Tag: psychology

Analysis of ‘Phantasm’

Phantasm is a 1979 supernatural horror film written and directed by Don Coscarelli. It stars A. Michael Baldwin, Bill Thornbury, Reggie Bannister, Kathy Lester, and Angus Scrimm. The film was independently produced, being financed by Coscarelli, his father, and local investors; the cast were mostly amateurs and aspiring professionals.

Following its expanded theatrical release, Phantasm would become a box office hit, grossing $22 million internationally. It got mixed reviews from critics, but in the years since its release, Phantasm has become a cult film. It’s on several critics’ lists of the best horror films, being praised by film scholars for its surrealistic qualities and themes of mourning, loss, and sibling relationships. JJ Abrahams is a fan of the movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, here are links (<<< this second one’s really bad) to the full movie, and here is a link to the (only first nine chapters, unfortunately, of the) novelization.

Since mourning and loss are major themes in the movie, I think it’s useful to go into the psychoanalysis of mourning. It’s also useful to examine the difference Freud saw between mourning and melancholia. In mourning, the painful process of dealing with the loss of a loved one is eventually gone through, and the mourner can redirect libido to objects other than the lost one; we can see Jody Pearson (Thornbury) largely getting over the loss of his parents and redirecting his feelings towards friends, bandmates like Reggie (Bannister), and women.

Things haven’t been so easy for Jody’s 13-year-old kid brother, Mike (Baldwin), who I would say is experiencing a repressed, unconscious form of melancholia, which involves not only a failure to accept the loss of his and Jody’s parents, but also involves the absorbing of their lost parents into his ego to make them internal objects (which in turn is the basis for object relations theory).

Furthermore, this internalizing also involves taking in those aspects of Mike’s parents that he doesn’t like, and so since those aspects are in him now, he dislikes himself for those aspects. His way of dealing with those disagreeable parts is to split them off and project them into the external world. These expelled objects would be what Melanie Klein called the bad father and the bad mother, those aspects of one’s parents that are frustrating and withholding of gratification.

These would be the Tall Man (Scrimm) and the Lady in Lavender (Lester), symbolically speaking, of course. Her sexual allure is symbolically in the Oedipally-desired parent, and his creepiness is symbolically in the Oedipally-hated parent. Since both are aspects of the same phantasm, they can also be seen to represent Klein’s notion of the combined parent figure, in which a child sees or imagines, in the primal scene, his mom and dad engaging in violent sex, which traumatizes him.

These phantasies (or phantasms) are the unconscious basis of all of the terror that Mike is experiencing as he continues failing to accept the loss of his parents. He’s been having nightmares ever since they died. Since part of him felt the usual frustrations any kid feels towards parents who don’t always do as a kid wishes, he imagines that he somehow ‘willed’ their deaths, and so he’s racked with guilt and self-hate over having ’caused’ their deaths–hence his being terrorized by the Tall Man, or the internalized bad father object, as his punishment for having ‘wished for’ the deaths of his parents. The terror he’s going through is all in his head.

Note that “phantasm” can mean both “spectre” and “fantasy,” or “figment of the imagination.” The Tall Man can be understood in both of these senses. He is a ghost terrorizing the Oregon town in which the film is set, and he is a fantasy in Mike’s mind. That fantasy comes from the internalized object of the bad father in Mike’s mind.

His conflict (and to a lesser extent, Jody’s conflict) with his mom and dad stem from the universal, narcissistic trauma of his love/hate relationship with them. They drove him crazy (presumably with their list of dos and don’ts) while alive, and now he can’t bear to lose them, now that they’re dead. He keeps them present and alive in his mind, in the unrecognizable forms of the Tall Man and the Lady in Lavender, for such is the way that repression works: feelings are pushed into the unconscious mind, then they return to consciousness, but in unrecognizable forms, hiding in plain sight.

What’s good and bad in Mike’s parents is split, in what Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position (“schizoid” referring to this splitting). The Tall Man, as Mike’s bad father, terrorizing him represents the persecutory anxiety the boy feels (“paranoid”) as a result of having rejected (and, as he imagines, having unconsciously wanted the death of) his father.

As with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Phantasm blurs the distinction between dream and reality. Because of this blurring, we can see the supernatural horror and the surrealism of Phantasm as being an allegory of the inner workings and conflicts of the unconscious mind. The dreamlike state that permeates not just this film, but also its sequels (generally regarded as inferior), explains to a great extent their many plot holes and inconsistencies.

The film begins at night, with a young man named Tommy making love with the Lady in Lavender in Morningside Cemetery. She takes a knife and stabs him to death, then changes into the form of the Tall Man. The juxtaposition of sex and death (or of Eros and Thanatos), as well as of the Lady in Lavender (or bad mother transference) and of the Tall Man (or bad father transference) allegorizes and personifies the unconscious processes described above.

Tommy has not just had the Oedipally-desired mother transference, he’s also experienced the combined parent figure, whom he penetrated and was penetrated by with a phallic knife (Indeed, in the novelization, the stabbing is described thus: “Quickly she sank [the knife] as hard and fast into his heart as he had plunged his body into hers.”). He later can be understood to be a kind of brother-figure for Mike, the way Reggie will be understood to be by the end of the film when we learn of Jody’s death, since we learn that Jody, Reggie, and Tommy were supposed to be a kind of Crosby, Stills, and Nash-style band of singers and guitar strummers (“It’s a hell of a way to end a trio,” Jody says of Tommy’s death to Reggie on the day of the funeral). The togetherness of the three young men suggests a tripling of Jody for Mike.

Because of the trauma Mike has suffered from his and Jody’s parents’ deaths, the boy has terrible fears of abandonment, and so he follows his older brother everywhere around town. Jody in fact plans on leaving Mike in the custody of his aunt, which of course the boy will hate, but Jody wants his freedom to pursue making music with Reggie, and leave that dull town.

Part of Mike’s fears of losing Jody the way he lost their parents can be seen as expressed in nightmare form: the stabbing of Tommy, and later of Reggie, the two victims being symbolic brothers. Mike’s unconscious mind is thus displacing the status of brother onto two men who aren’t his biological brothers, in order to ease the anxiety of facing up to the loss of his actual brother, Jody.

Mike’s melancholia, expressed musically through the haunting synthesizer theme in E minor, demonstrates the self-hate Freud wrote about in his paper on the subject (link above) in how the boy subjects himself to dangerous situations. His hanging out in the cemetery at night where the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves are, his going in the mausoleum, and even his rather precocious (for a 13-year-old) riding around on a motorbike (and, at one point, driving Jody’s car) all demonstrate at least potentially self-destructive behaviour, indicative of Freud’s death drive, something people who hate themselves might do, because they have bad internal objects haunting them.

After Tommy’s funeral, his death understood (but not believed, according to the novelization) to be a suicide, and it’s understood just how heavy his coffin is, Mike comes to the cemetery and sees the Tall Man pick up, carry, and put the coffin in a hearse all by himself. Mike is so amazed at the mortician’s superhuman strength that he whispers, “What the fuck?” and wants to tell a local fortune teller (played by Mary Ellen Shaw) about it. The height and strength of the Tall Man (especially as compared with the height of his dwarves) reinforces him being representative of the bad father, who from the point of view of a child, is much bigger and stronger.

The fortune teller, who has reassured Mike that if Jody leaves, they’ll go together, is an old lady. As such, she is as much a symbolic mother to Mike as the Tall Man is a symbolic father. (Her granddaughter, played by Terrie Kalbus, is a symbolic sister.) That the fortune teller is amused at Mike’s fear from feeling his hand trapped and hurt in a magic box indicates that she, like the Lady in Lavender, is a bad mother figure, too.

That the box seems to be taking away Mike’s hand and is scaring him (the losing of his hand would have been a symbolic castration) is indicative of castration anxiety, and castration at the hands of the bad father (or here, of the bad mother) can in turn be representative of corporal punishment. To overcome his melancholia, Mike must overcome his fear and unconscious hate of his dead parents. Only then will their bad internal objects stop tormenting him. Hence, the granddaughter (Sarah in the novelization) tells him not to be afraid, and only when he controls his fear does the box, a yonic symbol, release his hand.

The old and young women want Mike to understand that it’s fear itself that is his problem. A funny thing, though, happens soon after, for the granddaughter goes to the cemetery and enters the mausoleum; and when she finds a room in it with containers holding the Tall Man’s crushed dwarves (as we’ll eventually learn), she finds herself overcome with terror, and screams. We don’t see or hear from her again. The fear she warned Mike about became her very problem.

While she’s at the cemetery and mausoleum, Jody is at home, singing and playing his electric guitar on his porch, and Reggie arrives in his ice cream truck with his acoustic guitar and joins in playing the new song Jody has been working on. He’s singing of his lady having left him, and I can’t help linking that idea with how his parents’ death must have felt like an abandonment (hence, Mike’s fears of abandonment). The unconscious Oedipal attachment to Jody’s mother could have easily been displaced to his lady leaving him (his local girlfriend [see the novelization], or his coming sexual encounter with the Lady in Lavender). An expression of his displaced grief in song is one way Jody has been successful in overcoming his grief and loss–something Mike can’t do.

The novelization points out in Chapter Two that Tommy sang and played guitar just like Jody and Reggie–hence I say their trio would have been like Crosby, Stills, and Nash, especially judging by the mellow style of the song we hear the surviving two musicians working on. They only need to work out the vocal harmonies, which would have been three-part had Tommy still been alive, like the harmonies of CSN. As a trio, they would again be a tripling of brothers for Mike, an unconscious wish-fulfillment for a boy so scared of losing any more of his family.

When Jody and Reggie finish playing the song, Reggie takes out a tuning fork and strikes it, then touches it with his fingertips to stop the ringing sound. Immediately after that, we see Sarah, the fortune teller’s granddaughter, walking through a hall in the mausoleum towards the door to the room with the dwarf containers, where she’ll scream.

We learn towards the climax of the movie, when Jody, Mike, and Reggie find that room, that there’s a pair of metal bars sticking up from the floor. These look like a giant tuning fork, but without the connecting bottom. Mike will put his hand between the bars and see it disappear, just as when his hand disappeared in the box; he’ll discover what Sarah must have seen–a hot, hellish world of slave dwarves toiling away for the devil Tall Man. Reggie later will touch the tops of those bars, just as his fingertips touched the tuning fork. This causes a vacuum in the room from which he narrowly escapes.

We are left wondering what connection there could be between the tuning fork, the bars, and the box. Since as I said above, the events of Phantasm are an allegorizing of the goings-on of the unconscious mind, there will be an association of various images that we see, all signifiers of some kind meant to represent certain mental concepts. Since the magic box is a yonic symbol, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as phallic. Putting one’s hand in the box or between the bars makes the hand disappear, a symbolic castration.

Touching the tuning fork or bars, and putting one’s hand in the box, is symbolic masturbation. The threat of castration, symbolic of corporal punishment, is parental discipline against a child’s indulgence in forbidden pleasures.

Furthermore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be seen as both phallic and yonic, the spaces in between the “phalli” being yonis; therefore, the tuning fork and metal bars can be associated with the combined parental figure. That Mike’s hand disappears in the in-between “yoni” as well as that of the magic box indicates the vagina dentata of a punitive bad mother, one every bit as threatening as the bad father of the Tall Man, disciplining a child for his Oedipal urges. Recall how the Lady in Lavender, knife in hand, is ready to stab Jody just outside the mausoleum as Reggie is about to touch the bars and cause the vacuum in the room and the storm outside.

All of these elements in combination reinforce the idea that Phantasm is all about unconscious paranoid anxiety that the hated, internalized mother and father are out to punish Mike and Jody for wanting them dead and gone, however repressed that wish may be.

We learn from Chapter Seven of the novelization that Jody doesn’t want to take over his father’s bank. One can imagine some nasty argument between Jody and his parents over whether or not he should pursue a career in music rather than take over the family business. Jody’s wish to be free of his parents’ dictates surely contributed to an unconscious wish on his part to be rid of them…and so their deaths would have been a source of unconscious guilt for him as well as for Mike.

While Jody is visiting the bank in Chapter Seven of the novelization, he’s in the suit he had on during Tommy’s funeral, and apart from giving the management of his dead father’s bank to George Norby until Mike is old enough to take over, Jody also has a brief, intimate moment with Suzy, an employee there who likes him in that suit and, being of a traditional woman’s mindset, hopes her boyfriend will be the new boss of the bank. One of the film’s outtakes shows her with him in the office that was his dad’s.

Being an aspiring musician, though, Jody doesn’t want to be part of the money-obsessed, capitalist world. As I said above, I imagine his dad being upset with him for not wanting to do that. This conflict can be linked to the later scene of Mike seeing the slave dwarves in that hellscape beyond the metal bar portal in the room with the dwarf containers. Jody doesn’t want to be a slave to capitalism, angering his father, and so his and Mike’s unconscious is showing them the infernal punishment their devilish bad father (the Tall Man) has planned for them.

You see, Jody has a bit of paranoid anxiety of his own, though it’s not as intense as Mike’s is. Jody, too, has a nightmare, one of dwarves grabbing him and pulling him away into hell, just as Mike has a nightmare of the Tall Man standing over his bed with his arms out, ready to grab the boy, and the dwarves all then do.

With the blurring of the line between dream and reality, we don’t know for sure how much of Phantasm is actually in waking life. For all we know, it’s all a great big, unending nightmare, Dante’s tour of the hellish unconscious with Virgil. For this reason, I feel free to interpret any and every character as an extension of Jody’s and Mike’s family.

Thus, Suzy can be an extension of Jody’s unconscious Oedipal feelings for his mother (with Dad dead, he can have her, provided he’s willing to carry on with the family business). If not, though, he’ll be with the Lady in Lavender that night in the cemetery, taking his chances with the bad mother instead of having the good mother transference in his dad’s office in the bank.

Indeed, because things have gone sour between Jody and Suzy (she representing the good mother), he’ll go that night to the local pub and pick up the Lady in Lavender. Mike will be following Jody, as usual. The two lovers going at it in the cemetery represents a fusion of Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives.

Mike, of course, will be in the cemetery, too. He’ll be scared by the presence of those dwarves, making him scream for help and distract Jody from her…also saving his life without him even realizing it.

The whole point of the Oedipus complex, properly understood in its expanded sense to include the jealous wish to hog the Oedipally-desired object to oneself (be this object the mother, father,…or really anyone), is that it’s a universal narcissistic trauma expressing hate and hostility to anyone who wishes to share that object and not let one hog him or her to oneself. This is what we see when Mike is following Jody everywhere, not wanting his older brother to be free to live his own life (e.g., to be with the Lady in Lavender). Saving Jody from her knife is thus a justification of Mike’s narcissistic wish to hog his brother all to himself, and is thus a wish-fulfillment. Remember how all of Phantasm could just be Mike’s ongoing dream, all an expression of his unconscious.

The next day, Mike is downtown, and across the street he sees the Tall Man walking up to Reggie’s ice cream truck. The cold of the truck seems to affect the Tall Man negatively. Indeed, we come to understand that the antagonist, being a devil of the hottest hell, has a strong aversion to heat’s diametrical opposite.

Later, Mike is in the garage, tinkering with a car. His precocious talent at fixing cars seems to reflect a wish to know how to bring things back to life, as it were. If only he could bring people back to life, like his parents. Dwarves scare him again, and he tells still-disbelieving Jody about them.

That night, Mike will go with a knife to the mausoleum to figure out what’s going on there. As he’s hiding in a coffin, he sees a caretaker looking around. This is another middle-aged man, like the Tall Man, so as far as Mike’s unconscious is concerned, the man is yet again representative of the bad father that the boy has internalized and whom he wishes he could be rid of.

Note how in all of Mike’s fear of the Tall Man and his dwarves, the boy still ventures out to the places that are the sources of his fear. This willingness to go out there demonstrates his self-destructive nature, which in turn demonstrates the self-hate he feels from his having internalized his bad parental objects, the source of his melancholia in the Freudian sense. He hates himself because he hates them, who are now a part of him.

Still, he keeps trying to project them outward, hence he has to confront them in the forms of the caretaker and the Tall Man. The coffin he hides in is a yonic symbol, representing his forbidden Oedipal desire, which as I said above is much more than just the wish to have his mother incestuously; but in the more expanded sense, it means he wants to hog all desired objects (her, the good father, Jody, and other brother-figures–Reggie and Tommy) all to himself.

Lacan‘s Non! du père forbids Mike to hog everyone just to fulfill his personal wishes, though: Mike must enter society and share everyone with everyone else; he cannot be the symbolic phallus for the mother, which represents the wish to be the desire of the Other. This inability to be that phallus is thus a symbolic castration, which is a recurrent motif in Phantasm.

Mike struggles with the caretaker, even biting his hand…and we’ve seen how a hurt or disappearing hand is symbolic castration. Mike wants the frustration of his wishes to be projected onto others. Immediately after the biting of the hand comes the flying ball with the blade, which stabs the caretaker in the head and kills him. This flying testicle and phallic blade are both castrated and (symbolically) castrating in their mutilation of the man’s face.

Right after this struggle, Mike has to confront the Tall Man, who chases him into a room, with Mike bolting the door to keep the mortician out, his hand slipping through the crack. Mike uses his knife to slice off the Tall Man’s fingers, yet another symbolic castration and Mike’s wish-fulfillment to project the frustration of his desires onto his bad father internal object. This wish-fulfillment is a form of revenge against his father’s frustration of his desires, which led to his unconscious wish for his parents’ deaths, which in turn led to his guilt and melancholia over their actual death. Instead of human blood, the severed fingers drip yellow ichor (the blood of the Greek gods), fittingly the colour of piss and therefore it reinforces how the fingers are phallic.

Mike takes a finger, puts it in a little box [!], and takes it home to show Jody the proof that he isn’t going crazy. Later on, the finger turns into a horrible, black flying insect that attacks Mike and then Jody and visiting Reggie soon after. Its ugliness, and the revulsion that the insect causes, are the diametrical (and dialectical) opposite of the beauty of Aphrodite, who emerged nude from the foam of the sea into which the severed genitals of Uranus were thrown. Indeed, the original sky-father god was castrated by his son, Cronus, in a reversal of the fear of the castrating father of Freud’s conception (Freud, on page 469 of his Interpretation of Dreams, wrote of a variation in which it’s Zeus who overthrows and castrates Cronus in revenge for devouring all of his children.).

The insect is shoved into the kitchen sinkhole, just as the Tall Man will be trapped in a hole going down into an abandoned mine shaft. Apart from being more yonic symbols, these traps also represent attempts at repressing traumatic memories…and of course, neither of them will last long or be effective. Reggie’s seeing of the insect means he too will be involved in doing something about the Tall Man.

Jody is the next to go to the mausoleum alone, and he’s attacked by the dwarves, one of which then chases him in a hearse, it being too short for Jody to see it through the car windows. It turns out that, once Mike has arrived in Jody’s car to help and that the dwarf has been stopped, that it was a crushed, shrunken version of Tommy.

Jody and Mike come to realize that the Tall Man has been killing people in the town (including their parents), and he has been crushing the bodies down to dwarf height, reanimating them, too, in order to do his bidding. As Mike later learns through the twin metal bar portal in that room with the dwarf containers, the dwarves will be the Tall Man’s toiling slaves.

On a symbolic level, this all means that the bad father wants to infantilize Jody and Mike (i.e., to shrink them down to size), and thus make them obey their dad’s every command (e.g., continue to run their father’s banking business, and so abandon their dreams of a music career, etc., and be good slaves to capitalism) without question. Another thing to consider is how the dwarves, as symbolic children, are projections of Mike’s self-loathing. He screams in terror at them because they are him; they’re what Wilfred Bion called ‘bizarre objects,’ hallucinated projections of Mike.

As Jody tries to confront what’s going on in the mausoleum, he tries to keep Mike out of it, in a misguided attempt to protect him. The Tall Man will go after Mike in the house, anyway. Jody trying to lock Mike up in his bedroom just makes Jody into yet another bad object, frustrating Mike in his wishes to be involved with confronting the Tall Man. Mike, in his frustration as Jody is carrying him upstairs to his bedroom, struggles and screams, calling Jody a “goddamn bastard!” and fearing that Jody will abandon him forever.

Mike manages to break out of his bedroom, and the Tall Man, all fingers intact again, abducts him and puts him in a hearse to take him to the mausoleum. Mike has a pistol, though, and he shoots his way out, making the hearse crash and go up in flames. He goes in the mausoleum and finds his father’s coffin, as Jody has already done.

Just before opening the coffin, Mike says, “I’m sorry, Dad, but we had to”…do what? Wish for his and Jody’s parents’ deaths? He’s horrified to see his father’s corpse gone. A bladed ball flies at his head, but Jody intervenes and shoots it with a shotgun. Instead of being mad at Mike for disobeying and escaping his bedroom, though, Jody hugs him. Jody is thus a good object again.

They’re pleased to run into Reggie again, knowing he isn’t dead (after having assumed that he and a couple of young women were killed earlier by the dwarves). Mike is especially pleased, of course, since Reggie’s another brother-figure. They go in that room with the dwarf-containers and the portal. Mike calls the other world, the one he’s almost fallen into, another planet, but I think it’s supposed to be hell, where the Tall Man and his dwarves are all evil spirits.

Finally, with everyone outside the mausoleum again, Reggie, thinking he’s helping the Lady in Lavender, is stabbed by her, just as Tommy–another brother-figure to Mike–was. Then Jody devises his plan to lure the Tall Man into the mine shaft and trap him there.

Mike has to confront the Tall Man yet again at home, the mortician calling him “Boy!”, like a harsh, disciplinarian father. He chases Mike out to the mine shaft, where he falls in the hole, one which Jody then drops boulders from on high to trap the Tall Man in. Jody seems like a triumphant hero.

Mike wakes up in bed. It was all just a dream…wasn’t it?

As it turns out, it was Jody who died…in a car wreck, and not Reggie from a stabbing. Mike knows those rocks won’t hold the Tall Man for long (if he could survive the fire from the crashing of the hearse into the pole, surely he can get out of that trap): of course not–Jody’s trap is merely symbolic of repression in the unconscious. We know Mike has been having nightmare after nightmare ever since his parents’ deaths, and now he’s having even more of them after Jody’s death.

Has the whole film been a dream, on and off?

We see Mike and Reggie in the living room of the house, with a fireplace burning behind them. It looks almost like a romantic setting. I don’t mean to say that Reggie is being a pederastic predator, or that Mike is welcoming such predation in his unconscious; but rather that these overtones are symbolic of Mike’s deep need to have the (platonic) love of a brother-figure, a need that would be particularly intense now that he’s just lost Jody. His feelings of abandonment are overwhelming.

Since Mike has been frustrated as well as loved by his now-all-dead objects, the bad versions of them, including that of Jody now, will all be internalized by the boy. He’ll need Reggie as a good object and brother-figure. Fittingly, Reggie picks up his acoustic guitar and begins humming and strumming that song he played earlier with Jody, the one about his woman leaving him. The film is all about loss, mourning, and a feeling of abandonment.

When Mike is in his room to begin packing for the road trip he and Reggie have planned, he sees the Tall Man again, in the mirror. Seeing the bad father, instead of himself, in the specular image is a reminder to us that the boy’s demons are all inside himself, internalized, not out there somewhere and so he’d be safe from them.

Like a stern father about to spank his son, the Tall Man calls out “Boy!” again, and the dwarves’ arms crash through the mirror glass, grab Mike, and take him screaming away. The childlike dwarves, about Mike’s height, get him because, like the Tall Man, they are him.

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 ‘American Beauty’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Analysis of ‘Shadow of a Doubt’

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

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

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

Here are some quotes from Shadow of a Doubt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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