Tag: psycho

Analysis of ‘Se7en’

Se7en is a 1995 neo-noir thriller written by Andrew Kevin Walker and directed by David Fincher. It stars Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, Kevin Spacey, and Gwyneth Paltrow, with R. Lee Ermey, John C. McGinley, and Richard Roundtree.

A serial killer known only as “John Doe” (Spacey) targets his victims based on each of them being guilty of committing one of the seven deadly sins; and two detectives, Lieutenant William Somerset (Freeman) and David Mills (Pitt), must track Doe down before he completes his grisly sermon, to teach people not to trivialize the deadly sins.

Here are some quotes:

[first lines]

Detective Taylor: Neighbors heard them screaming at each other, like for two hours, and it was nothing new. Then they heard the gun go off, both barrels. Crime of passion.

William Somerset: Yeah, just look at all the passion on that wall.

*********

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves a homicide.” –Mills, of the ‘Gluttony’ victim

“Long is the way, /And hard, that out of hell leads up to light.” —John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II, Lines 432-33.

“Fuckin’ Dante… poetry-writing faggot! Piece of shit, motherfucker!” –Mills, banging a book in frustration

“‘One pound of flesh; no more, no less. No cartilage, no bone, but only flesh.’ Merchant of Venice.” –Somerset, of the ‘Greed’ victim

“He’s experienced about as much pain and suffering as anyone I’ve encountered, give or take…and he still has hell to look forward to.” Dr. Beardsley, of the ‘Sloth’ victim

*********

Somerset: Victor’s landlord said there was an envelope of cash in the office mailbox the first of every month. Quote: “I never heard a single complaint from the tenant in apartment 306, and nobody ever complained about him. He’s the best tenant I’ve ever had.” End quote.

Mills: Yeah, a landlord’s dream: a paralyzed tenant with no tongue.

Somerset: Who pays the rent on time.

*********

“It’s dismissive to call him a lunatic. Don’t make that mistake.” –Somerset, to Mills

*********

[Mills and Somerset are reading through the FBI results] Mills: Modern Homicide Investigation, In Cold Blood, Of Human Bondage … bondage?

Somerset: Not what you think it is.

Mills: Okay. The Marquis de-Shaday …

Somerset: It’s the Marquis de Sade.

Mills: Whatever. The Writings of Saint Thomas Aqua-something.

Somerset: Saint Thomas Aquinas? There it is. He wrote about the seven deadly sins. Is that it?

Mills: Yeah.

*********

Somerset: We must forget our emotion. We must focus on the details.

Mills: I feed off my emotions. How’s that?

*********

“It’s impressive to see a man feed off his emotions.” –Somerset (annoyed), of Mills

“What sick ridiculous puppets we are / and what a gross little stage we dance on / What fun we have dancing and fucking / Not a care in the world / Not knowing that we are nothing / We are not what was intended.” –Somerset, reading from one of John Doe’s journals

“On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about the weather and other things. I tried to be pleasant and accommodating, but my head hurt from his banality. I almost didn’t notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn’t stop laughing.” –Somerset, reading from one of Doe’s journals

“I admire you. I don’t know how you found me, but imagine my surprise. I respect you law enforcement agents more every day.” –Doe, to Mills on the phone

“Get this thing off of me! Get this thing off of me!…He – he put that thing on me…! He made me wear it!…He told me to fuck her, and…and I did! I fucked her! He had a gun in my mouth! The fucking gun was in my throat! FUCK! Oh God, oh God…please help me. Help me. Please help me.” –Crazed Man in Massage Parlour, wearing a strap-on with a blade, which Doe had made for him

***********

Mills: You know, see, you bitch and you complain and you tell me these things – if you think you’re preparing me for hard times, thank you, but…

Somerset: But you got to be a hero? You want to be a champion. Well, let me tell you, people don’t want a champion. They wanna eat cheeseburgers, play the lotto and watch television.

Mills: Hey, how did you get like this? I wanna know.

Somerset: Well. [sighs] It wasn’t one thing, I can tell you that.

Mills: Go on.

Somerset: I just don’t think I can continue to live in a place that embraces and nurtures apathy as if it was a virtue!

Mills: You’re no different. You’re no better.

Somerset: I didn’t say I was different or better. I’m not! Hell, I sympathize; I sympathize completely. Apathy is a solution. I mean, it’s easier to lose yourself in drugs than it is to cope with life. It’s easier to steal what you want than it is to earn it. It’s easier to beat a child than it is to raise it. Hell, love costs: it takes effort and work.

***********

Dr. O’Neill: He cut off her nose…

Somerset: …to spite her face. [Of Doe’s murdering the “Pride” victim]

***********

“Detective. Detective. DETECTIVE! You’re looking for me.” –Doe, to Mills

“Wanting people to listen, you can’t just tap them on the shoulder anymore. You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you’ll notice you’ve got their strict attention.” –Doe

***********

David Mills: Wait, I thought all you did was kill innocent people.

John Doe: Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man…a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you’d point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man, who if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn’t be able to finish your meal. After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must have been secretly thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated his life to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets!

David Mills: Murderers?

John Doe: A woman…

David Mills: Murderers, John, like yourself?

John Doe: [interrupts] A woman…so ugly on the inside she couldn’t bear to go on living if she couldn’t be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually! And let’s not forget the disease-spreading whore! Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that’s the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it’s common, it’s trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon, and night. Well, not anymore. I’m setting the example. What I’ve done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed…forever.

*************

“It seems that envy is my sin.” –Doe

“Become vengeance, David. Become wrath.” –Doe

[Last line] “Ernest Hemingway once wrote, ‘The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.’ I agree with the second part.” –Somerset (voiceover)

What must be noted about the deadly sins is that they are emotions, passions. Pride is excessive self-love; wrath is excessive anger, uncontrollable rage; envy (invidia) is a hateful looking on (the evil eye, as it were) at those more fortunate that oneself, and wishing to cut them down; greed is a passion for limitless wealth and luxurious possessions, “the root of all evil” (1 Timothy 6:10); gluttony is a passion for food; lust is an excessive desire for sex (e.g., having multiple prostitutes every night); and sloth, an unwillingness to do anything for the common good, can be seen to be rooted in the emotion of despair, sadness.

We all experience each of these seven feelings at one point or another in life, and it’s perfectly normal and acceptable to feel a little of these emotions, provided we control them instead of vice versa. They become deadly sins when they’re allowed to run wild inside ourselves, driving us to hurt other people.

So the main theme of this film is unrestrained emotion. Doe imagines all seven of his victims to be guilty of allowing their emotions to get the better of them, when really it’s debatable if all of the victims have such poor self-control (though lack of control is certainly true of the men labelled with sloth, wrath, greed, and…envy!).

Is “the disease-spreading whore” guilty of lust, or–far more likely–is she an exploited, poor woman forced to have sex so she can live? Is the model really all that proud of her looks, or does she swallow the pills knowing her only way of making a living has been cut off from her (even modest people wouldn’t want to go through life disfigured)? Does the glutton have an eating disorder, does he have a genetic disposition to obesity, or does he overeat as a manic defence against his own sadness?

Now, the “infamous” defence lawyer (Eli Gould, the “Greed” victim)–having had Victor (the “Sloth” victim) acquitted, and having habitually lied to have other guilty men go free, so he can make bags of money defending them over and over again–is as guilty as Doe says he is, as is Victor…and two others. Still, some sins have been exaggerated.

On the other hand, Doe’s envy isn’t limited to Mills and his “simple life.” Perhaps Doe’s strict religious upbringing has forced him to repress his own desires to the point that he envies the rest of the world for being free to indulge in sins he mustn’t allow himself to indulge in. He hates the glutton’s over-enjoyment of food, so he kills him. Perhaps he secretly lusts after the prostitute (or prostitutes in general), and envies the men who pay to enjoy her, so he has someone make the strap-on with the blade. Perhaps he fell in love with the model, but she broke his heart, and he envies her boyfriend.

The seven deadly sins are so destructive because any surrender to one sin can lead to committing another. Doe’s envy clearly leads to his anger towards “a world this shitty.” The Christian morality he imagines he is adhering to (remarkable self-deceit for a multiple murderer) gives him pride, a sense of superiority over the “common” sinners. That he imagines God has chosen him to kill sinners is outrageously arrogant. His strict sexual morality, the repression of his desires, makes his lusting after prostitutes not only possible, but almost bordering on probable (perhaps “the disease-spreading whore” gave him an STD). Doe also seems, in a way, to be succumbing to sloth.

What would drive a conservative Christian (apart from Western imperialists and their crusading in such things as Zionism and the “War on Terror,” but I digress) to become a multiple murderer? As Somerset cautions Mills, we shouldn’t dismiss Doe’s pathology as mere madness. That would be ignorant. We have to look for causes, traumas, disappointments…despair.

A Christian is supposed to have no illusions about the enormity of sin in the world. His faith in God and Christ is supposed to give him the patience and strength to bear the horrors of everyday life. A Christian is supposed to combat sin by doing good, by setting an example. “He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.” (1 John 4:8). Doe, on the other hand, sets a bloody example, because he is full of hate…but who does he really hate?

Doe’s motive for murder seems to be based on his knowledge of the bestial sin he feels inside of himself: his pride from seeing himself, a man of faith, as better than the sinners around him; his anger at the sin he sees everywhere; his envy of other people’s happiness; and his possible (if not probable, given his life of sexual repression) lust after prostitutes and the model. His awareness of the evil inside himself, coupled with the blood of Christ having never tamed the beast inside him (despite his faith), must have led to at least a faith struggle he’s denying in himself, if not outright despair…sloth.

He adamantly denies his loss of faith, as he denies his sinning (pride, anger, sloth, and lust) in any ways other than envy; he projects these other sins onto other people, regardless of whether they’re actually guilty of them or not. He rationalizes his pride and wrath, cloaking these sins in the garb of righteousness. He postures as one with pious control over his emotions; underneath that posturing is a repressed, disavowed sloth.

A feeling of sloth (i.e., apathy, despair, and depression) pervades the film, in the literal and symbolic senses. It frequently rains, symbolic tears of the despairing. Somerset is a jaded old cop soon to retire, to end his work. He’s seen so much crime and misery that he sees little reason to think the human condition will ever improve. He hasn’t completely succumbed to sloth, but he’s pretty close to it.

The one with the fiery passion is his idealistic but bad-tempered [!] partner, Mills. We see a dialectical relationship between his idealism and Somerset’s disillusion, for when Doe provokes Mills to his raging extreme, his devastation at the film’s end is his having gone past the serpent’s biting head of extreme rage, a rage over the destroying of his hopes and dreams, to the serpent’s bitten tail of despair, over his having become the very kind of criminal he was supposed to be trying to stop.

(Recall how I use the ouroboros to symbolize the dialectical unity of opposites. The coiled serpent, as I see it, represents a circular continuum, the extreme opposite ends of which are seen where its head bites its tail.)

The moderation of Somerset’s jadedness is what keeps him from reaching the extreme of slothful despair. He flings a switchblade at a dartboard, one time almost hitting the bullseye, at other times hitting further away from it–all times missing the mark (hamartia, or sin). He’s far from perfect, but still a reasonably good man.

Seven does not only refer to the deadly sins; it can also refer to the first seven days of Biblical Creation, the seventh being the day God rested. (Recall Somerset’s words to Mills in this regard: “Well, over the next 7 days, Detective, you’ll do me the favour of remembering that.”) Somerset will retire, finishing his work, as God did at the end of the sixth day; Doe wants to die (i.e., his goading of Mills to shoot him)…eternal rest, after finishing “God’s good work,” or seven days of creating homicides (from the discovery of the “Gluttony” victim on Monday to his death as “Envy” on Sunday).

John Doe freely admits to his personal desire “to turn each sin against the sinner,” as he rationalizes it. The fact that the Marquis de Sade–a fanatically atheistic writer of blasphemous, pornographic fiction in which libertines delight in raping, torturing, and murdering their victims (often underage ones!), then philosophize about how crime is necessitated by Nature–is among Doe’s reading, borrowed from the library, should tell you what kind of a “Christian” he is.

Indeed, Doe enjoys terrorizing and torturing his victims before killing them; hence, the gun pressed against the head of the “Gluttony” victim as he makes the fat man eat until his gut bursts…including eating “little pieces of plastic” (according to the police captain [Ermey]). Monday: the first day.

Then, he forces the “Greed” victim, at gun point, to cut out a pound of his own flesh. The victim’s first name, Eli, is Hebrew in origin; though Gould is Anglo-Saxon, it could easily be an Anglicizing of, say, Goldberg (Glenn Gould, his family surname having originally been Gold, was at times mistakenly thought to be Jewish). Added to this is, from a scanning of the photo of Eli lying dead from his gory wound, the perception of Semitic facial features. I mention these details to suggest, along with the allusion to The Merchant of Venice, Doe’s implied Christian antisemitism, with the stereotype of the ‘greedy Jew.’

A careful reading of The Merchant of Venice will show, however, that Shylock was not being greedy (How could he profit from a pound of flesh?), but vengeful, just as John Doe is being vengeful in killing Gould. However greedy Gould may be, cutting out a pound of his flesh is not, in his case, an appropriate way “to turn [the] sin against the sinner.” If Doe imagines it is, it’s really just him projecting his own wrath onto Gould, making him turn wrath and vengeance against himself. Tuesday: the second day.

Fingerprints on a wall in Gould’s office, behind an abstract painting Doe has turned upside-down, print out the message, “HELP ME.” This is assumed to be Doe asking for help for himself; instead, it leads us to Victor (real name, Theodore Allen), the “Sloth” victim, whose hand Doe has cut off to print the “HELP ME” message on the wall.

Though tied to a bed and kept barely alive over the course of a year (i.e., as if he were too lazy to get out of bed), Victor’s sloth doesn’t come in the form of idleness. Having been given “a very strict Southern Baptist upbringing” (Raised in a strict Christian environment? Sounds familiar.), Victor has lost his faith and turned to a life of crime (armed robbery, drug dealing, and sexually assaulting minors). Again, his loss of faith and turning to a life of crime sounds a lot like projecting John: “HELP ME” seems to be Doe asking for help for himself after all. Wednesday: the third day.

Somerset, Mills, and a SWAT team led by California (McGinley) find Victor’s apartment under the assumption that he’s the seven-deadly-sins killer, only to realize he’s the “Sloth” victim; this mistaken identity reinforces the idea that Doe has projected his sloth onto Victor, however slothful his victim may have been in real life (Victor’s indulgence in drugs and pederasty seems to be a manic defence against his sadness). Victor isn’t quite dead: he gasps for life, shocking all the cops in the room. This shows how the suffering in sloth is really a living death.

Right after Somerset warns Mills to control his emotions, the latter lets his rage fly out of control in front of a man taking pictures of him. The photographer, we later learn, is the killer, having captured Mills in a state of wrath.

Recall that there’s a sad tone throughout this film, with the tears of all the angels in heaven, as it were, falling to the earth in the form of rain. Mills’s wife, Tracy (Paltrow) is sad and lonely in her apartment, knowing nobody in this town that she and her husband have just moved to–apart from Somerset, whom she phones and asks to get together with to talk about what’s troubling her. Thursday: the fourth day.

Somerset and Tracy chat in a restaurant: we learn she’s pregnant and unsure if she should keep the baby (she hasn’t told David). Somerset wouldn’t want to bring a child into the ugly world he sees around him, but he regrets a decision he once made to have his former partner have an abortion.

It’s interesting, just to note in passing, when Somerset and Mills discuss the “Sloth” victim’s landlord, who considers Victor to have been the perfect tenant. As long as the rent is paid on time and there are no complaints about him making any noise, etc., he can be as despairing, directionless, and slothful as he likes.

Somerset and Mills later go get a printout of whoever has been borrowing books about the seven deadly sins, crime, etc., from the library, thanks to the help of an FBI man. Doe’s reading tastes range everywhere from Sade to Aquinas: he’s educated, cultured, and psychopathic. The detectives may not have his real name, but now they know where he lives.

After the incident when Doe shoots at them, Mills chases him through his apartment building and in the rain, and Doe hits him on the head, bloody-faced Mills returns to the apartment building and in one of his rages kicks open Doe’s door. The cops search his apartment, finding a glowing red Cross and hundreds of notebooks of Doe randomly pouring out his nihilistic thoughts on paper; but not one fingerprint is found anywhere.

They do discover Doe’s many photographs, though, including those of “Gluttony,” “Greed,” a prostitute, and Mills. Unlike the many photos of Victor’s transformation from a normal-looking man to a degenerated, virtual corpse (symbolizing how sloth slowly destroys a man), the pictures of the other sinners catch them in a fixed state at the moment, as if that’s all there is to these people. Everyone else is just a static stereotype of a sin in Doe’s mind: only through sloth, a projection, recall, of Doe’s true mental state, do we see how a normal person gradually turns evil. Friday: the fifth day.

Somerset and Mills find the place where the strap-on has been made. We sense again the sloth of society in general when we see how the maker is unconcerned with the implications of having made such an awful thing; similarly, there’s the sloth of the man in the booth of the “massage parlour,” who lets men bring suitcases and bags of questionable things, like the strap-on, for use with the prostitutes.

At a bar together that night, Somerset and Mills discuss the contrast between the jadedness of the former vs. the idealism of the latter. In spite of all the sobering experiences Somerset has had over the years, Mills still won’t give up on his ideals. Somerset can sympathize with the slothful attitude, for how much easier it is to have such an attitude than it is to cope with life, but he hasn’t completely given up on the idea of trying to help, even though he’s retiring.

If we see Mills’s passion for making a difference as a cop as being near the biting head of the ouroboros (i.e., at the neck, so to speak), and we see absolute despair as being at the tip of the bitten tail, we can see Mills as being closer to that tail than is Somerset, who is further along the length of the serpent’s body, past the bitten tail and in the hind-to-middle area. Somerset has numbed to the suffering; for Mills to despair, though, all he needs is a little push. Saturday: the sixth day.

The large photo of the beautiful model, the “Pride” victim, is seen over her bloody, disfigured body in bed. Again, Doe imagines her sinful state to be a static, unchanging thing, as seen in that one photo.

When Doe gives himself up to the police and we see his bloody hands, we discover why he leaves no fingerprints anywhere. He’s been cutting them off, annihilating any knowledge of his true identity just as he has done by going by the anonymous name of “John Doe.” These two acts symbolize his wish to annihilate himself, just as he wants Mills to kill him. He wants to die because of his sloth and despair, however repressed they may be in a man who consciously still considers himself a faithful Christian.

As Somerset, Mills, and Doe go in the car to where the delivery of the box will occur at 7:00 in the evening (a bit after 7:01, actually–the delivery man misses the mark of Doe’s desired delivery time), Mills vents his rage on Doe. When Mills calls Doe’s victims “innocent people,” however, it’s Doe’s turn to be angry.

Any suggestion that his victims didn’t deserve to die for their faults, whether real or imagined by him (surely even the worst of these at least deserved a trial, and not so sadistic a killing!), triggers Doe, since he’s been projecting his own sinfulness onto them. His affectations of piety are really his narcissistic False Self, reaction formations of him pretending to intend good, a mask hiding his pride.

Doe’s anger rises to such a pitch that, ironically, it’s Mills who tells him to calm down; then, when Doe provokes Mills about the life he’s been allowed to keep having (after the killing of Tracy and the unborn child), Mills releases his fury once again.

Deep down, Doe wishes he could have the innocence of a child, as Jesus said we need to have to enter heaven (Matthew 18:3). It isn’t just Mills’s simple life that Doe envies; he also envies Tracy’s sweetness and the innocence of the unborn child. Now, Doe’s envy shifts into the Kleinian version.

While Doe has projected his sinfulness onto his victims, and onto all of the bad people in the world around him, he would also engage in projective identification, that is, project what he imagines is his Christian goodness onto the unborn child. Still, he cannot extricate himself from his own sinfulness, so that evil part of himself will still be inside the unborn child; then, when he’s projectively identified with the child, his Kleinian envy will make him wish to spoil the mother’s goodness. This is part of Doe’s phantasy, part of what drives him to kill Tracy and the unborn child. And in this connection, killing the unborn child is thus again the fulfillment of his wish to kill his projected self.

When Mills realizes his wife’s head is in the box, the despair is overwhelming. We all know he won’t be able to refrain from shooting Doe; there’s no hope that he’ll be able to control his hunger for vengeance, because any man would want to avenge the murder of the woman he loves, even men with much better control of their anger.

The enervation of sloth implies a lack of emotion, a numbness; but this is a superficial observation, for sloth comes from a deep sorrow, an unconsolable sadness stemming from a feeling of hopelessness, of despair…from a sense of wondering what the point is in even trying. Hence, sloth is as unrestrained an emotion as pride, anger, envy, greed, gluttony, and lust are. Mills is about to go from one extreme emotion (wrath) to another (sloth); he’s shifting from the biting head of the ouroboros to its bitten tail, from an extreme urge to do something to an extreme realization of the futility to do anything.

When Doe sees Mills walk over to him with the gun, about to put a bullet in his head, he closes his eyes, knowing he’s about to come to rest: “to die, to sleep,/ No more; and by a sleep to say we end/The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation/Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep…” (Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, lines 60-64). Doe’s despair is like that of the Dane. Sunday: the seventh day.

Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the Christian Sabbath, the day of rest. Doe has finished his work: he has seen all the mayhem that he has made, and it is very good (in his twisted imagination, anyway). Now he can rest. Somerset is about to retire, and rest. Mills will rest in prison for murder. Doe, in driving Mills to despair and devastation, has killed him, too.

Mills’s sloth is a living death, like moribund, gasping Victor tied to that bed. Mills’s despair is not only from losing the family he loves, not only from losing his freedom outside prison walls, but worst of all, from losing his ideal of being able to fight crime, knowing he’s no better than the “fucking crazies” he despises and wants to put in jail.

Ira furor brevis est.

Analysis of ‘Slutlips’

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Slutlips is an album by Cat Corelli, which she released in 2017. It isn’t exactly a rock opera, since much, if not most, of the music isn’t even rock (you’ll hear an eclectic switching back and forth between neo-Baroque, jazz, rock [i.e., a kind of symphonic metalcore], and electronic styles, as well as dreamy, almost psychedelic passages, music reminiscent of the soundtracks of noir films, and even a piano waltz). You’ve heard of silent films; Slutlips is like a film without visuals. As the Chorus of Henry V advised us, we have to use our imaginations to fill in the visual details.

The first link above is to the entire playlist of songs/story scenes; I recommend listening to it all in order for the following analysis to make sense. Here is a link to the lyrics/script.

The story is non-linear, with flashbacks of Lily, one of the main characters, who was sexually abused by her father, Daniel (“Danny”) Torrance. The other main character is Alice, who sees herself in a mirror and imagines herself to be “a slut” (as is her reputation); she’s also a murderess, having bitten into the neck of Roy Torrance, sucked his blood like a vampiress, and slit his throat with a machete (we learn from the police investigation that Roy is Daniel’s brother). Daisy is another significant female character in the story, a nicer, more socially conforming type of girl, what I suspect Lily could have been had she not been abused.

Other characters include Morgan, who plays the piano waltz, Investigator Andy Trudeau and Agent Matt Curtis, who aren’t able to find Roy’s killer, and who expect more killings in the future. There’s also a “Mystery Girl” (Alice? Or, perhaps, the ‘unknown self’ described in the concluding section of this link?), who speaks in an electronically altered voice. There is much mystery in this story, without any real resolution…but this all seems to be deliberate, for the plot is of secondary importance. Slutlips is, essentially, a character study, an exploration of the mind of a victim of child sexual abuse.

Everything about this album involves disjointed elements, with a sudden switching from one idea to another, in terms of the music and the non-linear story. In fact, the whole album began as a number of separate songs written and recorded years back, then later incorporated into the story. This sense of disjointedness shouldn’t deter the listener from enjoying the story, though, for it all serves a purpose in expressing the main theme of Slutlips: psychological fragmentation resulting from childhood trauma.

Much of the story involves Lily’s childhood memories of being dominated by her beast of a father, who, far from giving her the empathic mirroring and love she needed, sexually abused her, then hypocritically imposed the sanctimonious morality of the Church onto her.

Young children, whose personalities are only just forming, need psychological structure and cohesion, which can come only from empathic parents mirroring their kids’ grandiosity in the form of an idealized parent imago. Such mirroring, coupled with optimal frustrations of the dual narcissistic configuration (i.e., grandiose self/idealized parent imago), will help the child mature by taming his narcissism and transforming it, by transmuting internalization, into healthier, more restrained and realistic self-esteem, the sort that allows one to blend in comfortably with society.

Heinz Kohut explained it thus: “The child that is to survive psychologically is born into an empathic-responsive human milieu (of self-objects) just as he is born into an atmosphere that contains an optimal amount of oxygen if he is to survive physically. And his nascent self “expects”…an empathic environment to be in tune with his psychological need-wishes with the same unquestioning certitude as the respiratory apparatus of the newborn infant may be said to “expect” oxygen to be contained in the surrounding atmosphere. When the child’s psychological balance is disturbed, the child’s tensions are, under normal circumstances, empathically perceived and responded to by the self-object. The self-object, equipped with a mature psychological organization that can realistically assess the child’s need and what is to be done about it, will include the child into its own psychological organization and will remedy the child’s homeostatic imbalance through actions.” (Kohut, page 85)

Without that needed structure and cohesion, the child is in danger of fragmentation, which leads, in extreme cases, to psychosis and a detachment from reality. The unhealthy form of narcissism is a dysfunctional attempt at structure and cohesion, in the form of a False Self.

According to Kohut: “I believe…that defects in the self occur mainly as the result of empathy failures from the side of the self-objects–due to narcissistic disturbances of the self-object; especially, and I think, more frequently than analysts realize, due to the self-object’s latent psychosis…” (Kohut, page 87)

Because of the trauma Lily suffered as a child from her narcissistic father, she feels her personality in danger of disintegration, a fragmentation into separate selves, a psychotic falling apart of the personality. I’m not saying she suffers from dissociative identity disorder, but all the female characters in the story–Lily, Alice, Daisy, and the Mystery Girl–seem to represent different aspects of her fragmented self: respectively, the innocent victim, the slut/murderess, the nice girl, and the ‘unknown self’.

The men in the story, paired as Daniel/Roy/Morgan, and the detectives, all seem to be repeats of each other, too; for splitting into good and bad versions of people (the detectives and the Torrance brothers/Morgan, respectively, as the good and bad father) is a common defence mechanism. Also, Alice’s killing of Daniel’s brother, Roy, can represent a displaced wish to kill Daniel himself (in unconscious phantasy); remember that Alice is another version of Lily, slut-shamed as a result of her trauma from the child sexual abuse, and thus–to ease guilt and anxiety–Lily projects the murder phantasy (and sluttishness) onto Alice.

Alice seeing herself in the mirror can be seen as another manifestation of fragmentation, since Lacan‘s mirror stage, not limited to the spastic years of infancy, results in a fragmented body, an alienation of oneself from the ideal-I in the mirror reflection. The clumsy baby senses a discord between himself and the unified, coherent image in the mirror; just as Lily–with only one leg, it would seem–can’t even stand up or dance; while the image Alice sees in the mirror, “a slut” and a killer, can be the ideal-I (Lily’s other self) only of someone having suffered terrible childhood traumas.

Slutlips makes allusions to several films, the noirish Mulholland Drive and Pulp Fiction (another non-linear narrative that symbolically reinforces the theme of fragmentation), and the horror classic, The Shining, also a story involving parental abuse. Slutlips‘ Daniel Torrance, who doesn’t have the psychic powers of The Shining‘s boy (Danny), or of Dick Hallorann, since Lily’s father lacks the empathy of the boy or of Dick, and is trapped in the past (as Jack Torrance is, as I argued in my analysis of The Shining [the novel]), in tradition, Daniel’s Christian heritage.

One thing deserves attention: all of the men speak in overdone, affected accents, cheesy to the point of being comically stereotyped. Rather than be irked by this, the listener should hear in these caricatured voices a manifestation of the False Self of narcissists, or of otherwise alienated members of society, alienated from themselves–more fragmentation.

Lily’s father speaks with an affected German accent, like a clownish Nazi. I say ‘Nazi’, and not German in the general sense, because of his abusiveness to her and his authoritarianism. He’s also a racist, since he doesn’t want to “risk [his] reputation” by being associated with “niggers” in being seen playing the banjo [!]. Since he has a non-German surname, Torrance, it is truly odd that he has a German accent; but that’s just part of the surreal, non-rational world of the unconscious that this story inhabits, Alice’s nonsensical Wonderland, down the rabbit hole and into a world where an authoritarian monarch threatens physical fragmentation (“Off with her head!” says the Queen in Carroll’s story [and Alice’s creator, Lewis Carroll, photographer and drawer of nude children, could have been, like Lily’s father, a pedophile], but in Slutlips, Lily’s father says, “You’re supposed to have only one leg!”). The Alices of both stories, however, remain defiant (Lily: “Daddy, you’re a moron.”) to the dictates of others.

Indeed, this is a world of dreams, dissociations, and mish-mashes of identities. Since I suspect that Slutlips is semi-autobiographical, I get the impression that Daisy, Lily, Alice, and all the other females in this story represent different aspects of Cat Corelli’s personality, the nice girl/bad girl sides, and the good and bad object relations introjected into her unconscious.

The good and bad object relations include the males in the story, too; not just Lily’s father, but also Roy and Morgan, are internalized in her unconscious. Now, the unconscious tends to make confluent mish-mashes of such things as the self and objects, or, I believe at least, between internalized objects, good or bad; just as it makes no distinction between liquids (milk, blood, urine, as Melanie Klein observed–see my analysis of Alien for more details on that).

Compare Lily’s father with Morgan. Her father poses as a good Christian, but he molests her. Morgan presents himself–as a piano player of waltzes and a connoisseur of The Shining–as at least somewhat cultured (he seems to have Lily temporarily fooled into thinking he’s a ‘good father’ substitute), but there’s something creepy in his voice. Speaking of his voice, he too has an affected, overdone accent–a southern accent, making one think of the ‘redneck’ stereotype. Morgan calls blacks “niggers”, too, though he seems to have a more ‘enlightened liberal’ attitude. He even lies to little Lily that he’s Morgan Freeman, an absurd bit of gaslighting comparable to her father’s gaslighting about her “one leg”, which supposedly wasn’t an erroneous belief he’d manipulated her into having, but one she’d pushed onto herself.

So, her father’s a quasi-Nazi bigot, and Morgan’s a redneck hick who at least seems to be a closeted bigot. Her father would have her believe he’s a good church-goer, and Morgan would have her believe he’s a well-loved movie star whose soothing voice embodies all the phoney liberal values the mainstream media promotes (too bad the real Morgan Freeman recently promoted Russophobic thinking, in aid of needlessly escalating tensions between two nuclear superpowers, in a short Rob Reiner video). More False Selves.

In Daniel and Morgan we have two oppressor stereotypes: the Nazi and the American redneck, both racist, both manipulative, the one a double of the other, a fusion of the worst kinds of German and American. The former, as Lily’s abusive father and religious authoritarian, is also representative of the traditional patriarchal family. In contemporary politics, we see Daniel representative of Donald Trump, an American ignoramus of German descent who also has creepy attitudes toward his pretty daughter (and by extension, in US politics there’s a much closer relationship with Naziism than is commonly understood).  But redneck “Morgan Freeman”, being representative of the liberal Democrat who pretends to be progressive but does nothing substantive to help the needy, is hardly an improvement on Daniel. Morgan–presumably white, and claiming he’s a famous black actor–suggests how liberals replace the legitimate proletarian struggle with divisive identity politics. Thus, Lily, representing the proletariat, is manipulated by both liberals and conservatives.

So, how do we help abuse victims like Lily? Do we leave them to their phantasy world of wishing murder on their abusers, dreaming of how Daniel, for example, descends into fragmentation and psychosis on learning of his brother’s murder? Or shall we transform society, so the Lilys of the world can “wake up” (i.e., bring their unconscious traumas into consciousness, and thus, by establishing a coherent, structured self for them, we can cure them) and become whole?

If we plan to do the latter, we can start by listening to these victims, rather than preach to them about behaving better so they won’t ‘irritate’ us so much, as Daniel demands of his daughter. Listening with an empathic ear will help restore the damaged self. Part of listening will require liberating those of colour, LGBT people, and the working class, as well as ensuring equality of the sexes in a socialist, not bourgeois, context. Putting money into childcare will liberate women from domestic burdens; it will also lessen family strain and thus allow for more empathic parenting. Putting money into healthcare–rather than into imperialist wars–must include funding for improving mental health, to provide those listening ears for victims like Lily.

But for now, before a proletarian revolution happens, I urge you, Dear Reader, to listen to Slutlips with an attentive and compassionate ear. For, apart from the pain Cat Corelli screams out on this album, and in spite of (or rather, because of) the many idiosyncratic moments you’ll hear, she is an extraordinary musical talent, capable of a wide range of colours, styles, emotions, and timbres, as well as showing a creative fusion of musical and film genres. Daniel may not have the shining, but in my opinion at least, Cat Corelli does.

Heinz Kohut, The Restoration of the Self, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1977

Analysis of ‘Psycho’

Psycho is a psychological suspense/horror film produced and directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1960.  It is based on the Robert Bloch novel of the same name, published the year before; the novel, in turn, was based on the Ed Gein murders.

Ed Gein was a serial killer in Wisconsin in the 1950s.  A ‘mama’s boy,’ Gein was devastated by the death of his mother in 1945, and felt all alone in the world; when she was alive, she was a domineering, prudish woman, teaching him that all women were sexually promiscuous instruments of the devil.

Soon after her death, Ed began making a “woman suit” so he could “be” his mother by crawling into a woman’s skin.  For this purpose, he tanned the skins of women.  He also admitted to robbing nine graves.  Body parts were found all over his house as ghoulish works of art.  These macabre crimes were the inspiration not only for Psycho, but also The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the Buffalo Bill character in Silence of the Lambs, and numerous other horror movies.

Psycho is considered the first slasher film; and while it had received only mixed reviews on its release, it is now considered one of Hitchcock’s best films, and one of the greatest films of all time.  The Ed Gein of the movie, Norman Bates (played by Anthony Perkins), was ranked the second greatest movie villain of all time by the American Film Institute (AFI), after Hannibal Lecter and before Darth Vader.  The first of the following two quotes was ranked by the AFI as #56 of the greatest movie quotes of all time; the second was nominated for the list.

1. “A boy’s best friend is his mother.” –Norman Bates

2. “We all go a little mad sometimes.” –Norman Bates

A few motifs in Psycho are birds, showers (those in the bathtub, and of rain), and mirrors (including reflections in glass).  These all have specific symbolic meanings.

The bird motif is generally of motionless birds, those in pictures–trapped, as it were, inside frames–or stuffed birds.  Normally, we think of free birds, those free to fly anywhere they wish; but the birds in Psycho are very much trapped and immobile.

Marion Crane (Mary in the novel) is a ‘bird’ in a kind of “private trap.”  She wants to marry her boyfriend, Sam Loomis, but he has debts and alimony to pay, thus making marriage with him not very feasible.  By stealing $40,000, she tries to escape from her trap, the trap of Phoenix, Arizona.  She tries rising like a phoenix from the ashes, so to speak, of her dead-end life there, but a suspecting policeman (along with the suspicions of a used car salesman) begins a pursuit of her that ensures that Crane cannot escape the trap she’s put herself in.  The phoenix can’t rise out of Phoenix.

Norman’s stuffing of birds, as well as the stuffing of another ‘bird’ (British slang for a sexually desirable woman), his mother (for whom he has an unresolved Oedipal fixation, something discussed in Chapter One of Bloch’s novel), represents the trap he is in.  “We scratch and claw” (my emphasis), Norman says, but we can’t get out of our “private traps.”

He kills Marion Crane in the shower–he knocks off that bird–but he’s still in his trap, and he knows it.  Hence his shock at the sight of her body lying over the side of the bathtub, causing him to jerk his body around, hit the wall outside the entrance to the bathroom, and cause the picture of a bird to fall to the floor.  He’s knocked off another bird.  Just like all those birds, Norman Bates is forever trapped.

Showers symbolize purification and redemption, or at least an attempt at it.  The rain that showers on Marion’s car at night, just before she reaches the Bates Motel, happens at a point when she has been thinking about all the trouble she’s gotten herself into.  She realizes that she has aroused not only the suspicion of a cop who saw her in a nervous hurry, and of a used car salesman whom she’s given $700 in cash for a rushed trade of cars, but also of her boss, who saw her nervously drive out of Phoenix when she was supposed to be sleeping off a headache.  With the cleansing rain comes her realization that she must return to Phoenix and take responsibility for what she’s done.

She’s only a little wet from the rain when honking her car horn to get Norman’s attention from up in his house.  During her conversation with him in the parlour room, she admits that she must get out of the private trap she’s put herself in.  Then she takes a shower, whose purifying water washes away the rest of her guilt, refreshing her and putting a smile on her face.  The birds of this movie, however, are always trapped, and we all know what happens next…

We catch people’s reflections many times in this film, either from windows or from mirrors.  These reflected images represent psychological projection.  Psycho is very much a psychoanalytic movie, for Hitchcock was heavily influenced by Freud (another notably Freudian film of his was 1945’s Spellbound, with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck).

An early example of projection is when Marion imagines the angry reaction of the rich man after she has stolen his $40,000: she imagines him saying that she was “flirting with [him]” when he laid the money before her, when we all know he was flirting with her.  Of course, her imagining him saying that is her projecting back at him.

Another example of projection, directly symbolized by mirror reflections, is when Lila Crane is looking around in Mrs. Bates’s bedroom.  She sees her reflection in a large mirror, but forgets that another mirror is behind her; for a second, she thinks–as do we, the audience–that a woman (Mrs. Bates?) is behind her, but it’s actually just another mirror reflection of Lila.  She has projected her intrusion into the Bates family’s private space onto Mrs. Bates, briefly imagining Norman’s mother is intruding into Lila’s personal space.  (The theme of intrusion will be dealt with later here.)

The crowning example of projection, however, is that of Norman Bates onto his mother…and of the mother personality projecting back onto Norman.  When talking to Marion in the parlour, he speaks of how Mother “goes a little mad sometimes.”  (See also Quote #2 above.)  He is clearly projecting his own insanity onto her, and onto the rest of the world, as is seen in the second quote above.  As the psychiatrist explains at the end of the movie, Norman’s mother was “a clinging, demanding woman,” but she wasn’t mad.  Norman, on the other hand, had been “dangerously disturbed…ever since his father died.”

Norman himself, in a powerful moment of dramatic irony, admits that his mother is “as harmless as one those stuffed birds.”  The mother personality, just after musing over Norman’s guilt at the film’s end, and projecting her guilt back onto him, says that she can’t allow everyone to believe she’d “killed those girls, and that man,” when all she could do was “sit and stare, like one of his stuffed birds.”  The fact that Norman had actually practiced his hobby of taxidermy on her corpse illustrates perfectly, and eerily, the irony of ‘Mother’s’ words.

Norman’s mother, like Ed Gein’s, has a puritanical attitude towards sex, and considers all women to be whores.  When she met a man, however, and had a sexual relationship with him ten years before the story’s beginning, Norman–with his Oedipal fixation–went insane with jealousy and murdered her and her lover with strychnine.  As the psychiatrist points out, “because he was so pathologically jealous of her, he assumed that she was as jealous of him,” and “the mother side of him would go wild” if she ever discovered him to be attracted to another woman; hence Marion’s murder, and those of two other (presumably attractive) girls.  Norman has projected his insane jealousy onto the mother personality.

A particularly important theme that runs throughout this movie is that of intrusion, penetration, or the invasion of privacy.  Hitchcock’s camera has us invade Marion’s and Sam’s privacy in their hotel room at the very beginning of the film, with him bare chested and her in her bra on the bed.

Later, when Marion is in the office at work, the rich man, Tom Cassidy, comes in with her boss; Cassidy begins ogling the beautiful young woman, even sitting on her desk as his eyes are going up and down her body.  He’s had a few drinks, so someone who’s probably normally a gentleman seems to have an excuse not to be now.  Again, we have intruding on someone’s personal space.

After driving out of Phoenix with the $40,000 she’s embezzled, Marion gets tired at night and pulls over to the side of the road to rest.  She’s slept there all night, though, and wakes up to the knocking sound of a policeman tapping on her car window the next day.  Looking through the window and wearing sunglasses that threateningly hide the expression in his eyes, the cop is invading her personal space.

He continues nosing in on her personal business by following her to a used car lot and parking across the road.  Leaning against his car, he’s watching her; and after she’s traded in her car for a new one, he’s in the parking lot, noting the new licence plate.

When she comes to the Bates Motel, she’s now in Norman’s private world, a motel doing bad business because a new highway has made the road to his motel rarely used; hence, he is all alone in his “private trap” with “Mother.”

As he chats with Marion in the parlour room, he shows his sensitivity to private matters by saying, “I didn’t mean to pry,” after asking where she is going.  The prudish young man can’t even say “bathroom” in front of beautiful Marion (for the things done there are so extremely private); and later, when Detective Arbogast asks if Norman spent the night with Marion, he, offended, says, “No!”

Norman is similarly offended when Marion suggests putting “Mother” in an institution, with all those “cruel eyes studying [her],” invading ‘her’ privacy.  Of course, the man his mother had a relationship with also invaded Norman’s private world, and he was so offended with that intrusion that he killed them both.

After the conversation between Norman and Marion in the parlour, he invades her privacy by watching her undress through a peephole in the wall shared by the parlour room and her cabin.

Of course, the shower scene is the ultimate invasion of privacy.  I can imagine this scene being particularly frightening to women, for that phallic knife invading a naked woman’s body is more that a murder: symbolically, it’s a rape.  In Bloch’s novel, she’s decapitated; but a penetrating knife is more symbolically appropriate for the film.

When Lila is talking to Sam in his hardware store about Marion’s disappearance, Detective Arbogast sticks his nose into their personal business by eavesdropping, at the ajar front door, on the conversation, then by interrupting it.  Later, the detective comes into Norman’s private world by asking about Marion, then about his mother, something that especially agitates Norman.

Finally, Arbogast walks right into Norman’s house without any permission to enter, and snoops around, going upstairs.  ‘Mother’s’ knife then invades his personal space, slashing his face and stabbing into him: he who lives by intrusion shall die by intrusion.  After that, the sheriff and police snoop around Norman’s house, forcing him to hide ‘Mother’ in the fruit cellar.

Leading up to the movie’s climax, Sam and Lila intrude on Norman’s private world by pretending to be a married couple looking for a room in the motel.

Sam keeps Norman occupied at the registration desk by chatting with him while Lila goes up to the house.  Sam’s questions get more and more intrusive, aggressive, and accusing, agitating Norman to the point of him telling them just to leave.  Meanwhile, Lila has been snooping in ‘Mother’s’ and Norman’s bedrooms.  In his room, she sees his stuffed toy rabbit, an odd sleeping companion for a grown man, and a book whose inner contents make her shudder.  (In Bloch’s novel, it’s pornography.)

At the film’s climax, Lila hides by the stairs to the basement while Norman is running into the house.  Instead of running outside to safety once he’s gone upstairs, she decides to snoop some more and go down into the basement, which Slavoj Zizek, in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, says represents Norman’s repressed id.  This is his most private place of all, and Lila’s invasion of that privacy allows us to learn the truth about ‘Mother.’

One last thing should be examined: the symbolism of hot and cold in the movie.  At the beginning, in Phoenix, it’s a hot day, first in the hotel with Sam and Marion after a sexual encounter, then in her office, which has no air conditioning, and where that rich lecher is leering at her.  The heat represents Freud’s concept of libido, or the sexual instincts.

Later, when the murders have been committed in the Fairvale area of California, we notice how people are colder.  Lila needs to get her coat before she and Sam go the sheriff’s house; in the police station at the end, the sheriff asks if she’s warm enough; and Norman “feels a slight chill,” and wants a blanket.  The cold represents the psychoanalytic concept of Thanatos, or the death drive.

Hi! Thanks for visiting my blog!

My blog is called ‘Infinite Ocean’ because–apart from my dialectical monist philosophy, which I hope can help people heal from alienation, C-PTSD and the other effects of narcissistic and emotional abuse–I have a (potentially) infinite number of subjects to write about. I have eclectic interests, so I write on a variety of subjects. Here is a brief explanation of all that I do.

Now, Dear Reader, beware: while I write a lot about such topics as narcissistic abuse, I want to emphasize that I am no expert. I have no formal training in psychiatry or psychology whatsoever; I merely dabble in psychoanalysis, and even that comes only from reading a lot–I’ve never been trained in that field. I say this to prevent any misunderstandings about the efficacy of what I have to say in an attempt to help people heal from psychological trauma; indeed, I myself am healing, and so my writing is just my personal journey, my attempt to heal myself. So feel free to accept or reject whatever I write about here in terms of its worth as advice.

One of the annoyances of doing research is how difficult it is to find appropriate source material from a Google search. Sometimes, the sources I give links to that back up my arguments are passages that are, unfortunately, hard to find within a sea of text. What can I say? I try my best with what little I have; so please, if you choose to read what I write, take it with a generous dose of salt, and if you have serious issues of psychological trauma, seek a qualified expert. My scribblings are no substitute: they’re just me pouring out my feelings, and if they–for what they’re worth–can give you validation or inspiration of some kind, then they’ve done what I meant for them to do, no more.

In addition to the above, I write about anarchism, socialism, libertarian-leaning Marxism, and psychoanalysis, as well as writing literary and film analyses (again, with the same lacunae of authority as there are in my writings on narcissistic abuse). I also write fiction–horror and erotic horror, mostly. Here are links to some of my short stories, as well as to works-in-progress. Here are some poems I’ve written.

Then, there are a few novels I’ve written and self-published on Amazon. (If you’re a sufferer of complex trauma and find horror triggering, I’ll more than understand if you want to skip past the next few paragraphs.)

My Kindle e-book, Sweet, is about a woman who has a disturbing habit: she likes to have men get her pregnant, then a few months after the baby is born, she kills it, cooks it, and eats it. Her latest lover wants to be involved with their baby’s life–how will he stop the mother from ending its life?

…and here are links to my other two Kindle e-books, Vamps, and Wolfgang.

Vamps is a vampire erotic horror novel, about three groups of vampiress strippers/prostitutes who lure lustful men in, then suck…their blood. Vampire hunters, however, are out to get them, and have been exposing them to the lethal sunlight. Someone is helping the hunters find the vamps…is it one of the vamps?

Wolfgang is about a German billionaire who happens to be a werewolf. Racked with guilt over his killings (particularly those of his own parents), he has a young prostitute whip and beat him, in sort of an S & M style, in an attempt to assuage his guilt. She has her own agenda (a lycanthrope fetish!), though, as does his butler (to use the billionaire’s money in ways the butler deems fit). A love triangle develops between the three: who will get control of the money, which two will remain lovers, and who will be the next werewolf?

My next erotic horror novel, Creeps, is a work-in-progress as of the writing of this update. It’s about a prostitution ring that uses small tech put inside worm-like ‘creeps’ that slither into the body, so the tech can take control of the bodies of the people forced into “consenting” prostitution. Two people, a young man and his older sister, discover that a woman friend of theirs is trapped in one of the legalized brothels, and they have to figure out a way to get her out of there. If the mafia ring (protected by a corrupt government) catches the woman’s two friends, though, creeps may be used on them to keep them quiet…permanently.

Anyway, I hope you have fun looking around at all of the different topics I’ve been writing about, and I hope you find some that interest you enough to make you want to follow me. Cheers!