Tag: object relations theory

Analysis of ‘Peeping Tom’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Le Petit Prince’

I: Introduction

Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) is a 1943 novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was first published in English and French in the US that year, and published posthumously in France following liberation, as the Vichy Regime had banned it.

The novella was Saint-Exupéry’s most successful work, selling about 140 million copies worldwide, and thus being one of the best-selling books in history. It’s been translated into over 505 different languages and dialects worldwide, second only to the Bible among the most-translated works. Le Petit Prince has been adapted into many art forms and media, including audio recordings, radio plays, live stage, film, TV, ballet, and opera.

Here is a link to quotes from the novella in French and in English translation, and here is a link to a PDF of an English translation of the story.

II: Chapter One

Saint-Exupéry begins his tale by discussing a time, when he was six years old, that he was fascinated with how a boa constrictor eats its prey, swallowing it whole without chewing it, and needing six months to digest it. The boy decided to draw a boa constrictor having swallowed an elephant, but on showing the picture to some adults and asking if it scared them, they saw nothing scary about it, since it looked as if he’d simply drawn a hat!

In this moment, we see the beginning of a recurring theme in Le Petit Prince: the folly of adults when compared to the wisdom of a child. The boy tried a second drawing, this time showing the inside of the boa constrictor so the elephant could be clearly seen. Now, the adults advised him to forget about boa constrictors and what they eat, and instead focus on learning geography, history, arithmetic, and grammar. The folly of adults is the reversing of what’s important and what’s unimportant, so Saint-Exupéry gave up on the dream of being an artist at the age of six and would eventually become a pilot instead.

In meeting more adults over the years, he never changed his low opinion of them, since as a test, he’d show them his first picture, and they always saw only a hat.

III: Chapter Two

Here is where the story really begins, a fanciful rather than a logical one. Adult Saint-Exupéry had been living alone, with no one to talk to (loneliness is another major theme of the novella), until six years before his telling of his story, when he was flying his plane over the Sahara Desert and it crashed with a broken engine. Again, he found himself alone, with no passengers or mechanics to help him.

He had to fix his plane alone, he was miles away from civilization, and he hadn’t enough drinking water to last a week. This was a life-and-death situation. You can imagine the stress he was going through.

This predicament really happened to Saint-Exupéry and his copilot-navigator, André Prévot, in 1935. Though they’d survived the crash, they faced rapid dehydration in the intense desert heat, with limited food and drink. They both began to have vivid hallucinations. By the fourth day of their ordeal, a Bedouin on a camel found the two and saved them. Saint-Exupéry described their ordeal in his 1939 memoir, Wind, Sand and Stars (Terre des hommes).

The notion of having hallucinations while suffering in the desert heat can explain Saint-Exupéry seeing the little prince. While the boy is, on the one hand, a projection of the pilot having regressed to a childhood state (to ease his stress), the prince can also be seen as a Christ figure, a sinless child coming to Saint-Exupéry’s rescue, just in time.

One idea that you can glean from all of my posts involving my interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros (i.e., the dialectical relationship between opposites) is that at the moment of the most hellish despair, salvation can come. The prospect of certain death in the desert (hell, the bitten tail of the ouroboros) leads to Saint-Exupéry’s delivery from it (heaven, the biting head of the serpent). This delivery, this salvation, comes to the beleaguered pilot in the Christ-like form of the little prince.

If adult Christ was King of the Jews, then as a child he was a prince, the Prince of Peace, the little prince. We are instructed that we can attain the kingdom of heaven only as a child (Matthew 18:3), and so Saint-Exupéry must get back in touch with his original, naïve childlike nature. This is the purpose of the little prince entering the pilot’s life right at this moment…saving him in the most unlikely way.

On the morning of the second day of Saint-Exupéry’s ordeal, he wakes up to the voice of the boy asking him, of all things, to draw a sheep for him. The importance of this seemingly trivial, frivolous request, interrupting the man from his urgent work, exists on several levels. First, there’s the dialectic of prioritizing the trivial over the urgent, a child’s wisdom versus an adult’s. Second, the sheep makes us think of a lamb, the Lamb of God. Third, the man is being brought back to his childhood love of drawing…but drawing a peaceful, rather than a threatening, animal.

What makes the pilot’s ordeal in the story even worse than that of Saint-Exupéry and his copilot, Prévot, in the real-life ordeal is precisely the absence of a copilot, or anyone else, for that matter. The man is alone in the hot desert, far away from civilization, with a plane needing repairs, and he’s running out of drinking water. He could die, and he has nobody with him. This is the hell of death and loneliness.

Being alone only intensifies annihilation anxieties, leading one all the closer to psychotic panic, or what Wilfred Bion would have called a nameless dread. The pilot is sweltering in oppressive heat; this heat is an example of unpleasant stimuli that Bion would have called beta elements, stimuli that have to be processed, via alpha function, into alpha elements, or processed stimuli that one can cope with. (Read more about Bion’s and other psychoanalytic concepts here).

As I said above, the extremity of the pilot’s ordeal has forced him to regress to a childlike state, to a simpler frame of mind that doesn’t have to cope with complexity. Still, though, that complexity has to be coped with, and in his regressed, childlike state, the pilot needs someone to help him process the physical irritants (beta elements, the dehydrating heat) that he can’t deal with all alone. It’s out of the question, of course, that his mother could be there for him, the one who normally does the vicarious processing of her baby’s unpleasant stimuli via maternal reverie. The pilot must resort to something else.

As a result of his helplessness, loneliness, and urgent need to save his life, the pilot projects his inner child out into the external world in the form of the little prince, who is for the pilot what Bion would have called a bizarre object, a projected hallucination from his inner psychic world, sent out of him to keep him company in a desperate attempt to save his life.

With the bizarre object of the little prince come all the other bizarre objects: the tiny planets of the boy and the men the boy visits, the talking rose, the talking fox, and the talking serpent. This childlike fantasy world is the pilot’s escape from his desperation, his ordeal.

Getting him to draw a sheep several times, criticizing each drawing for this or that flaw, and finally accepting a drawing of a sheep ironically obscured in a box, are ways of helping the pilot process his childhood trauma of his original artwork having been rejected by adults. Had he only been encouraged to be an artist as a child and thus to express his emotions freely, he might have pursued that ambition, instead of becoming a pilot (symbolic of trying to fly away and escape everything), and thus finding himself in his current, life-threatening predicament. On a symbolic level, his danger in the desert represents his psychological crisis resulting from having abandoned and betrayed the true self (in Winnicott‘s sense) of his childhood. In this sense, the little prince has truly saved the pilot.

IV: Chapter Three

We get a sense of how small the planet is that the little prince comes from when he tells the pilot that the sheep he’s given him won’t need a rope to restrain it, since if it strays, it won’t be able to wander very far.

The smallness of the little prince’s planet–like that of the planets of the king, the vain man, the drunk, the businessman, the lamplighter, and the geographer–has different levels of meaning. On the one hand, it means the planets are like small islands in a universal ocean, isolated places of loneliness and alienation. Thus, they represent projections of the pilot’s loneliness as well as the loneliness of all of us. The small planets also represent a wish-fulfillment for a man stranded on a stretch of land far too large for his comfort. If only he, like the little prince, could fly away from his world to explore others and escape his danger, taken away with the help of a flight of migratory birds (Chapter Nine), instead of being stuck in a desert with his broken-down plane.

V: Chapter Four

Indeed, the little prince’s planet is as small as a house!

The pilot believes the boy’s planet is an asteroid known as B-612, discovered by a Turkish astronomer in 1909, whose discovery was ignored by the International Astronomical Congress because the Turk wore the traditional clothing of his country rather than European clothes. When the Turk was in European clothes, though, and he presented his discovery to the Congress again in 1920, the Westerners acknowledged him. We see in this an example of both Western prejudice as well as the addled adult mindset.

The pilot notes more examples of this mindset, in how adults seem to think that numbers and figures pertaining to anything are more important than, say, its beauty. These numbers and figures, of course, often represent monetary values for the adults: ‘Does his father make much money?’ or ‘I saw a house worth a million dollars […] What a pretty house!’ Such a mindset is a reflection of the capitalistic values we’ve all been taught, and so Saint-Exupéry’s critique of such values must have been among the reasons that the pro-Nazi Vichy government wouldn’t allow Le Petit Prince to be published. Fascism is hyper-capitalism: it exists to thwart the growth of socialism–more on that later.

Now that the little prince is out of the pilot’s life (it’s been six years, as of the telling of this story, that the little prince has returned to his planet), and so not only does the man miss the little boy, but he has revived his childhood interest in art, having bought a box of paints and some pencils, and not wanting to be interested in only numbers. He is getting older physically, but the return of the little prince to his planet really means, paradoxically, that the projection of the pilot’s inner child has returned to his heart.

VI: Chapter Five

In this chapter is a discussion of the issue of baobab trees. As soon as the little prince is aware of the growing of a bad plant like a baobab on his little planet, he must destroy it at once. For if he allows any baobabs to grow freely, they will take over his entire planet and the roots will burrow their way down. And on a small planet like his, the baobabs will wreck it entirely.

Researchers have contended that the baobabs represent Nazism’s attempt to dominate and destroy our Earth. Small wonder the Vichy government wouldn’t let Saint-Exupéry’s novella be published, and only upon France’s liberation from Nazi occupation would the story be published there.

Note that it isn’t enough to uproot this or that baobab, and then be content that one’s work is all done. The little prince tells the pilot that one must regularly go to work, every day after washing and cleaning, spotting the baobabs and distinguishing them from the similar-looking rosebushes, and pull the baobabs out as soon as they’re spotted as such.

The same vigilance must be applied to fascism…though few have heeded the warning since the end of WWII. The defeat of Nazi Germany, more the sacrifice of the Soviets than of Western Europe and North America by a long shot, was merely a setback for fascism. The far-right soon regrouped and acted clandestinely, seeming no different from the rosebush-liberals of the postwar world.

Ex-Nazis found lucrative employment in the US via Operation Paperclip, for no one was more effective at fighting ‘those lousy commie Reds’ than fanatically anti-socialist fascists during the height of the Cold War. These ex-Nazis worked in NASA, NATO, and West Germany, causing tensions in East Germany that necessitated the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, also known as the Anti-fascist Protection Wall, to keep Nazi espionage out, as well as to prevent brain-drain, or the loss of skillful engineers, scientists, etc. to the capitalist West through tempting salary offers.

Then there were Operations Aerodynamic and Gladio.

After all of that fascist terrorizing of the European left came the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the use of Ukrainian fascists by the US and NATO to provoke Russia into a needless and dangerous war, and the rise of Trump via Zionists like Biden. This is why we can never stop being mindful of baobab fascism.

But I digress.

Saint-Exupéry may have been born to an aristocratic family, but that doesn’t necessitate elitist, let alone fascist, sympathies. Peter Kropotkin was a Russian prince; he was also an anarcho-commmunist. Friedrich Engels was a bourgeois; he was also Karl Marx’s trusted friend and colleague.

But I digress again.

VII: Chapter Six

The little prince loves to watch sunsets, which on his tiny planet come forty-four times a day! Here on Earth, though, the boy will have to wait and wait.

The frequent sight of sunsets (and therefore also of sunrises) implies that the little prince has a far more conscious sense of how cyclical life is than we do. He watches sunsets when he is sad, implying that they have a therapeutic value for him. Seeing the coming darkness will bring to mind that the light will soon return.

We on Earth, on the other hand, must wait much longer for both the light and the dark, giving us the illusory feeling that both the good and the bad are closer to being permanent states of existence. The boy knows better, though.

VIII: Chapter Seven

The little prince wants to talk to the pilot about flowers, and if the sheep will eat flowers, but the pilot is terribly busy and stressed trying to repair his plane. The boy’s incessant questioning feels so annoying in its triviality.

When the boy asks what a flower’s thorns are for, the man snaps at him that it’s because flowers are cruel, which the prince can’t believe. The pilot’s words seem to imply that the little prince is being a cruel flower himself for pestering him in his life-or-death situation.

The boy is shocked that the man doesn’t think flowers are important, and that he is being just like any other adult, bereft of understanding. Recall that the little prince, as a Christ-figure, is trying to get the pilot to understand that, in order to save himself, the pilot must be as a child, to be an imitator of Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1), and therefore in agreeing that flowers are important the man is imitating the prince and being like a child.

The little prince speaks of a man on a planet he’s visited who thinks that doing sums is the only important thing in the world; this man has never smelled a flower or looked upon a star. He’s swollen with pride, like a balloon. He sounds like the businessman we’ll learn about in Chapter Thirteen, he who imagines all the stars out in space are his possessions, his accumulated wealth. If so, he counts the stars, but never looks on them. In other words, he has all the inverted values of a capitalist. He doesn’t care about beauty; he only cares about numbers as money-values.

The pilot feels ashamed to seem like a man similar to this businessman.

IX: Chapter Eight

The little prince tells the pilot about a special seed that was blown onto his planet from some other place. It gave birth to a new kind of shoot, making the prince look it over very closely. Was it a new kind of baobab? No.

It grew into a beautiful flower that captivated the boy’s heart. She was a speaking flower, and one that is rather vain, her words annoying him. She wanted him to attend to her needs–watering her, and putting a screen around her to protect her from gales. He feels that one shouldn’t listen to flowers, but rather just look at and smell them, and admire their beauty.

Apparently, the flower, a rose, was inspired by the author’s wife, Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, who was from El Salvador, the country that inspired the little prince’s planet, with three volcanoes like those in her country, too (including the Santa Ana Volcano). I suppose we’re meant to assume by all of this that his wife was kind, yet petulant and vain as well.

The little prince’s leaving his planet and the rose behind, later to encounter the vast field of roses on Earth, is meant to represent Saint-Exupéry’s infidelity to Consuela, presumably during his travels by plane. In all of this, we can see again how the little prince is a projection of the pilot’s idealized version of himself, and is therefore also in turn a projection of Saint-Exupéry.

X: Chapter Nine

The little prince has left his planet, apparently, with the help of a flight of migratory birds, obviously symbolic of a plane for Exupéry to fly, and therefore a wish-fulfillment for the man stranded in the desert. The leaving can also represent the loss of innocence upon having grown up and having to face the adult world.

Before leaving, though, the boy’s had to be responsible and make sure his planet has been left in the best condition possible, which meant cleaning his three volcanoes, two active and one extinct, as well as pulling out the last of the baobab shoots and making sure his rose was safe from harm.

She says she won’t need the glass dome he’s used to put on her to protect her. She’ll enjoy the cool night air, and her thorns will protect her from any wild animals. Just as he is maturing and getting more responsible and self-reliant, so is she.

XI: Chapter Ten

In his travels in space, the little prince visits a number of asteroids not unlike his own in essence. The first of these has a king on it, and every other asteroid also has a solitary man living on it, each man in his own way demonstrating the foolishness of the adult mindset.

This adult absurdity is put into full effect here with a king who, all alone on his asteroid, rules over nobody. We see what a bad thing authoritarianism is when it’s presented in an absurd way. The king’s commands are pointless, illogical, and unenforceable. Quite an ironic position to get from an author who was born into an aristocratic family.

If the king can’t forbid the little prince to yawn, then he’ll command the boy to yawn. If the prince is too shy to yawn, then the king will command him sometimes to yawn, sometimes not to.

The king wants respect for his authority, and hates to be disobeyed, yet he is consummately ineffectual, thus demonstrating all by himself just how invalid regal authority is.

If the boy asks the king if he may do something, such as to sit down or ask a question, then the king commands him to do these things instead of simply permitting him to do them. The king is alone on his asteroid, yet he insists he rules over everything, even the stars, which he imagines must obey him in everything. In a while, we’ll be introduced to the businessman, who imagines the stars are his property.

The king says that authority rests on reason, and that he demands obedience because his orders are reasonable…yet the examples given above demonstrate how his orders are anything but reasonable.

The little prince wishes to leave the king’s little planet, yet the king forbids him to, offering to make the boy his minister. There being no one else on the asteroid, though, means that he as “minister” will have no one to judge. The king says the boy then can judge himself. The insists on leaving, yet the king offers to make him his ambassador. The prince leaves.

XII: Chapter Eleven

The second planet the little prince visits is inhabited by a vain man, who imagines the approaching boy to be an admirer. The prince considers the vain man’s hat to be an odd one, yet its owner says he raises it to anyone who praises hm…yet no one ever comes to his planet.

The vain man asks the little prince to clap his hands, which the boy does, causing the vain man to raise his hat “in a modest salute,” as if he were receiving applause for having put on an impressive performance.

The vain man, like the king, is demonstrating the absurdity of adults’ narcissistic affectations of greatness, when no such greatness is at all in evidence. He asks the boy if he thinks him “the handsomest, smartest, richest, and wisest man on the planet”…yet he is the only man on the planet, just as the king is alone on his planet, ruling over nobody.

Adult narcissism seems to stem from loneliness.

The prince leaves the planet.

XIII: Chapter Twelve

He arrives on a planet where a drunk lives. The little prince learns that this man drinks to help him forget how ashamed he feels…because he drinks!

The sadness of the drunk drives home the idea that it’s the loneliness of all of these adults that drives them to do the absurd things that they do. Hence, each man lives alone on his planet. The boy was alone on his, too, yet at least he had the sense to leave and look around, to find people.

Accordingly, he leaves the drunk’s planet, too.

XIV: Chapter Thirteen

The little prince arrives on the planet of the businessman, who is in the middle of doing sums. We see here especially how numbers are meant to represent monetary values, as I mentioned above, since the businessman is counting the stars.

He imagines he owns them simply because he was the first to think about owning them. He sees a difference between his owning them and a king ruling over them; we could see in this ‘difference’ a satirizing of the difference between capitalism and feudalism.

The businessman imagines that his ‘owning’ of the stars will make him rich…so he can ‘buy’ more stars! The little prince notes that the businessman’s avarice is based on the same kind of circular reasoning as the drunk’s shame is based on. One gropes for things only for the sake of groping for them.

The notion of justifying one’s ownership of a thing on the basis of having ‘discovered’ it is extended by the businessman into the realm of imperialism and settler-colonialism. He says, “When you discover an island that belongs to nobody, it is yours.” We all know what happened when Christopher Columbus discovered land that “belongs to nobody.”

The businessman’s ‘discovery’ of the stars, those islands in the sea of space, and his subsequent ‘owning’ of them, amassing his wealth through them, is the author satirizing capitalism by demonstrating the absurdity of accumulating capital for its own sake, claiming ownership of things that don’t belong to you.

He justifies his ownership of the stars further by calculating their totals, writing the totals on a little piece of paper, and putting the paper in a drawer to lock them in. This locking-away of the paper is his “bank.”

Like the king, the vain man, and the drunk, the businessman is all alone on his planet, engaging in his absurdity to compensate for his loneliness. The alienation caused by capitalism, fittingly, is felt most keenly by him. He pays little attention to anybody or anything other than his calculating.

The little prince observes that his own ownership of volcanoes and a flower are far more meaningful because he actually tends to their needs. The businessman, on the other hand, does nothing of use for the stars, just as any capitalist does little more than accumulating profits and overseeing those he overworks and underpays, his workers, who are the ones who are actually making the products and who thus should manage themselves and earn the full fruits of their labour.

The little prince leaves the businessman’s planet.

XV: Chapter Fourteen

The next planet the little prince comes to is one inhabited by a lamplighter. This planet is the smallest of them all, with only enough room for the lamplighter and his street lamp.

This man doesn’t seem to be engaging in absurd acts on first inspection, though, as has been the case with the previous four men, for lighting a street lamp does in itself have meaning. Still, his work is discovered to have plenty of absurdity in it.

The lamplighter’s planet is so small, and it has been rotating faster and faster over time, that morning and evening fall almost immediately the one after the other, so he must light up and put out the street light with hardly any rest in between.

And why? Because these are his orders.

Still, the boy sees good in the lamplighter, for “he cares for something besides himself.” The lonely little prince could also see a friend in the lamplighter, yet sadly, his planet is too small for both of them to live on, so the little prince leaves.

XVI: Chapter Fifteen

The next planet he lands on is one with a geographer, an elderly man who writes long books and imagines the approaching boy to be an explorer. Recall that geography has been one of the pilot’s studies, so when we discover the geographer’s absurdities, we will see another example of our narrator poking vicarious fun at himself.

One would think that this geographer would have an encyclopedic knowledge of every nook and cranny of his little planet, but he knows of no oceans on it, nor of any mountains, cities, rivers, or deserts. The reason for his ignorance, he says, is that he has no explorers to discover all of these things for him. He is only supposed to receive the explorers’ information, ask them questions about it, and write it all down.

Considering the little prince to be an explorer, the geographer is eager to hear the boy describe his planet. The prince tells of his volcanoes and his flower, though the geographer is not concerned with the latter, since it is “ephemeral.” Geography books are concerned only with what lasts forever on a planet, the geographer insists.

Similarly, he is not concerned with whether a volcano is extinct or if it lives. What matters to him is the mountain itself, which does not change. If the geographer records changing things in his books, then they’ll be out of date, sooner or later, and he can’t have that.

The little prince is saddened to learn that that which is ephemeral is “that which will die.” Since his flower is ephemeral, he fears for her death. In his heart, the boy knows better than the man: that which will die is far superior to that which is “everlasting,” since the ephemeral’s value is its rarity in the brevity of its life.

The geographer recommends that the little prince go next to the Earth, since good things have been said about the planet. So Earth is where the boy goes.

XVII: Chapter Sixteen

Ours is no ordinary planet, for instead of having only one king, one vain man, one drunk, one businessman, one lamplighter, and one geographer, there are many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and/or millions of each of these kinds of men on Earth. So many adult fools, all occupying one planet.

The narrator discusses the many lamplighters of the world before the invention of electricity.

XVIII: Chapter Seventeen

The narrator notes, yet again, another absurd thing that people often do: they lie to sound smart. While he acknowledges that people occupy very little space on Earth, grownups will think he’s lying about that, since they in their pride would prefer to believe that they take up a great deal of space here. “They think they are as large as baobabs.” As I discussed above, we should all know what that kind of poisonous pride can lead to.

When the little prince arrives on Earth, he’s surprised to find no people at all. Well, he is in the middle of a desert, after all. On a planet with so many people, the boy is still lonely.

He soon finds himself in a conversation with a snake. Since as a Christ-figure, the little prince could thus be a kind of second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:47, for example), then it is fitting that he have a conversation with a ‘second serpent’–not one that will tempt him (via Eve) into sin and death, but one that will give him genuine knowledge and wisdom.

The boy learns from the serpent that, while it is surely lonely to be in the desert, “It is also lonely among men.” One could be surrounded in a sea of people, yet still feel lonely if one doesn’t have any friends. Many people here on Earth have that experience. The boy’s encounter of many, each living alone on his own tiny little planet, is symbolic of that loneliness, isolation, and alienation we all feel, at least from time to time. The absurd behaviour of those men on their asteroids can be seen as at least representative of trauma responses to their loneliness.

The serpent says other things to suggest his links with the Biblical one. He says he’s “more powerful than the finger of a king”, suggesting he’s in a way like Satan, the god of this world (2 Corinthians 4:4). He also says, “Whoever I touch I send back to the dust that created them” (Genesis 3:19). This is a good serpent, though, and he won’t hurt the little prince, for he is pure and comes from a star. He is concerned about the boy, and he can help him.

XIX: Chapter Eighteen

The little prince walks across the desert and finds a flower with whom he has a conversation.

He asks the flower where the people are, but the flower has once seen a caravan go by, and it believes there are only six or seven people, all blown about by the winds, so who knows where they are. The people’s lack of roots “causes them many problems.”

That’s what we need: roots to hold us in place!

XX: Chapter Nineteen

The boy goes up to the top of a high mountain. Before, he knew only his three tiny volcanoes, going up just to his knees. He imagines he’ll be able to see the entire planet from this tall mountain, but he can see only “sharp, craggy peaks.”

He calls out, and hears only an echo for his answer. To hear only himself is like meeting the pilot, a lonely mirror of himself.

XXI: Chapter Twenty

This is the chapter in which the little prince, as I mentioned above, encounters a garden of roses. These roses look just like his flower, the one he left on his little planet. He’s saddened by how their likeness to his rose, his true love, makes her no longer unique, but common. He sees five thousand roses here!

Recall how I mentioned above that his flower represents the author’s wife, Consuela, and that these many flowers represent his extramarital affairs. Consuela, incidentally, had affairs of her own, which I suspect Saint-Exupéry knew of, or at least suspected, hence she, like the many roses here, must have seemed disappointingly “common” to him.

Since the little prince is an idealized version of Saint-Exupéry, then the replacement of the women in his life with flowers is an attempt to smooth over and mitigate his sins, as well as those of Consuela. We see, in the weeping of the little prince over his “common rose,” a touching moment revealing how, in spite of Saint-Exupéry’s naughtiness (and Consuela’s), he still loved her.

XXII: Chapter Twenty-one

As the little prince has been weeping, a fox appears. The two have a conversation, and the boy, feeling lonely, wishes to play with the fox.

The fox insists, however, that the prince tame it first. By “tame,” it means that the boy must “make a connection” with it, thus they would need each other, and be unique to each other. The boy thinks of his rose, and he tells the fox he thinks she’s tamed him. In this taming, it is apparent that his rose became “unique” to him…unlike now.

The fox doesn’t like its dull life because all it does is hunt chickens and is hunted by men, each of both types being all identical, lacking uniqueness, and thus their lives are boring; but if the little prince could tame the fox, then its life would be so much better. The boy’s and the fox’s lives would have meaning, because taming would make them connect with each other, and give each other uniqueness.

The little prince says, however, that he hasn’t the time to tame the fox, for he must look for friends and try to understand the ways of the Earth. The fox says it would be better to tame and be friends with it, for people, having no time for understanding, would rather buy things in shops. One cannot buy friendships, so people don’t have friends anymore…what a trenchant comment on how modern capitalism causes alienation.

To tame the fox, the boy will have to be very patient. Since ‘taming’ in this story essentially means making friends with others–calming down their wildness and making them civil with you–we see how important patience is in building relationships…a skill we have been losing more and more as we fetishize commodities in the shops mentioned above. It’s easier to have things than it is to have people, and to have people have us.

“Words can cause misunderstandings,” says the fox, which is part of why having patience in relationships is so hard.

And so in taming the fox, appearing for it at regular times and thus making it happy, the little prince has made friends with it and made it unique, not like a hundred thousand other foxes. Similarly, his rose is unique because of its taming, so it isn’t like all those other roses that seem so common. Because of this understanding, he can feel good about his rose again. One imagines that, in real life, this understanding must have helped Saint-Exupéry to reconcile himself to his wife, in spite of their troubled marriage.

We see most clearly through our hearts, the fox tells the little prince. Seeing through the heart must be the basis of a child’s wisdom, while seeing through the eyes seems to be the basis of an adult’s folly. What’s more, the boy’s rose is important because of the time he’s spent with her, the taming process.

The fox is believed to have been inspired by Saint-Exupéry’s intimate New York City friend, Silvia Hamilton Reinhardt, and she is the one who apparently gave the author the wisdom of seeing clearly with one’s heart. It’s ironic that the source of some of the novella’s wisdom, if it’s the true source, came from a paramour.

XXIII: Chapter Twenty-two

Next, the little prince meets a railway signalman. As the trains race past from one side to the other, the boy wonders why they’re in such a great hurry, to which the man answers that even the passengers don’t know why. The prince asks if the passengers were unhappy where they were before they took the train, and the signalman tells him, trenchantly, that one is never happy wherever one is; in other words, traveling anywhere will never bring happiness–one cannot find it by merely going out there…one must be content where one already is first. The little prince might well have just stayed on his planet with his rose. Oh, the folly of the pilot’s many flights!

One interesting point that the railway signalman makes is that the adult passengers are following nothing, just sleeping during the train rides, while it’s their children who have their faces pressed against the windows. The boy notes that only children know what they are looking for, implying the folly of the sleeping adults, who have let their sense of curiosity wane.

XXIV: Chapter Twenty-three

The little prince meets a merchant who sells small smart pills that can quench one’s thirst. If only the pilot were here! The little prince would use the time saved by taking the pills to go to a water fountain.

XXV: Chapter Twenty-four

As of this point in the boy’s telling of his story to the pilot, the latter has used up all of his drinking water. He is desperate, in his stress, to get water and repair his plane, so he has no use of the boy’s stories!

Since the little prince mentioned going to a water fountain, fortuitously just in time, rather than indulge in the hallucinatory wish-fulfillment of taking one of the merchant’s water-pills (whose saving of time is a further wish-fulfillment, alleviating the pilot’s anxiety about urgently finding water), he simply takes the pilot to look for such a fountain. They search until night falls, and thirst is making the man a little feverish.

At one point, the little prince remarks about how beautiful the desert is, and the pilot must agree. Then the boy says that the beauty of the desert comes from how a well is hiding within it.

The pilot has an epiphany on hearing this second observation. He realizes that what makes anything beautiful–a house, the stars, a desert–is something that stays invisible, hidden.

The boy falls asleep, and the man carries him. He realizes how valuable the little prince is. He looks at the boy and understands that what he sees is just a shell, but that what’s important about the little prince is invisible, hidden.

We see with our hearts, not with our eyes.

The little prince has tamed the pilot, who is no longer frantic about fixing his plane, and is patient in his growing thirst. Instead of being lonely, the pilot has a friend…if only a hallucinated projection of himself. He and the boy are unique to each other. The pilot understands that relationships are more important than things.

And it is at this point, at daybreak, when he has discovered, at last, a well.

XXVI: Chapter Twenty-five

The little prince seems to be recalling his conversation with the railway signalman when he says that people go on trains without knowing where they really want to go. They go in circles and get frustrated. It isn’t worth it. As I said above in my comment on Chapter Twenty-two, it doesn’t matter where one travels if one doesn’t have happiness. Was it worth the trouble for the boy to leave his planet? Have any of the pilot’s plane trips been worth it, if he’s been so lonely?

When they operate the well to draw water from it, the boy says, “The well is now awake, and it is singing.” He wishes to drink, too, but he’s always aware of beauty before his material needs.

As the boy drinks, the pilot comes to understand what the prince has been looking for: not just the nourishment of the water, but also forming bonds with people while seeking such material needs, and appreciating beauty along the way.

The little prince gets a picture of a muzzle for his sheep, drawn by the man so the boy’s flower will be safe from being eaten when he returns to his planet. Then the pilot must return to his plane and finish repairing it; after that, he must go back to the boy, as he in turn had to do to the fox, for this is part of being tamed: remembering your relationships with others.

XXVII: Chapter Twenty-six

The pilot returns to see the little prince, who is sitting on the top of a dilapidated old stone wall, with his feet dangling from it. The pilot notices that there is a yellow snake at the foot of the wall, one that could bite and thus kill the boy in less than thirty seconds. The prince tells it to go away, so he can get off of the wall. The pilot is getting his pistol out to shoot the snake, but it slithers away quickly.

He wonders about the boy speaking with snakes, but instead he learns that the little prince knows he has repaired his plane. So he can go home…and so can the boy.

The pilot knows already that he’ll miss the little prince when he is gone. He longs to hear the boy’s laugh. The prince has given the man so much wisdom; the boy has reawakened the child in the pilot.

Because of the child, the man has a way of valuing the stars that other adults haven’t. For scientists, the stars are trouble; for the businessman, they are wealth. For the pilot, because he knows the little prince is among them, the stars laugh for him.

The boy has given him the gift of happiness, of friendship, and of the end of loneliness. He doesn’t want to leave the prince.

XXVIII: Chapter Twenty-seven

Six years have gone by since the little prince left Earth.

Since he forgot to draw a leather strap for the muzzle for the sheep, the pilot wonders if the sheep has eaten the rose. Perhaps it’s safe, protected under its glass dome…or maybe there’s been an occasion when the boy has forgotten to put it on the rose, and the sheep has eaten it!

Whether the sheep has or hasn’t eaten the flower, everything changes if the answer to this question is yes, and this is important in a way no adult will ever understand, for it’s about caring deeply about a child’s happiness.

Saint-Exupéry ends his tale by twice drawing the spot in the desert where he met the little prince, and also where the boy left him. Thus, it is both the happiest and the saddest place in the world for the pilot.

Recall what I said in my commentary on Chapter Two, about the ouroboros, and that the head biting the tail represents where extreme opposites meet in a dialectical sense. In this instance, I mentioned heaven and hell: back in that chapter, hell led to heaven, the stress of facing certain death in the desert led to the pilot’s encounter with the Christ-like little prince; by the story’s end, though, happiness has led to sadness, in how the pilot has experienced a kind of enlightenment through the boy, and yet now he deeply misses the boy’s company.

After Buddhist-like enlightenment, the pilot feels himself thrown back into the samsara of attachment, wanting his little prince back. He thus asks his readers, if they should see the boy there in the desert, to let him know of the boy’s return, to comfort him.

XXIX: Conclusion

The complexities of life, the songs of innocence and of experience, make us adults forget the simple truths we knew as children: be kind to people, help those in need, appreciate friendships, weed out the bad things before they get worse, and prioritize what is beautiful over material gain. Don’t let pride turn you into a fool.

Thus it makes perfect sense that Saint-Exupéry wrote a novella, to remind adults of the above values, in the form of a children’s story.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le Petit Prince, France, Editions Gallimard, 1946

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part VII (Final Part)

Here are links to Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI, if you haven’t read them yet.

XXIX: Out

This chapter begins with another description of the rainstorm outside, and how things have developed as of 9:00 to 10:00 AM (pages 1411-1415). As with the last such description, it’s all one continuous paragraph (this time, for about four and a half pages) except for the last sentence, in which Andrew Keene, grandson of Norbert, isn’t sure if he can believe what he’s seen: the destruction of the Standpipe, something that up until then “had stood for his whole life.” (page 1415)

As I said last time, this uninterrupted flow of words, in its mass of formlessness, represents the undifferentiated trauma of Lacan’s Real. We may be reading words here, but their presentation, without any breaks except for the last sentence, suggests a lack of order, a kind of word salad, symbolizing the inability to verbalize.

Wind-speeds are at an average of fifty-five miles an hour, with gusts of up to seventy (page 1411). Though the water department initially ruled out a flooding of downtown Derry, it’s now not only possible but imminent, and for the first time since the summer of 1958, when the kid Losers went into the sewers.

Howard Gardener has a brief image of Hitler and Judas Iscariot, two of the great villains of history, handing out ice-skates; the water is now almost at the top of the Canal’s cement walls. Adding to the apocalyptic theme, Harold will tell his wife later that he thinks the end of the world is coming (page 1412).

By page 1413, the Standpipe already has a pronounced lean, like the tower of Pisa. As I said above, Andrew Keene has watched its whole destruction in disbelief (pages 1412-1415), though he’s been smoking so much Colombia Red that at first he thinks he’s been hallucinating.

Meanwhile, down in the tunnels, adult Bill and Richie are still going after It (page 1416). It wants them to let It go, but they’re very close now.

The Spider offers Bill and Richie long lives of two, three, five hundred years if they’ll let It go (page 1417). It will make the two men gods of the Earth–one is reminded of Satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness (Matthew 4:8-9).

Bill and Richie start hitting the Spider with their right fists and with not only all their might, but also with “the force of the Other,” this being Gan, as I’ve mentioned in earlier parts of this analysis, but that force is also that Lacanian Other of social togetherness as against the dyadic, one-on-one narcissism that uses only one other as an extension of oneself. This is the Other of solidarity: it’s “the force of memory and desire” [recall their lovemaking with Bev when they were kids, and how I said it symbolized their solidarity]… “the force of love and unforgotten childhood.” (page 1417)

The section is titled The Kill, for this is where Bill finally kills It by plunging his hand into the Spider and crushing Its heart (page 1418). To do Shadow work properly, you have to go down deep into the darkness, and get to the heart of the matter.

After the Spider dies, Bill hears the Voice of the Other, telling him he “did real good.”, even though the Turtle, it would seem, is dead (page 1419). Gan, the real God of Stephen King’s cosmology, is very much alive.

In the next section, Derry 10:00-10:15 AM, we confront the destruction of downtown Derry. The statue of Paul Bunyan has exploded (page 1420). Recall how it was associated with Pennywise when adult Richie was terrorized by It; fittingly, it’s destroyed around the time that Bill has killed the Spider.

And at 10:02 AM, again, when Bill has killed It, downtown Derry collapses (page 1421). When Bill regroups with Bev, Ben, and Richie, they get Audra, and they’re trying to find their way out (in the section fittingly titled Out, pages 1429-1435); they are aware of a growing light that shouldn’t be there in the Canal under the city (page 1431).

This is what happens when one does Shadow work: one goes deep into the darkness, into the heart of the matter, and one makes the darkness light. One integrates dark and light. What is unconscious is made conscious. This is what the collapsing of downtown Derry symbolizes.

The Losers realize that the street has caved in, for they recognize pieces of the Aladdin movie theatre down there with them (page 1432). This mixing of parts of upper, surface Derry with the underground symbolizes that integration of the conscious with the unconscious, a uniting of the dark with the light. Indeed, it seems to Bill that most of downtown Derry is in the Canal and being carried down the Kenduskeag River (page 1433).

The Losers climb up to the surface of the city, carrying catatonic Audra (page 1434). A small crowd applauds them when they’ve emerged (page 1435). The applause is fitting, even if the crowd doesn’t know what the Losers have just done, for they deserve it nonetheless–they’re the heroes of Derry. The Losers have become the Winners. The mark of that small door, they’ve noticed, is gone (page 1428). The cuts on their hands–from their childhood pledge to return to Derry if It returned (dealt with in the section titled Out/Dusk, August 10th 1958, pages 1440-1444)–are gone. The ordeal is finally over.

Bill, Ben, Bev, and Richie reach the corner of Upper Main and Point Street; there they see a kid in a red rainslicker sailing a paper boat along water running in the gutter (pages 1438-1439). Bill thinks it’s the boy with the skateboard he met before. He tells the boy that everything is all right now, and to be careful on his skateboard. Since the kid’s rainslicker is red instead of yellow, and since Pennywise is gone, perhaps all he needs to worry about now is the Big Bad Wolf.

Of course, not everything is all right. Bill still has to deal with what’s happened to Audra. I’ve discussed in Part II [see the chapter, “Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (I)”] how he does this. The point is that it will involve once again the novel’s theme of facing one’s fears.

XXX: Derry: The Last Interlude

Just as there is duality in so many other forms as I’ve described them in It–namely, the dialectical unity of opposites–there is also duality in the ending of the novel in the form of two epilogues, this last interlude and the actual epilogue after it.

Things are disappearing, as Mike notes in his journaling, starting June 4th, 1985. Bill’s stutter is disappearing (page 1447). The fading away of his speech impediment symbolizes how his resuming of the regular spoken use of language marks his leaving the trauma of the Real and his re-entry into the Symbolic, into society, a healing union with other people. He just has to achieve the same thing for catatonic Audra, who won’t say a thing.

Richie has disappeared: he’s flown back to California. Their memories of what happened are also slowly disappearing (page 1448). Just little details are being forgotten for now. Bill thinks the forgetting is going to spread, but Mike thinks that that may be for the best.

It’s a bad thing to repress trauma, so it’s there, bothering you without you being able to figure out what it is so you can do something about it. It’s also a bad thing, though, to ruminate endlessly over past pain. Since they have killed It once and for all, it’s probably best for them to let it go. In bad remembering and bad forgetting, we have another duality in It.

At the same time, though, there’s also good remembering and forgetting–in this case, their friends. Bill thinks that maybe he’ll stay in touch with Mike, for a while, but the forgetting will put that to an end. Ben later hugs Mike and asks if he’ll write to Ben and Bev…again, Mike will write for a while, for as with Bill, Mike knows he’s forgetting things, too (page 1451).

After a month or a year, his notebook will be all he has to remember what happened in Derry. Forgetting is filling Mike with panic, but it also offers him relief. This, again, is an example of the good/bad duality in the novel. Because It is finally and truly dead, no one needs to stand guard for Its reappearance twenty-seven years later.

Fifty percent of Derry is still underwater, the apocalyptic consequence of having destroyed It (page 1452). How does one rebuiild a city whose downtown has collapsed in a kind of Great Flood?

The forgetting is continuing. Mike has forgotten Stan’s last name (page 1454). Richie has forgotten it, too–was it Underwood? No, that isn’t a Jewish name…no, it was Uris, they finally remember.

Mike has almost forgotten Stan and Eddie. Did the latter have asthma, or a chronic migraine (page 1455)? He phones Bill and asks: Bill remembers the asthma and the aspirator, which Mike recalls only when Bill has mentioned it (page 1456). Mike has also forgotten Eddie’s surname; Bill thinks it was something like Kerkorian, but of course that’s wrong.

Yet another thing is disappearing: the names and addresses of Mike’s friends in his book (page 1457). He could rewrite and rewrite everything, but he suspects that the rewrites will all fade away, so why bother?

He has a nightmare that makes him wake up in a panic, and he can’t breathe. He also can’t remember the dream (page 1458). Such is the nature of repressed trauma. All this stuff is forgotten, but it’s still in one’s head. Still in his hospital bed, Mike has a vision of that male nurse with the needle…or of Henry and his switchblade.

Bill is the only one Mike remembers clearly now. Bill has an “idea” of what he can do about Audra, but it’s so crazy that he doesn’t want to tell Mike what it is (page 1457).

XXXI: Epilogue: Bill Denbrough Beats the Devil (II)

His crazy idea, of course, is to take catatonic Audra on Silver, his old bike, and ride with her out into the danger of the traffic, to snap her out of it. This racing on his bike, risking a crash and serious injury, if not death, is him trying to beat the Devil, as he did as a kid when racing to the drugstore to get Eddie’s medicine.

It’s an insane, desperate act, but as with his friend, Eddie, it’s an act of selflessness, for if Audra dies with Bill in a crash, it probably won’t matter, for in her catatonia, she’s already in a state of living death…Lacan’s Real, with no differentiation between life and death, and no ability to verbalize her trauma, to leave the Real and enter the Symbolic.

To leave the Real, one must have a sense of differentiation. Bill is getting a sense of that for himself before he imposes differentiation on Audra. He goes from naked in Mike’s bedroom (Bill and Audra have been staying in Mike’s house until he is released from the hospital) to fully dressed (pages 1461-1462). He goes from inside to outside, taking Silver out of the garage and onto the driveway (page 1463); he’s been thinking about leaving Derry, too, from inside the city to outside (pages 1463-1464).

In his imagination, Bill sees Derry as it was when he was a kid, a differentiation between the past and the present, between his childhood and his adulthood, for those memories–including the intact Paul Bunyan statue–are in stark contrast with the destroyed Derry of the present (page 1464).

He needs Audra to experience differentiation, too, between life and death, specifically, and by putting both of them right on the brink between the two, he hopes she’ll sense that differentiation and snap out of it. The danger of this, of course, is augmented by the fact that he’s way too old to be doing stunts on his old bike.

Naturally, he’s also full of conflict over whether he should be doing this–surely, he can’t!–and yet if he doesn’t at least try it, she’ll stay in her catatonia for the rest of her life. It, as I’ve observed in the previous parts, is all about facing one’s fears, for doing so is how the beat the Devil.

As he’s riding, in imitation of the Lone Ranger, Bill shouts out “Hi-yo Silver, AWAYYYYYYY!” (page 1468), as he used to do as a kid. Like the Lone Ranger, he is being a hero for Audra as he was for Eddie, yet paradoxically, he could also be about to kill her. We see the good/bad duality once again.

There’s also been his contemplation of leaving Derry, and whether or not he should look back (page 1469). It’s best not to look back: after all, Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at burning Sodom and Gomorrah. This must be why the Losers are forgetting everything–we mustn’t look back. Audra has to be snapped out of her catatonia, even to the point of risking death, because that catatonia is her, in a psychological sense, ceaselessly looking back on what traumatized her in the Spider’s lair. That trauma is turning her into a pillar of salt, so to speak.

As Bill is racing on his bike, people are shouting at him to be careful (page 1470). He comes extremely close to some crash barriers by a slipstream. Then he hears Audra’s voice: “Bill?” (page 1471). She’s asking him where they are, and what they’re doing. She’s using language; she’s re-entered the Symbolic and left the Real. She’s snapped out of it!

Now Bill can do his Lone Ranger routine with perfect confidence. His idea worked! He is a true hero! He’s beat the Devil!

In fact, he too has fully re-entered the Symbolic, for he realizes that his stutter is all gone (page 1472), and it seems that it’s gone for good.

As for his childhood memories, their beliefs and desires, and his dreams, Bill will write about them all one day (page 1473), for as I’ve said in the other parts of this analysis, writing is good therapy.

XXXII: Conclusion

So, the whole point of It is to face one’s fears, to confront the Shadow, and to make the dark light–that is, to integrate, reconcile, and unify such opposites as the dark and the light, good and evil (i.e., by confronting the evil, one finds the good), the self with the other, etc. In a fragmented world where we find ourselves not only cut off from each other, but also cut off from other parts of ourselves, integration and unification are necessary for us to be reacquainted with the intuitive idea that all is one, where inner peace is finally found, where one discovers one’s true self.

Discovering our true selves isn’t a simple matter of discarding our false selves, though; the Persona and the Self must be integrated, too, for the Persona is a part of the totality of the Self. This is why Bill had to speak in a voice other than his own to recite the couplet without stuttering and thus weaken It. Eddie had to let himself be duped by the ‘efficacy’ of his aspirator to help defeat It, too, since les non-dupes errent.

Integrating all of the opposites to reach that all-is-one unity in the Self is no form of sentimentality. It’s difficult, dangerous, and scary work, as the Losers learned inside those sewers. To reach heaven, the ouroboros‘ biting head (see Part VI, in XXVII: Under the City, for an elaboration of my interpretation of the symbolism of the ouroboros), one must first pass through the serpent’s bitten tail…hell. Such a crossing over of extremes, reconciling them, is what It is all about.

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

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part IV

Here are links to Parts I, II, and III, if you haven’t read them yet.

XVI: Three Uninvited Guests

While on the literal level, Pennywise is of course the killer in It, on a symbolic level, It is trauma personified. Henry Bowers has been blamed for all the murders in the late 1950s, while we know he actually killed his father and Mike’s old dog, Mr. Chips. I suspect, however, that Henry and Patrick Hockstetter are psychopathic enough, at least, to have committed all the killings. Pennywise’s presence in all these proceedings, including his own manifested violence, seem merely symbolic.

In this chapter, three people are getting involved in the Losers’ mission to destroy It. Two of them, Henry and Tom Rogan, Bev’s abusive husband, seem apt to be included, since they’re both trauma-inflicting bullies. The third, however, is Audra, Bill’s wife, and she’ll wind up on the receiving end of trauma.

As I mentioned previously in section XI: Georgie’s Room and The House On Neibolt Street from Part III, Henry is associated with the werewolf because, as we see in this chapter, he as an adult inmate in a mental hospital is hearing voices from the moon; thus he’s a lunatic of a sort comparable to how the full moon causes a lycanthrope to change into a wolf. The voice of the moon is the voice of Pennywise in the forms of Victor and Belch (page 791).

Since Pennywise is trauma personified, and since It represents the Collective Shadow, then it makes sense to understand these voices to be projections of Henry’s own traumas and madness. For him to see and hear Pennywise in the moon is to confront himself in a metaphorical mirror reflection.

So when Henry hears voices taunting him about his failures in such situations as the Apocalyptic Rock Fight (to be dealt with two chapters later, after the third Derry interlude), and they tell him to go back to Derry and kill all of the Losers, what on the surface would seem to be the clown is actually a projection of Henry’s mad thoughts (page 797).

Pennywise, in the voice of Victor Criss, tells Henry to get out of the mental hospital and get revenge on the Losers for the rock fight. Vic offers to help by taking care of a guard named Koontz, named apparently after Dean Koontz, who as a fellow horror/suspense thriller writer was something of a rival to Stephen King. Pennywise appears before this guard with the head of a Doberman pinscher, terrifying the guard and killing him (pages 802-803). That King would write a killing of a man named Koontz thus sounds like a form of wish-fulfillment.

Next, we learn of how Tom Rogan has found out where Beverly is going. After escaping Tom’s clutches, Bev got help from a friend named Kay McCall. Tom manages to find out that Kay has helped Beverly, so he finds Kay and gets the information of where his wife is going, by literally beating that information out of Kay (page 809). Feeling guilty over having told Tom, who threatened to slice up her face if she didn’t, Kay tries to contact Bev in Derry by phone to warn her that he’s on his way there (page 813).

On the plane from Chicago to Derry, Tom has a copy of Bill Denbrough’s novel, The Black Rapids. He’s read and reread the note on the author at the back of the book (page 813). He knows Bill is from New England; he also knows Bill’s wife, Audra Phillips, is a noted actress, and he’s trying to remember what movies he’s seen her in.

He remembers that Audra is a redhead, and therefore she looks a lot like Beverly. Since Bev wants to go to Derry to see her old childhood friends, including Bill, and since Bill seems to have a thing for redheads, does all of this mean that, not only were Bill and Bev an item as kids, but do they now want to revive their old love?

Tom has some insight into psychology, though as a narcissist and a psychopath, he uses that insight to manipulate and control, not to help, people like Bev (page 814). He has an instinct that people do transferences of those they knew as kids onto those they know now as adults, including transferences of love.

Eddie’s made such a transference of his obese, overprotective mother onto Myra (whose overprotectiveness, surprisingly, hasn’t motivated her to join Henry, Tom, and Audra in a search for the Losers in Derry). Bev did a transference from her father onto Tom. And Bill, Tom intuits, has done a transference of Beverly onto Audra…yet this transference seems to be insufficient for Bill, so he needs Beverly again. Tom’s intuition and his wild, sociopathic jealousy are welded together here.

This jealousy of his is extensively paralleled with that of Bev’s father, who always ‘worried about her…a lot,’ that she’d fall into vice with other boys. Tom similarly doesn’t like Bev to be smoking, and he’s bringing her a carton of cigarettes…not to smoke, but to eat (page 817).

Cigarettes are phallic symbols, too. Tom’s not liking Bev smoking is unconsciously linked to the idea of her practicing fellatio on an object other than his own phallus. Making her “eat” the cigarettes is a way of ‘curing’ her of her smoking habit by a kind of ironic overkill, punishing her with the sin.

Audra argues with her bad-tempered movie producer, Fredde Firestone, about her and Bill suddenly having to leave England and go to Derry (pages 817-822). In the US, she rents a Datsun to drive into the city.

She and Tom take rooms in motels that are side by side. In fact, the LTD wagon he’s bought and the Datsun she’s rented are parked nose-to-nose (page 824), with only a raised concrete sidewalk to separate them.

Such a coincidence is the kind of synchronicity that can happen only in Derry, it seems. The inner world of Tom’s mind, jealously preoccupied with the red hair of Audra and Beverly, is coinciding with the outer-world proximity of Audra’s Datsun.

XVII: Derry: The Third Interlude

Mike is reflecting on the period of killings that included the fire in the Black Spot. He imagines the killings to have been a kind of huge human sacrifice to satisfy Pennywise, as if It were a pagan god.

These cycles of killings of every twenty-seven years or so, these mass human sacrifices, as it were, would come to an end, and It being thus satisfied, would then go to sleep for about a quarter century. Yet just as there is a cause to end the killings for the moment, there’s also a cause to begin them.

And in the case of the spate of killings from 1929 to 1930, the cause was the incident with the Bradley Gang (page 827).

As usual, whenever there’s such horror as the shootout that killed the Bradley Gang in a bloodbath, the people of Derry, for the most part, pretend to forget what happened, either claiming they were out of town that day, or napping that afternoon and not knowing what happened until they’d heard about it on the news, or straight out lying about it.

As I’ve mentioned previously, Derry is the kind of town where people, on the surface, affect sweetness, kindness, gentleness, and good manners, all the while hiding the town’s slimy underbelly. It’s far easier to engage in denial and projection than it is to be honest about one’s traumas and confront the scary stuff. And as I’ve also said previously, confronting the scary stuff is what It is all about.

Mike manages to get the true story about the Bradley Gang shootout from Norbert Keene, owner of the Center Street Drug Store from 1925 to 1975 (page 828). The gang was led by the brothers George and Al Bradley; they would rob stores across Derry throughout the late 1920s, until of course the locals got fed up with them and gunned them all down. Even Pennywise was among the shooters.

The gang had been hitting banks across the Midwest and even kidnapped a banker for ransom (page 831). They got paid thirty thousand dollars for the ransom, a lot of money back in the late 1920s, but they still killed the banker.

The Midwest was getting sick of gangs like the Bradleys always terrorizing them, so the gang went up northeast and into the Derry area. They’d been lying low in a big farmhouse they’d rented there, but they were getting bored and wanted to do some hunting. They had the guns, but not the ammo, so they went to Machen’s Sporting Goods to get it. The owner, Lal Machen, was shocked to learn just how much ammo the gang wanted to buy (page 832), but said he’d have rather made the sale than his competition in a store up in Bangor. Lal knew exactly who his customers were, of course.

The gang was supposed to pick up the ammo two days later, at two in the afternoon (page 833). When the gang left the store, Lal told as many people as possible that the Bradley Gang would be at his store at the agreed time, and he knew that if the gang wanted ammo, they were sure to get a lot of it (page 834)…but in a way they hadn’t been expecting to get it.

When the time of reckoning came, Lal told Al Bradley, sitting in a La Salle, to put his hands up and that he was surrounded (page 838). Lal started firing, hitting Al in the shoulder. The shootout was all over in about four or five minutes. George, running away, got a bullet in the back of his head (page 841).

As I said above, it’s understood by Keene that one of the gunmen who massacred the Bradley Gang was a clown (page 843). We should consider how every shooter saw Pennywise using the same gun that he was using. Keene fired a Winchester, and he saw the clown fire a Winchester. Biff Marlow used a Remington, and he saw Pennywise shoot with a Remington. Jimmy Gordon used an old Springfield, and he saw the clown use one just like his.

This use of the same guns reinforces the idea that Pennywise is not someone there in the real, physical world. He’s a dagger of the mind, so to speak, proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain. He’s a projection of the gunmen’s own aggression, a personification of their trauma, of their fight-or-flight response…here, with an emphasis on fight.

Keene imagines the man was wearing clown makeup to hide his identity, as a Klansman might do with the white hood. This sounds like an unconscious wish-fulfillment and projection of a group of murderers who wanted to remain anonymous, just as so many in Derry ‘didn’t know’ what really happened that day.

XVIII: The Apocalyptic Rockfight

It’s interesting that the rockfight between the Losers Club–all seven of them now, with Mike finally joining them–and Henry Bowers’s Gang is described as being ‘apocalyptic,’ of all things. Recall that both the flooding in Derry at the novel’s beginning, when Georgie is murdered, and at the end, when the adult Losers confront and defeat It once and for all, are associated with the Great Flood, another world-ending event.

Pennywise, or It in Its giant spider form, must be seen in Its context of the whole cosmology of King’s novels, as must the Turtle, Maturin, in the Macroverse in which the Turtle vomited out our mainstream universe. Maturin is the God, or Ahura Mazda, the principle of good in this dualistic cosmology; and It is the Devil, or Angra Mainyu, the principle of evil, in this universe.

Good and evil are at war with each other throughout sacred histories like those of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, or the mythography King has created in novels like It. At the end of these sacred histories, the war between the powers of light and darkness comes to a head, and we get the apocalyptic final confrontation, like Ragnarök–a great, epic battle.

Just as the adult Losers have their ultimate confrontation with It at the end of the novel, with a fitting Deluge and destruction of downtown Derry, so do the pre-teen Losers have their great fight–no less a battle between good and evil, in its own way–with Henry Bowers’s gang. Depicting both battles as, each in its own way, apocalyptic is fitting, even if calling the rockfight ‘apocalyptic’ sounds a tad melodramatic on the surface. For the point is that fighting It is perfectly paralleled with fighting Henry and his bullies; it’s all about confronting trauma, facing one’s fears.

Pennywise is Henry…and his bullies, his father, Bev’s father and her husband, Eddie’s mother and his wife, the racist secret society (the Maine Legion of White Decency) that killed all the blacks in the Black Spot, Adrian Mellon’s homophobic murderers, etc. Pennywise is the Collective Shadow.

After having looked around Derry to jog their memories and confront Pennywise in various forms, the adult Losers go to the library to meet up with Mike, Bill being the first to arrive. Bill is thinking about Silver in Mike’s garage, the day the kids met in the Barrens (except Mike) and told their scary stories about It, and–looking over at Mike–Bill remembers the day Mike joined the Losers, the day of the apocalyptic rockfight (pages 850-851).

A number of the Losers, when they were kids, each had his own set of reasons why he thought Henry hated him the most, these being Ben, Richie, Stan, and Bill. To be sure, Henry virulently hates all four of them, but the kid Henry hated the most was Mike (pages 854-855). This hate stemmed from how Mike’s father’s farm so fully outclassed Butch Bowers’s farm, as I’ve already mentioned.

Now, Butch was as crazy and sociopathic as his son, and he hated Mike and his father as much as Henry did. Butch is how Henry learned racism against blacks. Parents teaching their kids bigoted ideas is a form of emotional abuse; in fact, Butch rewarded Henry with his first beer (page 858) for having killed Mr. Chips, Mike’s dog, by poisoning burger meat (psychopathic Henry even sat and watched the dog die after eating the meat–page 857).

Naturally, Henry wanted his father’s love, something difficult to get from a man plagued with PTSD after fighting the Japanese in WWII. Henry was afraid of crazy Butch, just as his bully friends, Victor et al, were afraid of the vicious man, who was as abusive to them as he was to Henry. Even Butch’s wife left him after he beat her almost to death.

The point is that abuse and the trauma resulting from it are contagious. This is how that It-spider has existed throughout the sacred history of King’s cosmology. It feeds on human flesh, but finds that the fear of children makes that flesh taste better. So trauma and abuse are like the original sin that is passed from generation to generation, nourishing It the whole time. Killing It thus ends the sacred history, an apocalyptic moment like the rockfight, since It is manifested in Henry and his gang of bullies.

Hurt people hurt people. Henry hurts everyone, because he himself has been hurt so much. It feeds on everyone’s pain.

Henry, Victor, Belch, and two other bullies named Peter Gordon and Steve “Moose” Sadler are chasing Mike toward the Barrens, while on the bank of the Kenduskeag Stream, the six Losers are discussing how It is terrorizing them. They realize It lives in the sewers (pages 863-864).

Bill’s father, Zack Denbrough, told him that the whole sewer area was originally marsh. Zack explained that the machinery used to pump the sewage is old and needs to be replaced, but the city council doesn’t want to pay for new machinery whenever the issue is brought up at budget meetings. So the sewers are never fixed.

Recall that I see the underground, including of course the sewers, as a symbol of the unconscious. The sewers reek of piss and shit, the filth ejected from our bodies, which in turn is symbolic of all that we project and deny, pain that the unconscious mind wants to pretend doesn’t exist, just as the residents of Derry look the other way when It terrorizes somebody.

Replacing the old machinery with new machinery is like a psychoanalyst giving therapy to an analysand, delving into the unconscious and bringing repressed traumas out to the surface so we can recognize them as they are, not to be tricked into thinking they’re something else, hiding in plain sight in an unrecognizable form. The council’s refusal to replace the sewers’ machinery is like a patient’s resistance to his therapist’s probing into the secrets of his mind.

The rockfight happens near the Barrens, by the bank of the Kenduskeag, because this area represents the unconscious. This battle represents a struggle between different parts of the unconscious mind.

As Henry’s gang is chasing Mike, Henry admits that it was he who killed Mr. Chips, enraging Mike (page 887). He gets his revenge by hurling a chunk of coal at Henry, hitting him on the forehead (page (889). A while later, Bill seems to have a premonition, and he tells the other Losers to gather rocks as ammo (page 894). They all start gathering lots of rocks, as if they know Mike is coming, Henry’s gang close behind.

Mike reaches the Losers, and he’s standing beside Bill, panting, when Henry and his gang arrive. Henry taunts the Losers, calling Richie “four eyes,” Ben the “fatboy,” and Stan “the Jew” (page 897). Of course, Mike is referred to as “that nigger,” whom Henry wants at the moment. Bill is called a “stuttering freak” (King’s emphasis).

Mike isn’t the only one seething with rage at Henry for all the wrongs he’s caused. The rest of the Losers are sick of Henry’s crap, and they have the rocks to prove it. The rockfight begins.

Henry gets a rock from Bill on the shoulder, then one on the head (page 898). Rocks from Richie, Eddie, Stan, and Beverly also hit him, making Henry scream out in disbelief that these little kids could actually hurt him. His shouts for help from his gang make him sound like the weakling. Henry’s wimpish reaction is a reminder to all of us of just what bullies really are: they’re cowards, always picking on kids who are weaker and who can’t fight back…because bullies can’t handle people who fight back.

And so, of course, Henry and his gang of bullies lose the fight and have to retreat. A badly injured Henry threatens that he’ll kill all the Losers (page 902). We know he’ll follow up on that promise by chasing the Losers into the sewers, though the only ones who will die then are his own gang, while he himself goes insane, confesses to all the murders, and ends up in Juniper Hill Asylum.

So the chapter ends with yet another mix of good and bad: it’s bad that Mike was bullied and chased, and it’s bad that there was a fight; but it’s good that the Losers Club became the Winners Club for that day, and it’s good that the kids have found a new friend in Mike.

XIX: The Album

The rest of the adult Losers arrive in Mike’s library, and they all bring booze (page 905). We all have our ways of dealing with trauma, and isn’t the use of alcohol a common way to cope?

As we all know, Stan had his own way of dealing with trauma–escaping it through death. Mike is reminded of Stan’s suicide when he opens the library refrigerator and sees, inside it, Stan’s severed head next to Mike’s sixpack of Bud Light (page 909). Just as alcohol is an escape from trauma, so is suicide, so it’s fitting, though ghoulish, to see the two side by side.

Stan’s eyes change into those of Pennywise, who then taunts Mike. Then Mike has his own flashback…

A few days after the rockfight, Mike meets up with the other six Losers in the Barrens again. He learns that, with Ben’s guidance, they’re making an ‘underground treehouse,’ since with an actual treehouse, there’s the fear of falling out and hurting oneself (page 914).

Another good reason to have an underground treehouse is as an effective hiding spot for when Henry and his gang come along, as will indeed happen later in the story. Having this underground hideout in the Barrens, symbolic of the unconscious, will be a good safe space for the Losers in a symbolic sense, too, for here, the Losers can soothe each other’s unconscious traumas and validate each other. Mike is already feeling better with his new friends.

Indeed, the kids start talking about their scary experiences of It (page 917), and now Mike can feel safe about talking about the clown, too (page 918). He can also talk about the big bird (page 921), as well as mention some old photos his dad has in an album. The Losers are relieved to know that Mike doesn’t think they’re all crazy with their clown stories. Mike’s bird story makes Stan’s story about the Standpipe, and his shouting out the names of birds to stop the horror, feel valid.

For Mike, the presence of that giant bird in his dreams and unconscious is a shadow in his mind’s darker corners…the Shadow. (page 922).

Some time has passed since these discussions about It, at least a week, and the underground clubhouse is almost finished (page 926). Mike brings his father’s photograph album to the clubhouse. Inside the album are old pictures and clippings about Derry. He’s brought the album because he’s sure he’s seen the clown in it before, and he wants the other Losers to see It.

Since only Mike and Richie are at the clubhouse for the moment, with Ben down at work in the hole, Mike wants to wait for all the others to get there before looking at the pictures and seeing Pennywise in them. Richie is reluctant to look into any photo albums at all, since he’s had that disturbing experience with Bill looking into the photo album with Georgie’s pictures (page 928).

George’s and Mike’s photo albums are symbolic of all the traumatic memories the people of Derry have suffered–moments frozen in time, motionless photographs, yet thanks to the pain those moments inflict, the memories have lives of their own, hence the pictures move, like short films.

When Bill and Eddie have arrived, and Ben’s come out of the hole, Bill notices Mike’s album (page 936). Mike says he’ll show them all photos of the clown when Stan and Beverly arrive, making Bill and Richie nervous because of Georgie’s photos. More work is done on the hole until Stan and Bev come back.

Since the underground clubhouse, like the Barrens, sewers, and cellars, are all symbolic of the unconscious, and traumatic feelings are associated with the album photos, both working in the hole and looking in the album are symbolic of doing the inner work to make the unconscious conscious–they’re two sides of the same coin, so to speak. It’s rewarding, healing work, but it’s also scary.

Mike says that some of the pictures his dad has put in the album go back a hundred years (page 936). So having photos with Pennywise, the personification of Derry’s collective, accumulated traumas, is a representation of not only the personal Shadow of Mike’s father, but of Derry’s collective Shadow.

Mike’s dad collects this old stuff because it was there before the Hanlon family came to Derry, rather like coming into a theatre in the middle of a movie and wanting to know how it starts, according to an analogy Mike and Bill make (page 937). Of course, coming into Derry late and not knowing the town’s early years is like how all of us not only don’t know the inner workings of our personal unconscious, but also don’t know the collective unconscious–the archived, as it were, accumulation of old experiences shared by all of humanity going back to the dawn of Homo sapiens.

Mike wants to show the Losers the clown in the photo album so they can all get to the bottom of what It is and what It is trying to do to all of them…just like digging the hole in the underground clubhouse, fixing it up down there, is also the Losers’ getting to the bottom of their traumas, in a symbolic sense.

As they’re looking through the album, thumbing through the pages, Bill flips out, warning them not to touch the pages and using a fist to gesture at the album for fear of cutting up his fingers again. Everyone gets a scare from his reaction, but Richie of course understands because he was there when they were looking through George’s album (page 937).

They look at one of the first pages, which Mike thinks is from the early to mid-seventeen-hundreds (page 938). The picture is a woodcut that Mike’s father put under a protective plastic cover, which relieves Bill. It shows a juggler on a muddy street. He has a huge grin on his face, with no makeup, though Bill’s sure it’s the clown’s face.

Mike flips some more pages and finds a picture from 1856 (page 939), a colour picture, like a cartoon, showing drunks in front of a saloon. A fat politician is also seen holding a pitcher of beer. Women are seen looking at the drunks disapprovingly. A caption at the bottom says, “POLITICS IN DERRY IS THIRSTY WORK, SEZ SENATOR GARNER!” (page 940).

This image of drunks in Derry ties in with the beginning of the chapter, with the adult Losers coming into Mike’s library, all of them bringing booze. The use of alcohol to drink away one’s fears was as common a way to deal with Derry’s traumas then as it is now. It’s all about escaping the pain, rather than facing it.

The clown is seen in the picture, just as he was seen in the previous one. So many years had gone by, from around the 1750s to 1856, yet Pennywise is there, in both pictures.

Then Mike shows them a picture from 1891. The clown can be seen to the left (pages 940-941). Then they see a photograph from 1933. Pennywise is seen drinking champagne from a lady’s high-heeled shoe. The clown seems to want to encourage drinking as a way of avoiding one’s pain.

Next, a newspaper article from 1945, about the surrender of Japan. A parade celebrating the American victory is seen in the photo…with Pennywise in the background. To Bill, however, there doesn’t seem to be any victory. The matrix of dots that make up the grainy photo suddenly disappear, and the picture starts to move (page 942). He’s terrified.

He points out the supernatural occurrence to the others, and they all see it. It’s just like what Bill and Richie saw of Georgie’s pictures. Then Ben notes that there are sounds emanating from the photo: the band playing a marching tune, the cheering of the crowd in the parade, popping noises…firecrackers (page 942).

As I said above, these moments of the past may have seemed frozen in time, but trauma–as personified by Pennywise–brings them back to life, making them move and make sounds.

It’s interesting that Pennywise is appearing in photos from years when he was supposed to be dormant. In part, he’s appearing in the pictures now, in 1958, because he isn’t dormant, and he wants to scare the kids. But his appearance in photos from his dormant years also reflects how trauma resides in the unconscious and stays there, in spite of not coming out into recognizable, conscious view. He appears in the photos because unconscious material appears in consciousness, hiding in plain sight.

As the parade is seen moving away in the photo, Pennywise comes forward, climbs up a lamppost, and looks straight at the kids up close, his nose pushing against the protective plastic covering (page 944) Mike’s dad put over the pictures. I’m reminded of the fly in Bill’s unopened fortune cookie, pushing in it and making it bulge out (page 685). Those unconscious traumas are trying to come out and be known, but our protective coverings (defence mechanisms like repression, denial, projection, etc.) try to keep them inside and hidden…hence, the bulges.

Pennywise threatens to drive all the kids mad and kill them. He presents himself as the Teenage Werewolf, to give Richie a scare, as the leper, to give Eddie a scare, as the mummy, to give Ben a scare, and as the dead boys in the Standpipe, to scare Stan. We presumably would have seen more (i.e., the bloody sinkhole, Georgie, and the giant bird), but Stan, unable to bear any more, grabs the photo album and slams it shut (page 945).

Stan objects to the whole thing, saying “No” over and over again. Bill thinks his denials are more worrisome than the existence of the clown, that Pennywise wants everyone to deny Its existence, so It needn’t fear any attempts to kill It, as Bill is aiming for.

Certainly killing It is of the utmost importance, on the literal level, to save Derry from future killings, and on the symbolic level, to cure the Losers of their traumas. Bill’s personal reasons for wanting to kill It, however, seem a lot more selfish.

Bill insists on changing Stan’s nos into yeses, even shaking him as he tries to change them; and Ben, Richie, Mike, Bev, and Eddie all add their own yeses into the mix to persuade Stan, whose nos are a foreshadowing of his eventual suicide, his inability to face his traumas, what he thinks has offended him (pages 557-558), has outraged his sense of what is rational, explicable, and what can be put into words…Lacan’s undifferentiated, traumatic Real.

Stan eventually relents and says yes, to appease Bill and the others, though deep down, he still wants to say no (page 946). And though Bill would like to believe that his wish to kill It is selfless, for the sake of all the Losers and for everyone in Derry, deep down, he knows he wants to kill It as a personal vendetta against the killer of his little brother, and that he’s using his friends, even risking their lives, to help him assuage his guilt over Georgie’s death.

And these private thoughts are making Bill feel all the guiltier.

XX: The Smoke-Hole

Because of the pain in his eyes from his contact lenses, Richie has switched back to glasses (page 948). All the adult Losers in the library are continuing their alcoholic drinking (page 949), though they aren’t getting drunk.

Suddenly, the burning in Richie’s eyes gets to be too great to bear, even with glasses replacing contact lenses (page 950). He now knows what’s causing this pain. He remembers the incident, when they were all kids, and they were doing an old Native American ceremony Ben had read about, involving sitting in an enclosed, smoke-filled area and trying to endure the smoke as long as they could. Richie and Mike lasted the longest, but the smoke had hurt Richie’s eyes then, and he remembers the pain now. Memories of Derry have triggered the pain in his unconscious (pages 951-952).

The purpose of sitting in and enduring the smoke-filled, enclosed area, a smoke-hole, is to have visions. The Losers hope that a vision in the smoke will help them find a way to defeat It (pages 958-959). The kids decide to make their underground clubhouse into a smoke-hole.

Since, as I’ve said above, any underground area–the sewer, the cellars, the Losers’ clubhouse, etc.–is symbolic of the unconscious, the use of a smoke-hole to get mystical visions is an attempt, symbolically, to make conscious contact with the unconscious, what Jung would have called Active Imagination. One conjures up images from the unconscious to gain insights into psychic truth.

Now, gaining this insight can be dangerous–one can go mad without someone, outside of the foray into the unconscious, as a guide to pull one out if one goes too far inside. The kids consider having someone stay outside of the smoke-hole in case those inside, coughing and choking from the smoke, need help to get out. They want Beverly to be the one outside, because she’s a girl. She’s furious with them for their sexist, over-protective traditionalism (page 963).

Because she insists on being included, they decide instead to use matches, one of them burnt, for drawing straws (page 964). She ends up stuck with the last match, but miraculously, it isn’t burnt. It seems to be a divine sign that all seven of them are to go into the smoke-hole (page 966).

We can see, in this experience they’re about to have, a dialectical combination of good and bad, that theme I’ve said is a recurring one throughout the novel. It’s good to have the vision and gain the insight from it on how to defeat Pennywise, but it’s bad to put oneself–especially when one is just a child–through such an ordeal, one that could kill you. But any mystical experience is a kind of paradoxical meeting of the extremes of heaven and hell–like Jesus’ passion, death, harrowing of hell, resurrection, and ascension to heaven.

One by one, the kids–finding the smoke too difficult to bear–leave the smoke-hole, and Mike and Richie are the only remaining two (page 972). Again, the intensity of the smoke is unbearable–at its worst–but these two are the ones to receive the vision.

They see a world from long ago, before the dawn of man (page 977). There’s even an allusion to John 1:1, to give us a sense that this really must be the beginning of time: “(the word in the beginning was the word the world the) (page 978, King’s emphasis). Mike feels a vibration, a steady, low one, the kind of thing that makes us think of the foundation of all matter, of all creation. The vibration is growing and growing.

Richie thinks they’re about to see the coming of It (page 979). He sees a huge, electric object in the sky; he thinks it’s a spaceship, but it isn’t, even though it must have come through space to get to Earth. There are explosions. He’s convinced he’s seeing It.

The other kids pull Mike and Richie out of the smoke-hole (page 980). They ask the two boys what they saw. What’s interesting about their description of what they saw is how they describe it in evil terms, yet they don’t understand what they saw, and their descriptions imply divine things, in spite of how devilish they think it all was.

It was the beginning of time, yet Mike says it was “like the end of the world” (page 985). Richie thinks he saw It come (page 984), but the “spaceship,” in spite of his denial that it was God, was “like the Ark of the Covenant…that was supposed to have the Spirit of God inside…” (page 985).

In other words, the Turtle, as I see it. Those explosions must have been the Turtle vomiting out the universe.

Part V is coming soon.

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

Analysis of ‘It,’ Part I

I: Introduction

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

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

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

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

II: General Thoughts

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

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

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

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

III: After the Flood (1957)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV: After the Festival (1984)

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

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

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

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

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

V: Six Phone Calls (1985)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part II is coming soon.

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

Trust Is Like the Soul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘The Brood’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Child’s Play’

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

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

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Un Homme Qui Dort’

Un homme qui dort (“The Man Who Sleeps,” or “A Man Asleep”) is a 1974 French film directed by Bernard Queysanne and Georges Perec, based on Perec’s story of the same name. It stars Jacques Spiesser.

The film’s script is taken completely from the text of Perec’s prose, though in a condensed form. The text is in the second person singular, as though the narrator (recited by Ludmila Mikaël in the original French, and by Shelley Duvall in English translation) were speaking to Spiesser’s character.

The black-and-white film was almost lost, but it was restored on DVD in 2007. It received some critical acclaim, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1974.

Here is a link to quotes from the film in English translation, here is a link to an English translation of Perec’s story (or is it the script for the film?), and here is a link to the film with English subtitles. Here is a link to the English language version.

A twenty-five-year-old Parisian university student (Spiesser), whose name is not given (thus making him a kind of everyman), lives in a one-room chambre de bonne. His feelings of alienation have risen to such a pitch that he no longer wishes to participate in social life. “…you discover, without surprise, that something is wrong, that you don’t know how to live and that you never will know.”

The notion that he is “a man asleep” is metaphorical. Actually, he wanders the streets of Paris instead of going to school and hanging out with friends. He’s living the life of an automaton, devoid of human interaction; it’s an attempt at indifference as a way of alleviating suffering. Self-isolation, he hopes, is a way to nirvana.

He’s as passive as can practically be achieved: “…it’s not action at all, but an absence of action…”

He imagines that someone else, his twin, his double, will get out of bed, wash, shave, dress, go out, and attend school for him. This idea of a double is significant, for it is expressed in other forms: the narrator, addressing him as “you,” is the rambling of his own thoughts in a kind of unwritten diary; also, there’s his cracked, Lacanian mirror, the specular image of which he is alienated from, too.

Finally, there’s the reproduction of René Magritte‘s 1937 surrealist painting, La reproduction interdite, showing a man standing in front of a mirror, his back to us and facing it; but instead of seeing the man’s face reflected back to us, we see the back of his head just as we do of the actual man in front of the mirror. About fifteen minutes into the film, when the student has gone into a theatre to see a movie, we see a surreal variation of this picture, but it’s the student, and the images show him repeatedly facing away from his ‘reflection.’ More self-alienation.

All of these doublings of himself indicate his having left the social and cultural world of the Symbolic Order in order to regress into the narcissistic, dyadic world of the Imaginary. In time, the horrors of the Real will jolt him out of his isolation, and force him to reintegrate into the Symbolic.

It’s also significant that the movie is in black-and-white, when colour film was easily available, and when, by the early 70s, virtually all movies were in colour. I see the choice of black-and-white to be symbolic of black-and-white thinking, or psychological splitting, part of the cause of this young man’s psychological problems.

According to Melanie Klein, the paranoid-schizoid position causes us to split people into being perceived as all-good or all-bad, the bad ones being projected outward and split off from us. This is what the student is doing, though he seems to feel that virtually all elements of society are bad, so he splits them off, including his internal objects of them, and projects them outward, imagining himself to be safe without them.

But of course, he won’t be safe without them, because the internal objects are a part of himself; hence, towards the end of the film, when the tension is raised and he realizes he can’t just cut himself off from the world, we see the black-and-white film in negative images.

Still, for the time being, anyway, he feels a sense of peace and bliss from no longer engaging with the world. Wouldn’t we all love to break away like this?! To give up on all responsibilities, to let Freud‘s death drive kick in, and be at rest, no longer suffering with the rest of the world.

Pleasure, for Freud, consists in the relaxation of tension, which in the form of death, is the ultimate relaxation of it; hence, the death drive as being merely the other side of the same coin as that of the libido, part of Eros. We sense that the young student is aiming for just such a relaxation of tension, though, like Hamlet, he’s too chicken to go through with suicide.

So life as a passive, indifferent automaton seems a reasonable compromise. Indifference, in this regard, is like that of the Buddhist avoiding gratification of desire, or attachment to the world…but without the Buddhist’s hard discipline, of course. The non-existence of nirvana, no-thing-ness, the escape from existence as pain, dukkha, is the death-paradise the student seeks.

We’re reminded of Hamlet’s soliloquy:

“…to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” (III, i)

It is in this sense that we should understand the young student to be “the man who sleeps.”

Recall that the narrator, his anima mirror-double, says, “You have no desire to carry on […] the fleeting and poignant desire to hear no more, to see no more, to remain silent and motionless. Crazy dreams of solitude.”

At one point, in the middle of this solitude, he imagines he has reached this point of nirvana, for the narrator says the following to him:

“As the hours, the days, the weeks, the seasons slip by, you detach yourself from everything.
You discover, with something that sometimes almost resembles exhilaration, that you are free, that nothing is weighing you down, nothing pleases or displeases you.
You find, in this life exempt from wear and tear and with no thrill in it other than these suspended moments, an almost perfect happiness, fascinating, occasionally swollen by new emotions.
You are living in a blessed parenthesis, in a vacuum full of promise, and from which you expect nothing.
You are invisible, limpid, transparent.
You no longer exist…”

His friends have stopped over to say hello, but he ignores the knocking on his door and the paper messages slipped under it. He wants no contact with others, for he has come to understand that hell is other people; he doesn’t want to bear their judgemental gaze…yet the narrator, his internalized Other, addressing him with a judgemental “you,” ensures that he will never escape the hell of judgemental others. Therefore, there is no exit for him, not even in indifferent solitude.

(We hear, almost an hour into the film, “Il n’y a pas d’issue,” that is, “There is no way out,” or “There is no exit”; now, Sartre‘s play is named Huis clos–“Closed Door”–in the original French, but English translations of the play with titles like No Way Out and No Exit would have been well known by the time Perec began writing his story. Besides, the student, when in his chambre de bonne, typically has his door closed, anyway.)

When we see him wandering the streets of Paris, we usually see few if any other people there. This can be seen in the middle of the day, when the streets presumably would be far busier: could he be dreaming during these moments, experiencing wish-fulfillment?

Alone, in his chambre, he smokes, drinks Nescafé, looks up at the cracks on his ceiling (easily associated with the cracks in his mirror, all symbols of his fragmented self), and plays a game of cards similar to solitaire. This escape from the social world, into one of solitary play and contemplation, is not too far removed from the maladaptive daydreaming of traumatized people, or the self-isolation of sufferers of stress from Adverse Childhood Experiences.

His room–small, hot, claustrophobic, and with those cracks in the ceiling and on the mirror–is nonetheless “the centre of the world” for him. The room thus in many ways represents himself: fragmented, narcissistic, a place to hide himself in sleep, and a place to escape from when he can no longer stand himself. He’s as passive as that dripping tap, or those six socks soaking in the pink plastic bowl–sharks as indolent as he is.

With his loss of interest in social life comes also his loss of interest in time, whose passing he barely notices. Similarly, when during his wandering of the Parisian streets, two twin boys in identical clothes are running past him from behind while rattling a ruler against the palings of a fence he’s walking beside, he isn’t at all irritated by the noise. The boys’ duality parallels his duality as against his alienated self, his image in the mirror, the man twice seen in the Magritte picture with his back to us, his imaginary double replacing him in going about his normal daily routine, and his anima narrator…except that the boys are, in their energetic, enthusiastic participation in life, his dialectical opposite–what he still could be if he weren’t so alienated from everything and everyone.

In the Luxembourg Garden, he watches the pensioners playing cards, comparable to his own playing of his solitaire-esque game in his room. Such a comparison suggests a unity of self and other vis-à-vis him and the pensioners…also a dialectical unity between the elderly and his young self.

In a development of this theme of self and other, young vs. old, we see him watching an old man sitting on a bench staring into space “for hours on end,” as if mummified, “gazing into emptiness.” The young man, admiring the elder, would like to know his secrets, for the latter seems to have attained the ideal of detached indifference for which the former has been striving. (One is reminded of Prince Siddhartha seeing a holy man, and thus being inspired to find enlightenment himself.) He looks at the old man as if staring into a mirror, gazing at his ideal-I…so much better than his reflection in his cracked mirror in his room.

At one point, while reading the business news in Le Monde, he imagines himself to be some important businessman or politician smoking a cigar and getting out of a car. Ending the narcissistic fantasy of him identifying himself with important men, he is seen as his ordinary self, playing pinball.

When playing his solitaire-like card game, he removes the aces, so he has no ‘ace in the hole,’ or ‘ace up his sleeve.’ Accordingly, he rarely succeeds at the game, yet winning doesn’t matter to him, for what would winning mean to him, anyway? The card game, after all, is like life: if he’s indifferent to life, why would he care any more about winning at some card game? He goes through the motions like an automaton, all meaninglessly, just as he does through life.

We’ve noticed, by now, that he’s been biting his nails.

As I mentioned above, he reaches a point when his ‘mastery,’ as it were, of the indifferent life has allowed him to attain a kind of bliss. He seems as indifferent as the dripping tap, as the six socks soaking in the plastic pink bowl, as a fly, as a tree, as a rat.

He speaks no more than is absolutely necessary: in this disengagement with language, and therefore with society, he is leaving the Symbolic. “Indifference dissolves language and scrambles the signs.” Though he’d seem to be blissfully regressing to the narcissism of the Imaginary, before long, he’ll experience the trauma of the undifferentiated Real.

In this sense of non-differentiation, he finds himself with a series of choices of ‘you do, or you don’t do.’ These include:

You walk or you do not walk.
You sleep or you do not sleep.
You buy Le Monde or you do not buy it.
You eat or you do not eat.

A little later, the narrator says, “You play pinball or you don’t.” All of these ‘do or not do’ expressions remind us of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Just as Hamlet suffered from an inability to act, whether in killing his uncle Claudius or in killing himself, so does the young Parisian student feel incapable of acting, hence his automaton-like passivity and indifference. Still, in the end, like Hamlet, he must act.

Tense music can be heard playing in the background, suggesting that he is reaching the limit of how long he can continue to live the ‘indifferent’ life. Though I mentioned above the black-and-white film as representing his black-and-white psychological splitting, there’s also the preponderance of grey, for he is “a grey man with no connotation of dullness.” Indeed, his life has grown so dull that he’s forgotten what excitement is.

In his narcissism, in his imagined mastery of the indifferent life, he fancies himself “the nameless master of the world.” Buddha-like, he has seen that motionless old man the way Prince Siddhartha saw the impressive holy man (after having seen the old, sick, and dead men, as you’ll recall from his legendary life story), and now he imagines he has attained enlightenment. “All you are is all you know.” Total, narcissistic solipsism…nirvana? I think not.

So in his ‘mastery’ of the indifferent, he’s “inaccessible, like a tree, like a shop window, like a rat.” We again see a shot of him watching the motionless old man, as if he were looking in a mirror at his ideal-I, or like the Buddha seeing the holy man. We see a shot of that indifferent dripping tap, too, as well as shots of a walkway with trees, benches, and fences on either side, yet devoid of any people…the misanthropic young man’s ideal world.

But he soon comes to realize all of the ways that he is not at all like the ‘enlightened’ and ‘indifferent’ rat; for rats don’t have sleepless nights, they don’t bite their fingernails, they don’t wake up bathed in sweat, they don’t dream, against which the young man has no protection.

We come back to Hamlet: “to sleep, perchance to dream.”

Just as Hamlet couldn’t use the “sleep of death” as an escape from his problems, for he’d then have the nightmare of hell to deal with after having committed the sin of suicide, so can’t this young student use the sleep of indifference as an escape from his alienating world, for his nightmares are the return of repressed pain that he’ll never be able to project onto the world and be rid of.

Such an understanding “makes us rather bear those ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of”.

To get back to the biting of his fingernails, we learn that he bites them so violently that they bleed and are in unbearable pain. This violent biting is an example of his excessive attempts at splitting off and projecting those ‘black’ parts of himself that he doesn’t accept. The biting represents his alienation from himself, his refusal to integrate his Shadow.

Rats don’t play pinball, either, and when he plays, for hours on end, he’s in a rage…hardly indifferent. No, he isn’t much of a Buddha. But like Hamlet, he “can play or not play.” He can’t start up a conversation with the pinball machine, though, and this incidentally would seem to be his reason for preferring pinball to people. At the same time, a pinball machine cannot give him the human response, the love, that he so obviously needs.

It is in this very retreat from human company, replacing it with things that will never satisfy, that we can all relate to the young man; for don’t we all, in our own way, attempt a sleep of indifference to the world?

The narrator says repeatedly that he drifts around the streets, an odd behaviour for someone who has supposedly ‘found the answer’ to his problems. He goes back to his room and tries to go to sleep, but he can’t; instead, he would “calmly measure the sticky extent of [his] unhappiness,” and he goes out again and wanders the streets at night.

It is around this point that we start noticing a switch to negative film, back and forth between this and regular black-and-white film. We also hear the first of a series of references to “monstrous” things, or to “monsters”–in this case, “the monstrous factory gates.” We also hear of “impatient crowds,” which I believe are the “monsters” he’s been trying so hard to rid himself of.

Now, unhappiness hasn’t come to him all of a sudden: it’s gradually appeared to him, as if without his knowing until it was fully formed. Unhappiness has been in the cracks on his ceiling, and on his mirror, in the dripping tap, in those things in which he saw blissful indifference. All of his wandering has been meaningless.

As we see him biting his fingernails again, there’s a rapping, percussive sound in the background, reinforcing the sense of his agitation. He keeps playing his absurd card game, having removed the aces, but it offers no way out of his malaise…the same as with his wandering.

By now, an hour into the film, the narrator is speaking faster, with more urgency in her voice. We see negative film again, with crowds of people on the street. That rapping noise is still being heard. “The monsters have come into your life,” the narrator says, “the rats, your fellow creatures, your brothers. The monsters in their tens, their hundreds, their thousands.” These crowds of people are the ones he’s been trying to get away from…but can’t. This is also one of the first references to “rats” that is negative…interesting that this is happening now.

As we see more of the negative film, we hear the narrator say, “You follow their shadows [i.e., those of the “monsters,” the crowds of people], you are their shadow [i.e., you are the very thing you see in them that you won’t accept].” As the rapping sound continues, we also hear the narrator speaking faster, and we hear a dissonant chord played on a keyboard.

We see more shots of crowds of people walking on the streets, we hear more rapping, and the dissonant keyboard chord. Images of condemned, torn-down buildings, too. More references to “monsters,” all those people he hates. The juxtaposition of all these jarring images, sounds, and words is, of course, deliberate. The narrator’s voice is getting more and more agitated. The film alternates between normal black and white and negative film during this climactic moment.

The narrator mentions “…all the others who are even worse, the smug, the smart-Alecs, the self-satisfied…” These people seem suspiciously like projections of himself as the would-be indifferent Buddha. Again, he’s trying to split off and throw away what it is inside himself that he doesn’t like–the Shadow he needs to integrate.

After more repetitions of “monster,” the wanderer in his ongoing bitter meditation starts tossing around the word “sad” through his narrator mouthpiece: “sad city, sad lights in the sad streets, sad clowns in sad music-halls, sad queues outside the sad cinemas, sad furniture in the sad stores.”

His heavenly bliss of indifference has become the hell of a most non-gay Paris.

He feels like a prisoner in his cell, like a rat trying to escape its maze. Again, how odd it is that only now is a rat being used as a simile for something negative. He’s starting to realize that his retreat from the world has never been anything good.

The narrator has finally calmed down. Among the shots of rubble, we see a surrealist image of a sink standing alone; instead of containing water, though, we see a flame on it. Should we interpret this rubble of torn-down buildings, and his flaming sink, as representative of his chambre de bonne, in turn representative of himself, torn apart, fragmented, burning, in a psychotic break with reality, in the traumatic agony of Lacan’s Real Order?

“You are afraid,” the narrator says as he looks at all of the rubble, the home he meant to return to. We see a shot of his cracked mirror again, in between the shots of him looking at the rubble. He runs away, another attempt to run away from himself and his problems. We see the burning sink collapse.

Next is a shot of him calmly walking down a street between parked cars. He is calm, and it seems that he has come to accept the necessity of returning to a life in the real world. We hear an eerie tune played on an organ: a repetition of D to G on the right hand (and variations thereof), a descent in the bass from G to F, then to E-flat and to D-flat. A female voice accompanies the organ by singing a high G.

The young man is no wiser from his detachment from the world. “Indifference has not made you any different.” The nirvana of indifference has led back to the samsara of involvement with the world. Still, he won’t be judged for his failed experiment, for he has done nothing wrong. “No, [he is] not the nameless master of the world.” He’s no Buddha. He is afraid, waiting for the rain to stop…as we all are.

The film ends with the same shot of the buildings of the city that we saw at the beginning. The film has come full circle; he’s back where he began. He’s woken up from his metaphorical sleep, ready to go back into the world with the rest of us. We must all wake from our sleep of death, of indifference, and be involved in life again.

The Highly Sensitive Person

In previous posts, I’ve discussed how I suffered emotional abuse at the hands of a family whose members have had, in varying degrees, narcissistic traits of at least significant, if not pathological, levels. Because of my trauma, I as a child acquired a number of dysfunctional habits, including maladaptive daydreaming.

Instead of feeling empathy for me, and using such empathy to direct and motivate her towards getting to the root cause of my problems, my mother–the head narc of the family–claimed that psychiatrists who’d examined me diagnosed me with autism. Now, she’d described this “autism” in such extreme language that I find totally implausible. She claimed that the psychiatrists who’d examined me as a little kid had said I was, apart from being autistic, mentally retarded and that I should be locked up in an asylum, throwing away the key!…and by a “miracle from God,” I grew out of this extreme mental condition!

Combining the above with observations made by two psychiatrists I saw a few decades later, each of them concluding after examining me over a period of months that there were no signs of autism in me, and with far-too-low scores I got on the “Autism Quotient” test, I can say that my mother’s version of events were, to say the least, totally unreliable. To say the most, she was outright lying to me.

That she was lying to me I find to be the only logical explanation for her claims; the purpose of the lies was, as I see it, not only to project her own narcissism onto me (she tended to go by an old definition of autism as meaning ‘excessively self-absorbed,’ like narcissism), but also to avoid taking responsibility for the effects of the childhood bullying I’d suffered, at its core, from my elder siblings, against whom I, as a little boy, was helpless in a power imbalance.

In other words, the autism label was meant to indicate that I was ‘born that way,’ rather than correctly describing my maladaptive childhood habits (self-isolation, talking to myself, etc.) as trauma responses, as attempts to self-soothe and ease my anxieties. In point of fact, my real mental condition is C-PTSD, brought on by all that emotional abuse, bullying, belittling, and gaslighting.

Now, as true and valid as all of the above is, it doesn’t mean that I can’t locate any source of these dysfunctional behaviours as my having been ‘born that way.’ I’m convinced that there’s a particular, innate psychological condition that I have that’s contributed to these problems of mine in a significant way.

I am a highly-sensitive person (HSP).

I consistently get high scores on HSP tests. HSPs react more intensely to external stimuli, including discomfort and pain, than the average person. We’re also more empathic that most people (though being an empath and an HSP aren’t necessarily the same thing); we tend to internalize what’s around us more, including criticisms. Bullies can smell such traits in HSP children, and they’re quick to take advantage of our disadvantage.

Narcissistic mothers tend to make their sons and daughters play roles: the golden child (my elder sister, J.), the lost child (arguably, my elder brothers, R. and F.), and the scapegoat, or identified patient—me. The narc mom chooses her golden children and other flying monkeys (all three of my sibs) based on how well they’ve learned to please her, or to give her narcissistic supply. She chooses her scapegoat based on how much narcissistic injury and rage the kid(s) cause(s) her.

Very often, that narcissistic injury and rage are caused not so much by how blunt or sassy the child is to her, but rather by that child’s display of qualities the narc mother knows she can only fake: sensitivity, empathy, and a sincere wish to confront and do away with wrongdoing, which includes phony displays of virtue…a narc’s special talent.

You see, the thing about the scapegoat, or identified patient, or black sheep–whatever you want to call the unfavoured family member–is that this person is the one who can see through all the family bullshit. He or she has the sensitivity to be able to tell the difference between real and fake love. For if the charade of love that is performed before our eyes is real, then why do we scapegoats get so short-changed?

It’s not as though we have a monopoly on human fault: the golden and lost children have plenty of faults of their own; but a double standard is clearly at play here–the flying monkeys’ faults are usually swept under the rug, as are the narcissistic parent’s faults, while those of the scapegoat are put under a magnifying glass. Not exactly fair, is it?

I’m not denying that I have faults; I have a whole slew of them (just ask my wife). The problem is that the family treated my faults as if they were the essence of who I am, rather than something that I have, just a few facets of the totality that I am, among other facets raging from neutral to quite good. And when you focus on the negative in somebody, you bring out that negativity all the more.

The scar to the narcissist’s ego, at the sight of the empathy and sensitivity of the target of his or her rage, comes from envy. The narcissist can’t bear to see another with virtues that he or she can only pretend to have, and narcissists are known for envying others, while imagining that others envy them (i.e., this envy is projected onto others). Hence, the narcissist feels a consuming need to destroy those virtues in the target, to create the illusion among everybody that the sensitive person’s empathy doesn’t exist.

Remember that in the narcissist’s world, appearance and reality are confused, swapped, even. So if the narc can make him- or herself look kind, generous, thoughtful, and altruistic to the public, while making the HSP seem self-centered and indifferent to the suffering of others, then he or she has come as close to reality as needed. One of the crucial manipulative tactics that the narc uses is projective identification, which goes beyond usual projection’s mere imagining that one’s own traits are in others, but which manipulates others into manifesting those projected traits, creating the illusion that the others really have those traits while the narc never had them at all.

I believe that my mother, with her flying monkeys’ help, did this kind of projecting onto me…and she did it with remarkable success! Any inclination in me to want to help others, or to connect with others, was crushed in me, suppressed, denied, and discouraged. To allow me to demonstrate such inclinations would make me step out of my assigned role as family scapegoat; I’d no longer seem “autistic,” and Mom couldn’t tolerate that!

When someone believes that he or she has this or that kind of personality, he or she will behave accordingly. To ensure that I behaved in a self-centered or uncaring way, Mom had to drill into my head the belief that I have such vices. So instead of telling me that I needed to change from my selfish ways, she just said that I am selfish…as if the vice were an absolute, unchanging trait in me, never to be corrected.

If I tried to do good, the family would twist things around so it would look as if I meant to do wrong. I’ll give a few examples, stories I’ve discussed before (links above), but I’m repeating them here to illustrate this point.

Over thirty years ago, it was my mother’s birthday, and I was having difficulty finding a suitable gift to buy for her, so I was late with it. My good intentions would have been clear to her and my sister, J. (I’d spoken to them of how I’d searched all over the city, with no luck), but J. decided to act as though I’d made no such efforts. After all, only the physical appearance of a gift matters, not the thought behind it. And besides, J. had to demonstrate as the golden child that, by having given Mom a gift on time, unlike me, the scapegoat, she was a better daughter than I was a son.

I gave Mom a birthday card, which she received warmly. I was anxious to buy her a gift as soon as possible, so as to avoid being late with it (it was her birthday that very day!). J., however, decided to interpret my intentions as me just wanting to get the buying over with, so I could enjoy the rest of Mom’s birthday as a “me-day,” to use J’s words (actually, since J. had already given Mom a gift, she was now free to get together for a dinner date with a woman-friend, to have a “me-day” of her own!).

I went to J. and joked about the card I bought Mom as a kind of “down payment” on her gift, since Mom warmly said she didn’t mind the gift being a little late. But J. got all snooty with me for being late with it, and this provoked me into getting into a fight with her. In response to J.’s ‘Thou shalt not be late for Mom’s birthday’ attitude, I inadvisably said, in all sarcasm, “…and a birthday is this god we have to worship!”

I meant this remark not out of disrespect to Mom, but to point out how needless J.’s insistence on standing on ceremony was. Nonetheless, Mom, overhearing what I’d said, took my words as disrespectful, and she blew up, shouting a barrage of four-letter verbal abuse at me. I immediately realized my verbal faux pas, and fell over myself trying to apologize, saying I never meant to hurt her…to no avail, of course.

Looking back on what happened, I have the creepiest suspicion that both Mom and J. had set me up to be the scapegoat for a forgetting of the birthday that, in fact, Dad and my brother, F., had actually forgotten. You see, J. had known that I was trying to find a suitable gift, since I’d asked her a night or two before Mom’s birthday what I should buy. J. knew I’d never forgotten, but she acted as if she thought I had.

And how could Mom have gone from a whisper to a scream like that, from so warm to so psychotic–so quickly? I suspect that Mom, in a private conversation with J. prior to the incident, lied to her about me ‘forgetting’ along with Dad and F.; and J., like a good flying monkey, just went along with the charade, because Mom wanted her to do so.

Another occasion when my good intentions were twisted into bad ones was when–again, about thirty to thirty-five years ago–all the staff of my parents’ restaurant, Smitty’s Pancake House, closed it up on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon (Mom and Dad were on vacation at the time) because some fumes…or something, I don’t quite remember now…were making the cooks too sick to work. F. came home that day and asked me why Smitty’s was closed. I simply explained what happened, matter-of-factly.

Apparently, I should have answered his question with all manner of histrionics, for F. told me that the way I’d answered his question sounded as if I didn’t care about the sick staff. His claiming that I don’t care about anyone but myself had been his favourite excuse to bully and harangue me at that time (i.e., over those past several years), and the fact that it was much more of an excuse to attack me than a legitimate complaint of my faults was made nakedly clear (not that he’d have ever noticed, let alone admitted to, it) in this choosing to hear my reaction as ‘uncaring,’ as opposed to my simply answering a question.

Since when did my answer even need to be ‘caring,’ anyway? Was my ‘caring’ going to help the staff recover faster, or something? F.’s constant bullying of me when I was a little kid, with virtually never any defence of me from the rest of the family (with only a few ever-so-rare exceptions from my parents), indicates that the family rarely cared about me in any meaningful way beyond the bare minimum (i.e., feeding me, clothing me, giving me shelter). Such a lack of caring is called childhood emotional neglect; this, combined with the emotional abuse I was suffering from all five of them, taught me that the world is an unsafe place, that hell is other people (I’m misusing Sartre‘s dictum on purpose here, though his original meaning applies to my situation, too), and that self-isolation was the only way I could feel safe.

…and if I was uncared for, then the family shouldn’t have been surprised to see me return that uncaring attitude to them.

Even still, I tried at times to be caring to them, even when they’d continued to hurt me. After J. made it clear to me that she didn’t approve of my marrying the truly caring person who is now my wife (indeed, Judy is the best thing that ever happened to me), I’d been loath to forgive J. for not keeping her disapproval to herself. Nonetheless, when I heard that J.’s husband was terminally ill with cancer, I allowed my ability to feel empathy and compassion to overrule my anger.

I offered to make a flight back to southern Ontario (I’ve lived in East Asia since the summer of 1996) to see J. and her husband one last time. Had I done it, paying for the trip would have broken the bank for me, but I was still willing to do it. This was in the mid-2000s.

The family should have been encouraging of me to do this selfless act…if selflessness is really what they wanted of me. Instead, Mom e-mailed me, telling me not to come, out of fear that my “tactless and insensitive” nature would have resulted in me putting my foot in my mouth in front of J.’s then-emotionally-vulnerable husband, agitating him.

I was furious at this rejection; yet, instead of simply admitting that she’d made a bad call, Mom continued to rationalize her arrogant position with the usual references to “my autism” (or Asperger syndrome, as she now liked to call it), all to make me feel further alienated from the family. Note how neither she nor the rest of the family ever considered, let alone took any responsibility for, causing the very alienation that has made me so cold to them ever since.

And since, as I explained above, the autism story had to have been a lie, Mom’s basis for rejecting my attempt to show solidarity with the family was also built on a lie. Another thing we must remember about narcissists and their relationship with the HSP as family scapegoat: since narcs are pathological liars, they will be paranoid of anyone exposing them as such. HSPs abominate liars, so narcs know that, in order to protect themselves, they must do a kind of preemptive discrediting of the HSP.

I’m convinced that my mother did exactly this to me behind my back, and that this discrediting, in the form of smear campaigns, triangulation, and divide and conquer, is the real reason that I, as the family scapegoat, never got along with Mom’s flying monkeys, my three elder siblings.

Her constant bad-mouthing of her youngest nephew, my cousin G., is what makes me believe she did the same to me. One time, during a phone call I had with her about a dozen years ago, when she was giving me a flurry of G-bashing, she raised her voice in an angry crescendo and claimed that G. must have had Asperger syndrome…exactly what she insisted I have. This disorder was meant to explain how G. is so ‘unlikeable’ (he’s a bit awkward, to be sure, but he’s nowhere near as bad as Mom characterized him). It’s not a leap of logic to assume that she was using “my autism” to tell the family that I’m similarly unlikeable.

As her health was deteriorating in the mid-2010s, she pulled more of her malignant, manipulative crap on me, in revenge–it’s safe to assume–on me for not ever wanting to communicate with her during the first half of that decade. (The above links give the full story, if you’re interested, Dear Reader.) I’ll try to make this brief.

In a series of emails and one phone call, Mom made a number of assertions that ranged from “Why should I believe a word of this?” to “That is most unlikely,” to “That couldn’t possibly have happened,” making all of it dubious in the extreme. And this was after I’d already established an understanding of her as a habitual liar, and not just about the “autism” story.

I told her so, most bluntly in an email explaining why I didn’t want to fly over to Canada to visit her. Predictably, she pretended not to know what I was talking about when I’d accused her of “Lies, lies, and more lies” in my email. Predictably, she made me out to be the villain and herself out to be the innocent victim when discussing my email to the family, who–predictably–believed her every word without question.

Well, of course the family believed her every word without question: they’d been conditioned to for years…decades!…to discredit any observation I made about anything that didn’t jive with their preconceptions about the world. Mom had preemptively discredited me, so my accusation of her lying wouldn’t be given a millisecond of consideration by them. Mom may have been dying, but her reputation was safe.

With her death, in the spring of 2016, the hope of a confession from her similarly died. Her last words to me, spoken on her death bed over the phone to me, were all about how my accusation “hurt” her (translation: caused her narcissistic injury–note how she was permitted to refuse a visit from me, but I wasn’t permitted to refuse visiting her), none about how the truth and validity of what I accused her of had hurt me. She didn’t even try to be fair, and acknowledge that there were many times in my life that she’d hurt me, and that she was sorry for that; instead, I got a pity party about how much of a bad son I was, and to add insult to injury, she congratulated herself on what a ‘good mother’ she’d been, apparently having given me “the most love,” of my siblings and me…during those very years (just before and around my pre-teen years) when she’d contrived the autism lie!

In short, she dumped a huge guilt trip on me while pretending she’d never done me any wrong–classic narcissism. Here’s the thing: if I’m so ‘uncaring’ of other people, why dump all this grief on me? It would make no difference to me–I’d just shrug it off, easily, wouldn’t I? The fact is, the family all know that I internalize all the abuse they ram down my throat–they know I feel the pain. The whole purpose of dumping that guilt on me is to manipulate me into doing what they want me to do, to control me…or at least to try to control me.

I feel so hollow now, so empty, the shell of what I once was, or could have been. Such is what narcissistic abuse does to victims: the vice of narcissism is projected onto the victim, who is fully misunderstood. We are made to live a lie of the narcissist’s making. It’s a terrible feeling, knowing your family doesn’t truly love you, that their ‘love’ was all an act, to make themselves look good publicly, or just family obligation.

Still, I can’t go on just feeling sorry for myself. The damage has been done, but there’s no one out there to do the repairing for me, so I’ll have to do it all myself (I don’t have the money for therapy.). I’ll have to find that sweet, sensitive little boy inside me, buried deep down under all of this pain.

Since I follow the Freudian (actually, post-Freudian) school of psychoanalysis, I don’t usually go in for Jung‘s ideas, but there is one of his that I’ve recently been interested in: his notion of the Shadow. As a result, I’ve been looking into what’s called Shadow work as a form of therapy to confront all this repressed trauma and self-hate, and therefore to heal me.

Since I assume, Dear Reader, that you’re reading this blog post as part of an exploration of the problem of narcissism to heal your own emotional wounds, then I hope that what I have to say here about Shadow work will help you find resources in your own healing journey.

There are so many different ways to describe what Shadow work is, and how to do it, that space doesn’t permit me to go over it all in encyclopedic fashion, but I can give you a basic idea of what it’s about, if you aren’t yet familiar with the concept.

According to Jung, we all have a Shadow aspect to our personalities, a dark, unpleasant side that we try to hide because it includes shameful and traumatic elements. We try to repress it, but we mustn’t; for after all, what is repressed returns to consciousness, though in an unrecognizable form…and this return of the repressed can come in quite nasty, regrettable ways. This repressed, ego-dystonic material must be confronted if we are to heal–Shadow work is this confrontation.

There are many ways to do Shadow work. The most common ways include journalling every day, putting our trauma into words. Other ways can include expressing your pain through art or music. Meditation is also helpful, including EMDR therapy…and there are lots of YouTube videos on these subjects. One of the websites I added a link to above recommend having a ‘dialogue’ with one’s Shadow: asking it questions and listening for answers in a contemplative silence. What’s most important is feeling that pain again (though not overwhelmingly so, of course!), as scary as that sounds, for the only way to heal is to process the trauma properly.

If you don’t feel that pain, you’ll try to repress it or project it, as my family did onto me. I’ve already explained the catastrophic results of that.