. was required to give her whole life and identity to the service of the family. On any occasion that she tried to go off and do her own thing, all for herself, there would be hell to pay.

Now, this doesn’t mean, of course, that she never did anything for herself–it’s just that she’d have to prioritize the family over herself. One time, though my memory of it is vague, it’s enough to illustrate my point. We as a family (I was a teen) were in the car doing something we had to do together (I forget what specifically), but J. wasn’t with us. We arrived at the restaurant, where we saw her walking about, doing her own thing. Mom and Dad viciously bawled her out, reducing her to tears.

On another occasion, Mom and Dad had come home unexpectedly early one night, and they found J.’s boyfriend undressed and in her bed (again, I was a teen at the time, and in the basement, hearing the whole ensuing fight, so she, five years older than I, was a young adult). Mom freaked, screaming, “I’m ashamed of you!” at her repeatedly, again, reducing J. to tears…and all for doing something that, by the mid-1980s, was standard for a consenting young adult couple. J. had failed to be our mother’s ideal.

Since Mom forced conformity on J., tricking her into believing that such ‘guidance in the paths of righteousness’ was Mom’s way of loving her (this was J.’s trauma), my sister in turn tried to make me conform to the kind of person she thought I should be, imagining she was loving me and guiding me with her ‘wisdom,’ rather than just using me as an extension of her ego, as Mom had done to her.

J. carried this ‘guidance’ to some rather ridiculous lengths. In her ‘humble’ opinion, I can’t do anything right. I don’t dress the ‘right’ way, I don’t have the proper, ‘enlightened’ political beliefs, and I certainly don’t listen to the ‘right’ music.

Oh, the absurd attempts she made to deter me from listening to the music I liked! She’d berate me for it, dismissing its often experimental nature as “weird” and “strange” (note: we always label the things we simply don’t understand as “weird” and “strange”–her words were really more of a comment on her musical ignorance than they were on my idiosyncratic taste in listening). I was a teen at the time, though, and teens identify with their music: so in calling it “weird,” J. was calling me “weird,” another form of emotional abuse.

Needless to say, none of her attempts to shame me and discourage me from listening to progressive rock, jazz fusion, 20th century classical music, and other forms of experimental or boundary-pushing music ever worked. If anything, I got even more interested in that kind of music. So if listening to that kind of music was bad, then her tactics were just another case of the family pushing me from bad to worse. In any case, her “weird” labelling of my music, and by extension, of me, was just another way that that family gave me a complex.

Though my brother, F., was the worst bully of my three siblings, he imagines he tried to do me a good turn by teaching me how to play baseball. Actually, he forced me to play a game I wasn’t interested in playing; it may amaze him, but not every little kid is interested in playing sports, and that’s okay. And again, if he didn’t like my childhood habit of maladaptive daydreaming instead of going out and finding friends, then he should have made the link between his bullying of me and the harmful psychological effects it had on me as a kid…and if he was too young himself to make that link, then it was the job of our parents to help him understand that–which, of course, they never did.

On at least one occasion during that ‘teaching of baseball,’ he not only bad-mouthed me (about 8 or 9) to a girl neighbour of a similar age, which only increased my feelings of alienation and loneliness, discouraging me all the more from seeking friends, but he at the time also threatened to hit me, if not actually did (I don’t quite remember what exactly happened: traumas often cause memory loss). In any case, I went home in tears that day, and instead of getting any comfort from my parents, my mother loudly barked at me from another room, saying, “Take your bath!” I remember lying in the bathtub in a daze, stunned at the lack of love I was getting…and my mother’s last words to me before dying in 2016 were to tell me that, during those very childhood years of mine, she’d given me “the most love.”

It can be argued that Mom simply didn’t know what had happened, yet her attitude made it plain to me that she simply wasn’t interested in even listening when I tried to tell her. You see, we’re not talking about a few mere flaws in an otherwise basically good family here; we’re talking about a lack of basic decency. Family is not supposed to treat you this way, and the refusal to listen to the victim’s cries for help leads me to my next topic.

IX: Not Listening

If your family loves you, they listen to you. Period. It’s the same as in any other relationship.

Toxic families don’t listen. They preach. They pretend that their long-winded speeches are edifying for you. They aren’t so at all–they’re just annoying, an insult added to the injury of all their emotional abuse.

None of this preaching is for your own good, no matter how much the toxic family claim it is. It’s really about glorifying their egos.

This mentality was Mom’s an J.’s, all over. Just as my mother imagined she was a natural born psychiatrist, with no need for training or education in the field, so did my elder sister fancy herself a life coach of some kind for me.

J. imagines she has this huge treasure-trove of life wisdom to impart to me…actually, as I said above, she’s only five years older than I am: how much more could she possibly know about life than I do? On the other side of the coin, she imagines that I know nothing substantial about life, or about much of anything else, for that matter. This arrogant presumption of hers dovetails with what our mother had said about ‘my autism’ and being ‘mentally defective’ in general.

In fact, if J. and I were ever to switch roles, with me sharing any of my own thoughts on how to live one’s life, she would get outright snotty with me, as if I had the gall to break rank with her and be ‘insubordinate.’ I recall a couple of occasions when I was a young man, when I’d made comments, not at all serious, and she thought I was pretending to know more about life than the great philosopher did.

On one of those occasions, she’d expressed a rather snobbish annoyance at someone speaking ungrammatical English. I joked, “Sometimes in life, we all meet people who don’t talk good [sic].” She redirected her snootiness at me and said, in all sarcasm, “Oh, really? Tell me about life.” Her sense of ‘superior wisdom’ was so great…and her listening so poor, she didn’t even realize I’d merely attempted a joke–a silly one, but a joke all the same, not a serious lecture on life. So, what I’d unwittingly done was offend her narcissism, and I got needlessly hurt once again.

As I said, instead of just being quiet and listening to me, which is what I so desperately needed during those years I lived with the family, J. preached to me. She always thinks she needs to teach me something, that her words of advice will ‘guide me on the straight path.’ No, J., that’s not what I need; people can learn the lessons of life the normal way–by trial and error, through experience. Her words don’t add much to that.

Allowing people to talk, however, is very therapeutic. Allow them to get their pain off their chest, what’s called “the talking cure.” When an analysand free associates, the therapist just listens and takes notes, linking the themes that appear again and again in the patient’s endless talking; after enough themes are connected to show a consistent direction in the patient’s thinking, then the therapist may speak, giving an interpretation of the analysand‘s thought processes, which–it is hoped–will be an insightful one, helping the patient understand him- or herself better, thus leading to improvement in the patient’s mental health.

J., no more a therapist than our mother was, fails to understand the importance of listening. Instead, if I start to explain what’s troubling me, she breaks in and gives me a speech that, supposedly, makes visible the ‘larger philosophical perspective’ that I don’t see. Actually, what she typically says has little relevance, if any, to the subject at hand.

I’ll give a few examples. Once, when I was about 18 or 19 years old, I tried to tell her about a time shortly before, when Mom had yelled and screamed at me like a maniac for the unforgivable crime of having interrupted her. All J. had to do was listen. Instead, she interrupted me, saying, “Yeah, and I applaud Mom for it!” Then she went on about some nonsense about teenagers arrogantly thinking they know everything, which had nothing to do with Mom’s then-craziness or my attempt to remain calm as she’d spoken so hurtfully to me. That J. thought she knew everything about what had happened was lost on her, of course; I’m guessing she’d heard Mom tell her about our argument, misrepresenting what had happened and painting herself as the innocent victim, and me as the bad guy.

Another time, shortly before Mom died, I tried talking to J. on the phone about how Mom had lied to me so terribly (<<parts 5 and 6) that I didn’t want to communicate with her and put up with her manipulation anymore. Again, instead of listening to me, J. lectured me about how mothers ‘don’t have an instruction booklet on how to deal with every single family problem.’ Again, apart from J.’s typical condescension, her ‘perspective’ had nothing to do with what I was complaining about! Constant lying isn’t just a minor character flaw: it’s a serious personality problem, causing one to feel no longer able to trust the liar. It’s shows a lack of basic decency–not something to be endured. Actually, J. was enabling Mom’s emotional abuse by lecturing me the way she did, and this leads me to my next topic.

X: Enabling the Abuse

Many might read what I’ve written about here and think that I’m wallowing in the remote past like a ghost. Oh, those things you complain about happened so long ago, Mawr, decades ago! Get over it! Let it go!

First of all, those things happened in my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood–my formative years, when my personality was only developing, and so the experiences would have a profound effect on the rest of my life, the same as anyone else’s experiences of childhood trauma. Such issues, thus, should never be trivialized or dismissed.

Second, the emotional abuse I suffered from that family was not limited to those early experiences. Once a toxic family, always a toxic family. After I left Canada to live in East Asia, the family could still communicate their nastiness by email or long distance phone calls…and they did.

Not content to have implanted the autism lie in my head when I was a child, my mother modified her lie by saying I have Asperger’s Syndrome: no need to have me tested by a psychiatrist during one of my visits home…my mother, the rank amateur psychiatrist, just ‘knew.’ I argued with her about this new label during the 2000s, and she wouldn’t let it go. It didn’t matter to her that she lacked the authority to give me, or anybody, psychiatric labels of any kind. Her presumptuous arrogance was just that brazen.

Of course, enabling of her emotional abuse came from her #1 flying monkey, J., the golden child, who in an email from the mid-2000s told me to “let this go” (i.e., stop arguing with Mom about the Asperger Syndrome label, and stop wallowing in the past). I was also instructed by J. not to reply, for I obviously have no right to tell my side of the story. Mom’s ‘version’ of the truth, in which she is blameless and I’m the bad guy, would suffice for J.

Another thing that had upset me at the time was how, when J.’s husband was terminally ill from cancer, my wife and I had offered to make a visit to Canada to see him one last time. My mother, in her usual condescending tone, said I shouldn’t come out of a fear that my ‘tactless and insensitive’ nature would cause me to put my foot in my mouth and say something to upset J. and her husband. Oh, those Aspies sure are tactless, aren’t they? Never mind how tactless and insensitive my Mom was being. My wife was every bit as offended as I was.

Indeed, I was furious, arguing all the more vehemently with Mom about it, thus leading to J.’s “let this go” comment. And around this time, I was beginning to have truly anti-Mom thoughts. I go into detail about all of this issue here, so if you’re curious about it, Dear Reader, you can go there, as a full explanation is beyond the scope of this article.

J.’s wish that I “let this go” must therefore be seen in the context of these more recent outrages of Mom’s, as was J.’s comment in 2016 about Mom’s ‘not having an instruction booklet to deal with every family problem,’ as discussed above. J.’s enabling of the family’s emotional abuse wasn’t just something from my childhood–it’s recent, too. J. claimed in a tweet to me a couple of years ago that, in spite of my having gone NO CONTACT with the family, she still ‘loves’ me: if so, her having read some of my blog posts on the family’s emotional abuse and having felt saddened by what I’d suffered, why has she–as I can safely assume–not pleaded my cause to R. and F. (if she had, and succeeded, surely they would have tried to contact me on Twitter and sought to make amends, wouldn’t they have)? The enabling of the family abuse, then, continues to this day–her ‘loving’ me was just an attempt to hoover me back into the family dysfunction.

XI: Conclusion

So, to summarize, families with a basic sense of decency will not allow the following problems to go on unchecked: gaslighting you into thinking you’re less capable than you really are; bullying you; teaching you to embrace bigotry and a petite bourgeois mentality (which can lead to fascistic attitudes and bigotry, given the right material conditions); explosive anger; making problems even worse instead of solving them; forcing you to conform to their way of doing things; not listening to you; and enabling their abuse of you.

These issues are not the result of minor, forgivable character flaws in otherwise basically good people. These issues come from people with serious personality problems. If you’re in a family with people subjecting you to this kind of abuse, don’t let them gaslight you into thinking that they’re ‘okay,’ but just a little flawed, and that you are ‘not okay’ for not tolerating their b.s.

They are the ones who are not okay. You are right to call out their abuse and demand better treatment. If, after your demands are made, they still won’t change, get help and get out. You deserve better than to be treated that awful way. Don’t let them guilt-trip you for setting boundaries and prioritizing your mental health over them.

By getting away from them and their toxic influence, you’ll truly get a chance to heal. Do what you need to do to be well.

Analysis of ‘The Game’

The Game is a 1997 thriller film directed by David Fincher. It was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, and it stars Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, and Deborah Kara Unger, with James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

The Game was well-received by Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and others, but it didn’t do all that well at the box office, as compared to Fincher’s Se7en; since then, though, The Game has gained a cult following among Fincher’s fans, and it’s now considered among some of them to be one of his most underrated films.

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

Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) is a wealthy San Francisco investment banker. The film begins with sad piano music as a soundtrack to old, grainy home movies of his childhood and his rich father. Naturally, little Nicholas would have identified with his successful father, so when–as we later learn–his father has committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the family mansion, with little Nicholas seeing it, the traumatic scene is not only emotionally shattering for him, it’s incomprehensible that his father would have done such a thing…in a Richard Cory sense.

His father would have been the little boy’s idealized parental imago, one pole of Nicholas’s bipolar self, to use Heinz Kohut‘s psychoanalytic terminology. Not only the death, but also the witnessed suicide, of Nicholas’s parental ideal would have almost irreparably damaged that pole, necessitating compensation from the other pole, that of the mirroring of Nicholas’s grandiose self, given in the form of his status as a wealthy man, with his power to hire and fire employees, his wearing of good-looking and expensive clothes, and many opportunities to be icy and condescending to everyone around him.

Van Orton’s defence against psychological fragmentation, which would result from damage to his remaining pole, is thus covert narcissism, which is manifested in his deep insecurity, anxiety, and depression, all hidden behind a False Self of outward confidence and control.

Other manifestations of his covert narcissism include his victim mentality, which exists in spite of his wealth and power, and which is aggravated by the Consumer Recreation Services (CRS) game played on him, which feels increasingly like persecution; the real source of his victim mentality, though, is of course his childhood trauma from having seen his father kill himself. That he’s reached his 48th birthday–his father’s age when he killed himself–and that his birthday gift from his kid brother, Conrad “Connie” Van Orton (Penn), is the paranoia-inducing CRS game, don’t make Nicholas’s associations with his father any less unsettling.

More covert narcissist traits in Nicholas include his social withdrawal, to avoid being compared unfavourably with others and thus to maintain his illusory sense of superiority, and his difficulties in relationships–he’s divorced and lonely, clearly a result of his lack of empathy for others, yet another narcissistic trait.

Now, he should be able to go through life adequately, despite his faults…except that the CRS game is going to tear his whole life apart, and smash the other pole of his already fragile self.

Now, while it is true that birth order has very little impact on one’s personality development (contrary to popular belief), Nicholas and Conrad respectively embody the stereotypes of the high-achieving, organized, mature, and responsible eldest sibling, and the fun-loving, free-spirited, immature, and risk-taking youngest sibling. These stereotypes are evident not only in Conrad’s referring to himself as “Seymour Butts” in his invitation to lunch to Nicholas, but also in Nicholas’s cool, humourless response of yes to the invitation of “Mr. Butts.”

The elder/young sibling stereotypes are also evident later on in the film, when Conrad, flipping out over how the CRS people “just fuck you and they fuck you and they fuck you,” then when Nicholas, equally upset about CRS’s manipulations of his life, nonetheless keeps his cool as best he can and tells Conrad to stop being emotional; now, Conrad complains of having never lived up to the family’s expectations.

Furthermore, at the restaurant where the brothers meet so Conrad can give Nicholas his CRS gift, Nicholas tells Conrad he’s not allowed to smoke there, but Conrad lights up in defiance, anyway. Also, when Nicholas in his uptight nature is skeptical of the CRS “game,” Conrad–insisting it will be the best experience ever for Nicholas–tells him it will make his life fun…implying that Nicholas hardly knows what having fun even is.

Nicholas goes to the CRS building, where he meets Jim Feingold (Rebhorn), who explains that the CRS experience is a game, which will fill in what’s empty in Nicholas’s life. He’s still skeptical, but he does all the psychological and physical tests necessary to tailor the game exactly to his personality. When he asks someone who’s done the game before, he’s answered with a quote from John 9:25, “Whereas once I was blind, now I see.”

In a way, The Game is a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol, with Nicholas as Scrooge, with the game’s wild disrupting of his life comparable to the terrors of the three Christmas ghosts, shocking Nicholas into his final redemption. The naming of the protagonist sounds ironic, a glum receiver of a disruptive gift with a name that’s evocative of a cheerful giver of gifts to children.

There’s yet another association of Nicholas with Scrooge that is important: both men are rich. The CRS game is expensive, so much so that at the end, Nicholas offers to help Conrad pay for it, something the younger brother deeply appreciates. That this “game” is something only rich people can afford to play is significant, for the upsetting things that happen to Nicholas are things that, if one is of the lower or middle classes, one would not be able to walk away from, whereas “a bloated millionaire fat cat” like Nicholas can walk away from them, since none of them are real–just a game. If only they could just be a game for the poor.

The game begins for Nicholas in a surprising way, since after his psychological and physical testing, he’s been contacted by CRS by phone, and they tell him his application for the game has been rejected. So when he drives home at night and sees a wooden clown lying on the ground before his mansion, put there deliberately to look like his father’s dead body after his suicide, Nicholas is soon to realize he’s been thrown into the game, willy-nilly.

With the wooden clown in his living room now, he doesn’t yet know what to make of it, so he has his TV on with the business news, as reported by Daniel Schorr (playing himself). Schorr discusses the bad economy and how “a staggering 57% of American workers believe there is a very real chance they will be unemployed in the next five to seven years.” The image on the TV twitches from time to time, causing a normal news broadcast suddenly to be Schorr directly talking to Nicholas on behalf of CRS.

Soon enough, Nicholas clues in on this oddity, and he starts paying proper attention to Schorr. That CRS, which clearly represents the omniscient, all-controlling powers-that-be, would do this to Nicholas in turn represents how a fascist, totalitarian government would surveil and thus terrorize ordinary people. Nicholas is rich, so in the end, it’s all just a game. Not so for the lower and middle classes.

Now, while smart TVs hadn’t come into their own as of the making of The Game, it’s interesting in hindsight now, as of the 2020s, to make an association of them with the film. Furthermore, one might recall the “telescreens” in Nineteen Eighty-four. And since The Game came out long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, describing the symbolic totalitarianism of CRS in terms of communism, rather than of capitalism, would be sheer nonsense.

On top of this TVs-that-watch-us surveillance is also a commentary on the manipulative nature of the corporate media, which as of the making of The Game was already two years into the enacting of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which would result in mergers and acquisitions in American media, so that by now, 90% of it is controlled by only six corporations. These super-rich capitalists thus control most of Americans’ access to information. The totalitarianism of today is capitalist and fascist, not in any way socialist.

Nicholas learns from Schorr that the wooden clown’s head has a camera in it, and thus it is what is surveilling Nicholas. Big Bozo is watching you.

Later, Nicholas takes a plane for a business trip, but while waiting for the plane at the gate, he is informed by another man there (a CRS employee, as it eventually turns out) that the pen in his shirt pocket has exploded, staining his shirt with ink. This moment is a mild, early instance of narcissistic injury for him, the beginning of the eating away of his grandiose self, the only pole left of his bipolar self for him to hang onto.

In the nearby men’s room, he tries to remove the ink stain to the best of his ability, and a man in a toilet stall (presumably another CRS employee) asks him to give him a roll of toilet paper from a neighbouring stall. Nicholas leaves the restroom without helping the man, this being an example of Nicholas’s narcissistic lack of empathy, a Scrooge-like moment.

Nicholas meets with an employee of his, Anton Baer (Mueller-Stahl), to fire him and give him a severance package, but he cannot open his suitcase due to more CRS meddling; this is a problem whose significance will be understood later. When we see him outside, smashing his suitcase against a bench in a futile attempt to open it, his manic frustration shows that his personality is already unraveling.

I’ve used the psychoanalysis of Kohut to describe this unravelling; now I’ll use that of Jacques Lacan. The suicide of Nicholas’s father has deprived him of the man who, traditionally speaking, would have pulled him as a boy out of his narcissistic, dyadic, Oedipal relationship with his mother (the realm of the Imaginary), and brought him into the larger society of the Symbolic (hence his inability to relate with others), from the dyadic other to the Other of relating with many people. As his parental ideal, his father was also the object of inverted Oedipal feelings, so losing his father has jeopardized and compromised the stability of both the Symbolic and the Imaginary for him.

The agitations of the CRS game are therefore plunging Nicholas into the traumatic, undifferentiated Chaos of the Real, where one may experience a psychotic break from reality, the fragmentation I mentioned above. Nicholas doesn’t literally succumb to psychosis in the movie, of course, but the disruptions of the normal structure of his life, and the growing paranoia that he feels as a result of these disruptions, are certainly symbolic of such a psychotic break. Now, in Lacanian terms, foreclosure explains how the exclusion of Nicholas’s father from his family life has already set the stage for such psychosis.

Later, he goes to a restaurant where a waitress (actually another CRS employee–Unger) spills drinks all over his suit, to which he reacts with his usual lack of graciousness, in spite of her apologizing. His annoyance is a continuation of the narcissistic injury he felt when his pen exploded, and it will continue when he loses his thousand-dollar shoe from climbing a fire escape ladder as he’s been fleeing CRS agents with her.

He’s not even sure of her actual name: Christine, or Claire, as he learns by the end of the film. CRS has made his grip on reality so slippery that we can reasonably understand CRS to be a pun on curse.

Though she’s initially unfriendly to him as a result of his ungracious response to her apologies over messing up his shirt, she–an attractive young woman–later speaks and behaves in ways to suggest a sexual interest in him: displaying herself in a bright red bra to him (they both need to change clothes and shower in his shower-equipped office after a fall into a dumpster during the chase with the CRS agents), and telling him she was paid to spill drinks on “the attractive guy in the gray flannel suit”; earlier, trapped with him in an elevator, she tells him that she, in a skirt, isn’t wearing underwear when he wants to give her a boost to get out at the top. All of this sexual innuendo, of course, is part of her job as a CRS employee to keep him interested in and hooked on the game.

In the middle of this chase from the CRS agents, Nicholas has lost his impossible-to-open suitcase. What’s more, his American Express card has unaccountably been found at a hotel lobby desk. After retrieving it there, he is directed to a room he has…supposedly…booked, and there he finds his battered suitcase in a trashed room he’s apparently to spend time with a prostitute…and with lines of cocaine.

Now, the danger of a man of his socioeconomic status and reputation being exposed in a sexual scandal of this sort will cause him to feel intolerable narcissistic rage, even after he successfully removes all the evidence of his supposed naughtiness: photos of what looks like him with a prostitute indulging in various forms of kink, the lines of cocaine, video of a moaning pornographic actress, etc. A hotel maid wanting to come in the room to clean it only intensifies the urgency of burying the evidence; as he nervously tries to get rid of the cocaine, he cuts his thumb–symbolic of his narcissistic injury.

Assuming incorrectly that Anson Baer is responsible for the set-up of this potential sexual scandal (the motive supposedly being wanting revenge for Nicholas’s firing him), Nicholas goes over to the hotel he knows Baer to be in and angrily confronts him, throwing the embarrassing pile of photos on a coffee table before Baer, his wife, and their daughter. When it becomes clear that Baer had nothing to do with the photos, cocaine, etc. (he discussed the severance package with Nicholas’s lawyer, Samuel Sutherland [Donat], and he’s quite pleased with it), Nicholas leaves, apologetic and embarrassed, and he knows that the set-up was CRS’s doing.

From the photos, he’s recognized the red bra on the girl, and so assuming it was “Christine,” he knows he must find her again. Before that, though, he goes back to his mansion and finds it broken into. It’s been vandalized, and a loud recording of Jefferson Airplane‘s song “White Rabbit” is playing at top volume. This choice of song is fitting, for its lyric uses the imagery of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to describe the experience of doing drugs. The CRS disruption of Nicholas’s sense of reality is as surreal as an LSD trip (“When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead“), and like Alice, he feels as though he’s falling down a rabbit hole.

And again, where Nicholas, through his wealth and power, can find his way out of a mess like the potential sex scandal (as he’s angrily told Baer, investors won’t care about his reputation, but “whether the stock was up or down”), anyone of lower socioeconomic status would be destroyed. Similarly, Nicholas can handle a break-in far better than a poor man could. After all, for him, it’s all just a game–not so for the poor.

Nicholas meets with Conrad, who is acting (yes, acting) hysterically after apparently having been screwed over by CRS countless and seemingly unending times. The hysterical state we see him in, a display of the psychological fragmentation I described above, is a foreshadowing of what is going to happen to the more-together Nicholas. When Conrad sees a bunch of CRS keys in the glove compartment of Nicholas’s car, the younger brother acts all the more paranoid, as if Nicholas is in on the persecution of Conrad, when if anything it’s the other way around–Conrad is being like a CRS employee.

And of course, in the midst of Conrad’s emotional breakdown in front of his older brother is a revisiting of their family’s old emotional baggage as I’d mentioned above: how the younger sibling feels resentful over seeming ‘inferior’ to the far more successful eldest sibling. Such complaining is a kind of regression to a time of simpler gripes, to help Conrad forget the far more serious…or so it would seem…persecution from CRS. Conrad runs away from Nicholas in his supposedly growing paranoia, and Nicholas–with a flat tire–has to get a taxi.

He soon learns that his cabbie is another CRS employee. The driver jumps out of the cab just before having it go into San Francisco Bay. Again, because Nicholas is a rich man, this is all just a game, from which he’ll be able to escape; whereas a poor man with the bad luck of being in a cab–or any other kind of vehicle, for that matter–in which the driver is a maniac who crashes it is far less likely to get out of the predicament in one piece.

He involves the police and Sutherland, but there’s very little they can do at the moment, since the CRS building has been abandoned. Again, if one were poor, one would get virtually zero help from the police in a situation like this, since we all know who they really serve and protect; in fat cat Nicholas’s case, it will all end up just being a game.

He finally gets together with “Christine” again. At her home, he realizes she’s a CRS employee, for she tells him there’s a hidden camera in the room, with CRS doing their Orwellian spying on him. Such spying in a house anticipates the anxieties and fears many today are getting from the idea of smart home surveillance. Remember also that when I say ‘Orwellian spying,’ it’s within the context of a capitalist society, not a ‘Stalinist’ one. Nicholas will eventually get out of the game, but poorer people are far less likely to escape.

He, of course, doesn’t yet know this is all just a game (unlike the poor, who never have been nor ever will be in just a game), so he gets angry and shows that he knows he’s being surveilled. This provokes armed CRS personnel to swarm the house and fire in its windows. Nicholas and “Christine” flee.

This scene could make viewers of the film today think of what’s happened during Trump’s second term, with such incidents as the immigration raid on Chicago apartments. Or one might be reminded of the 1985 MOVE bombing. Rich Nicholas will learn it’s all just a game soon enough. The real-life victims I’ve just described will never find themselves in a mere game, though.

As Nicholas is fleeing with “Christine,” he comes to understand that CRS has apparently drained his bank accounts by guessing his passwords using the psychological tests he did, though Sutherland reassures him that none of his money has been touched. She says he’s in on the scam. How many poor-to-middle-class people have been conned out of their money, with no comfort of learning in the end that it was all just a game?

Finally, in another house, she gives him a drink, but it is drugged. As he’s getting dizzy and losing consciousness, she admits she’s part of the ‘scam,’ and that CRS is finished taking all of his possessions, since he’s given his card security code over the phone. At the risk of sounding redundant, I must say again: such a scam played on people of modest means would not end up to be a mere game.

He wakes up in a Mexican cemetery, buried there in a filthy white suit. Symbolically, it’s like a death, a harrowing of hell, and a resurrection; but instead of him experiencing a kind of ‘apotheosis’ or ‘deification’ in a ‘spiritual body,’ if you will, he’s been reduced to nothing. Not only is he materially annihilated, but he’s also been humiliated–it’s a Lear-like drop from the royalty of wealth to destitution. This is the greatest narcissistic injury he’s endured yet.

The only thing he has left of any value is a watch, a sentimental gift from his mother that he’ll have to hawk to get some money for a bus ride back to the US. He’ll also have to beg a ride back to San Francisco from a driver in a diner; none of the people asked wants to give a ride to such a filthy-looking ‘bum.’ Nicholas now knows what it’s like to be poor and despised for it.

This is the point where both poles of his bipolar self have been compromised: his birthday has made him the same age when his father, his idealized parental imago, killed himself and thus became an eliminated pole (all the more eliminated with the losing of his mother’s watch); and his grandiose self has been smashed from this financial ruin and abasement of his social status. This means that the other pole has been all but eliminated. He gets back to his (foreclosed!) mansion, takes a cold shower, puts on some respectable-looking clothes, and gets a pistol. Naturally, he wants revenge on CRS. When a carjacker tries to take his car, he points the gun at the guy and tells him he’s “extremely fragile right now”: with his bipolar self so compromised, he certainly is fragile.

He also learns of how fragile Conrad apparently is from the manager of a hotel Conrad was staying in: he’s had a nervous breakdown, it seems, and been taken to a mental institution. The younger brother’s apparent psychological instability is a double of Nicholas’s actual growing instability.

One redemptive moment for him is when he gets together with his ex-wife, Elizabeth (played by Anna Katarina), and he asks her forgiveness for his having been an emotionally neglectful husband. He’s gone through the extreme of hell and come out finding heaven, in this sense: recall the previous player of the game and his quote of John 9:25. I’ve discussed the dialectical relationship of such opposites as heaven and hell in other posts.

While with Elizabeth in a restaurant, Nicholas sees Jim Feingold on TV in a commercial–he’s an actor. He remembers the Chinese restaurant Feingold had gotten food from when they’d met before he did his tests. Nicholas manages to trace Feingold to a local zoo, where he is with his kids. Unbeknownst to Nicholas, this is all CRS just bringing him back into the game.

He forces Feingold at gunpoint to take him to the real CRS office, where he sees all the employees who were involved in his game…including, of course, “Christine.” Nicholas speaks of pulling back the curtain, so he can see, so to speak, the Wizard of Oz.

Such a rising up against the conspiratorial powers-that-be is a fantasy many have had, in their wish to believe that the world is run by some secret, Satanic cabal (run by ‘the globalists,’ ‘the NWO,’ ‘the Freemasons,’ ‘the Jews,’ etc.), since so many like to see the world as a kind of cosmic melodrama than as the banality that it really is. Seeing the world in such a melodramatic manner seems easier, since one can avoid seeing it simply as run by capitalists and see doing something about it as an impossibility; otherwise, one might have to take responsibility and plan a revolution.

Anyway, Nicholas has “Christine” on the roof of the CRS building; she speaks frantically of his gun not being a prop and that the whole thing has really just been a game, which of course he doesn’t believe. Doors open to the roof, and he assumes it’s CRS guards, so he fires…but the bullet goes in Conrad, who’s holding a bottle of champagne while the others with him are there to wish Nicholas a happy birthday.

Devastated, Nicholas has truly reached the lowest point, a low that makes the Mexican cemetery seem mild in comparison. Both poles of his bipolar self have been utterly shattered: he walks off the roof in imitation of his father’s suicide. He lands, however, on a giant air cushion in a banquet hall, where he is to celebrate his birthday.

The CRS employees predicted that he’d be pushed to a suicide like his father’s. Feingold later tells him that if he hadn’t jumped, Feingold would have had to push him off the roof. This all gives us a sense of how disturbingly omniscient CRS seems to be. As representative of a surveilling, totalitarian government, Godlike CRS comes across, in spite of having just played a game, as being just a little too powerful for our comfort.

In this would-be suicide leading to his entry to his birthday party, Nicholas’s ‘death and resurrection’ has truly seen him go through hell and into heaven in the dialectical sense I described above about the Mexican cemetery. Now his character arc is complete, like Scrooge after experiencing the horrors of future Christmases. He is transformed into a good man, willing to give and receive love.

But as I’ve related so many times, he as a wealthy man can afford (literally) to be put through all of this hell and come back okay. Some people might be put off by this ‘happy ending,’ but the point is that the wealthy can experience this kind of thing as a fun adventure, whereas if any of these things happened to the poor, they would never experience it as a game…except in the sense that it is a ‘game’ that the ruling class–the real CRS curse of the world–plays on the common people all the time. The poor would hit a hard ground in such situations; they wouldn’t hit an air cushion.

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.

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