…Through otherworldly
Hall of Tsars.
– And who is this one
inexorable and marbled?

He is so majestically
embellished by gold.
- A miserable policeman
of Pushkin’s fame.

He condemned the author;
he cut manuscripts,
the beastly butcher
of the Polish land.

Look carefully -
Never forget:
the murderer of the poet
Tsar Nicolas.
The First.

1931

Alexander Pushkin (1799 – 1837)

Tsar Nikolas I, 1796 – 1855 (Reign 1825 – 1855)

The semantic structure of the poem compiles what can be called “monarchic attributes” – through which Tsvetaeva poetically (sometimes hyperbolically) extends our understanding of the psychology of monarchs.

The first monarchic attribute, according to Tsvetaeva is to belong to the other world – “the otherworldly hall of tsars”, that is the marbled/golden immortality of tsars. Let’s following her, call it tsars’ “halliness” (don’t confuse it with holiness). In comparison with tsars, poets, for example, don’t have a hall, only a hole, hell and sometimes, posthumously, a hill.

The second monarchic attribute is to be inexorable (never consider anything outside his self-occupied self-image as the center of all attention).

The third monarchic attribute is being marbled (belonging to marbles, not to human race).

The fourth monarchic attribute is being majestic: to belong to a particular tautology of glory/glamour (that is a goal in itself and signifying only itself).

The fifth monarchic attribute is being framed by gold – not only dressed in clothes made of gold, but, probably, all in all from undergarment to body parts.

The sixth monarchic attribute is being a policeman by the call of the soul, who polices free speech and its ability to reveal the truth.

The seventh monarchic attribute is not only to be a policeman of free speech but to repress it by intimidation, incarceration and multiple forms of censorship (some of which are remarkably like those practiced by today’s democracies).

The eighth monarchic attribute is to invade and subdue other nations and countries if they dare to follow their own interests (instead of serving “our” interests) even if their interests are not adversarial to ours but just different (to interpret difference and independence/autonomy as an adversity).

The ninth monarchic attribute is to be able to absorb resistance without changing much in the manner of ruling over the population. What is left for us is to “look attentively“, to know and not forget what we have learned about despotism in order not to fall into sin of loyalty to tsars, kings, emperors, “gensecs” and (financial) “moneypulators”.

Each time when poet dares to expose monarchs’ plebeianism (aggrandized into glory) and nothingness (glamorized into plenitude), the ultimate victory of truth cannot be ruled out.

As we see in Tsvetaeva’s poem, poet’s influence is not other-worldly. It is the nature of earthly power to be other-worldly inspired and protected. Poet’s influence is appeal of life itself for recognition after eons of being subdued by the megalomania of supernatural trying to root itself within monarchy over life. Aren’t we Americans living today in monarchy that masks itself as a democracy? Of course, it is not autocratic monarchy, but one that is equally authoritarian.

How beautiful (and what an expression of refined taste!) that Tsvetaeva, one of the most emotionally subtle and intellectually sophisticated Russian language poets, allows herself to intonationally… hate this pathetic monarchic figure (in today’s language – just one of the comic strip super-heroes).

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941)

Freedom [is] in the being of speech through the presence of the self to the other.
Julia Kristeva

O’Neill wanted to avoid the melodramatic excesses… He wanted to develop what he called ‘behind life’ drama, drama that is generated by values (largely psychological…) rather than by incident. This attempt may account for… an emphasis on metaphorical function of stage sets… The ‘behind life’ quality… is best realized in distorted images.
R. Moorton (Ed.), “Eugene O’Neill’s Century”, 1991, p. 74

Jamie gives story about sensitivity and compassion in the brothel.

The sun of the fog: silver (through the fog) sun – that’s how Lumet introduces the world of the characters to the film’s viewers. The fog, the basic metaphor of LDJN – separates James, Mary, Jamie and Edmund from the world and from each other, and yet unites them in their awareness of being similar in their separateness. It is as if at this point of unconscious/informal family ideology of Tyrones – the very democratic psychology is born, a democratic combination of individualism and mutual respect that opens the avenue for mutuality and communication. It is this democratism of communication when togetherness is mediated by individual perspectives, is capable to gently but firmly oppose the traditional spirituality (the members of Tyrone family are born of) with its moral perfectionism, moralistic scapegoating and general personalization of all the problems leading to excess of guilt and shame (when real understanding is impossible and only grief and demonization of otherness and dissimilarity are available to scratch and sooth the existential wounds).

It is still morning, and Mary and James try very hard to start the day on a positive and cheerful note.

But the truth of Mary’s morphine addiction breaks through the neat façade of their relationships, and only mutual recriminations are left for old married couple to address their pain and disappointments.

In this still we see Mary’s archetypal pose in life – feeling abandoned by her husband (with his previous job in the theater and his bohemian friends) and sons – alone with her self-reproaches.

Mary knows that her younger son is seriously ill, and she is not only absurdly blaming herself for his illness but simultaneously, unconsciously using her grief as an excuse and justification for taking morphine.

Mary knows that Edmund got Consumption but she irrationally forbids him to say it (as if pronouncing the truth will make him doomed), and in the moment when fear for himself makes him weak and feel desperately dependent, he forces her to hear that he is ill.

For Mary, as for a mother it’s unbearable to feel that she is not a perfect parent in her son’s (and her own) eyes. She tries to stop Edmund’s questions about her condition (she knows that he considers her addiction as her betrayal of him, his brother and their father).

In certain moments she cannot control her fury created by unbearable guilt.

Edmund asks for his mother’s forgiveness for childishly accusing her for being not compassionate enough.

James and his two sons, both still materially dependent on him, jokingly “negotiate” who deserves an extra-drink and who is not.

Jamie like his mother is permanently self-reproachful. In his case the reason for his “moral guilt” is different from hers. He hates human hypocrisy and dishonesty and a preference for pleasant falsities and naïve albeit tricky fabrications instead of objective truth. But because for people it is not easy to hear from him the truth he feels bad that he often forces the truth on them.

Edmund and his father sometimes have long night conversations with tough moments of categorical disagreements and gracious moments of mutual empathy and reconciliation.

In this shot, Edmund who personifies in O’Neill’s play and Lumet’s film the poetic/mystical sensibility, is philosophizing about his spiritual identity. If today’s young people could think and talk as elegantly and penetratingly about their existential problems…

Edmund doesn’t know what to do to help his mother to stop taking morphine. But he doesn’t really understand why she needs this drug.

Edmund contemplates his destiny and the world’s future.

Mary in front of her husband and sons is giving herself to morphine induced delirium.

Eugene O’Neill (1888 – 1953), the author of the play Lumet’s film is based on.

Sidney Lumet (1924 – 2011)

______________________________________________________________

People who are “chosen” – provided with double affliction: emotional sensitivity and an intelligent mind, have problem with life – with human body, relationships with other people (and how life is organized in human society), with everything our nature and social conventions program us to look for – physical survival, satisfaction of amorous and sexual needs, higher place in the social hierarchy, the ordeals of parenting, a power and wealth, confrontation with power of others and with our own mortality and death. For such people who problematize everything (like the characters of “Long Day’s…” – LDJN), traditional spirituality is not protective idol (with claws of dogmatic beliefs), in multicolored shadow of which regular people feel encouraged and reinforced in their determination to fight with rivals, enemies and people’s and world’s otherness. But in people afflicted by the sensitivity for the problematic, traditional spirituality is a way to contact the mystery that invites them to get closer yet at the same time lets them maintain their freedom. For Mary Tyrone, the heroine of LDJN, this mystery of otherness of the world is perceived through the existential metaphor of the fog, amidst which she can stop to see herself “just living” in all imperfection of her life with its shame, guilt and pain. Mary wasn’t able to protect her second son who died in infancy. She is not able to help her grown-up sons to become successful and happy, and to prevent dangerous illness of one of them. And, on top of this, her relations with her husband, romantic and passionate at first, upon meeting real life produced bruises and wounds that become chronic with age.

All the members of the family O’Neill and Lumet represent in “Long Day’s…” are in a permanent confessional dialogue with one another, a dialogue that in today’s life is almost completely absent between Americans and more and more so between Europeans. Today’s mutuality is based on points of similarity which excite friendliness, not on the discovery of otherness that stimulates empathy, thinking and imagination. People more and more feel happy to find commonalities and are repelled from one another by dissimilarities. According to Julia Kristeva, linguist and psychoanalyst, the fact that today’s culture of fight for success and compensatory consumerism (of goods, services and entertaining and massaging images) puts aside the value of introspection and mutual communication of introspective and empathic experiences, has devastating consequences for human ability to live with other people and creates a climate of suspicion, hate, greed, frustration, endless wars and destruction. She is talking about a kind of freedom that is forgotten by our culture orienting us on economic power, scientific control and external victories – “Another concept of freedom favors being, and especially singular being, versus economic and scientific necessity.” (J. Kristeva, “Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis”, Vol. 2, Columbia, 2002, p. 264), and about civilizing and peace-orienting role of confessional speech – “… freedom [is] in the being of speech through the presence of the self to the other… this liberation of the being of speech [inscribes] freedom within the essence of philosophy as endless questioning.” (L. Kristeva, ibid, p. 263). The reason this style of mutual confessions is absent today is that the pervading mass cultural atmosphere contradicts this style (to consume is much more pleasant than to confess, and to cheer a baseball star is more pleasant than to analyze yourself and your interlocutor), to this we can add a stressful environment.

Commercial fiction and cinema use psychological mechanism of positive and negative identification of the viewers with the characters or protagonists. Filmmakers have to either reduce/smoothen or, conversely, in a caricatured way exaggerate otherness/dissimilarity between personages and the audience because in otherness lies the origin of “boredom”, suspicion and eventually loss of popularity of the work of art. But Lumet allows himself to base his film on the psychological uniqueness of his characters that makes it more difficult for the viewers to identify with them (without the immediately detected similarity that serves as a narcissistic bridge between the audience and the protagonists and is good for the box office).

James Tyrone, the father of the family, is not a religious dogmatic. For him god is Shakespeare and church is classic theater. Nevertheless his authoritarian posture towards the world, his proclivity to assess and judge people according to almost a priori standards, and the irrational need to unconsciously disavow truths about himself, other people and historical events and come up with endless alibis and justifications for innocent not even lies but examples of bad faith (to make life correspond to his beliefs/axioms) – all this discloses him as a traditional authoritarian personality although softened by his experience of being exposed to aesthetic grace of art enveloping his disappointments in life by the makeup of artistic beauty. James personifies the dogmatic side of religious psychology that is already displaced (and at the same time prolonged) by secular culture (to settle there not less solidly than it did in religion).

Mary Tyrone personifies the martyrdom facet of religious psychology. Mary feels shame and guilt for her inability to make her children live up to the standards of perfection formulated/established by the religious tradition. She feels so humiliated by her failure as a mother and as a woman that she can no longer pray to God or to Christ. She is passionately praying only to Virgin Mary who for Mary Tyrone represents the spiritual alternative to human life. “…Mary does want what none of us can really have; a second chance, a truly new beginning by making what has happened undone. Mary seeks to regain herself as she was before she lost her innocence, before she married Tyrone and set into motion the events that followed her marriage…” (R. Moorton, ibid, p. 139) Martyrdom through psycho-somatic pain – tactile distancing from the body and worshiping virginity are Mary’s creative “solutions” of the problem of her human destiny, protection against her drastic “failures” according to the rigid codes of religious idealism – “Psychological defenses are specific unconscious or semi-conscious patterns of behavior used to avoid internal or external threat. They are universal modes of dealing with anxiety and are intrinsic to personality and character.” (John Stroupe [Ed.], “Critical Approaches to O’Neill”, AMS, 1988, p. 170)

Jamie and Edmund personify the alternatives to religious psychology (its rebellious progeny trying to liberate itself from its influence). Jamie with his sharp critical mind, observant empathy and the ability to look at himself objectively (without disavowing the truth about his real motivations) represents the intellectual aspect of existential spirituality. Edmund with his poetic interests, literary talent and mystical bent represents its artistic aspect.

Like James when he meets an unpleasant reality starts to retreat into a protective modality of declamation (as if he is on the stage), Mary traumatized by the truth of an aging body and deteriorated relations with her husband (with whom she exchanges endless accusations about the past), tries to psychologically deny it through her very pain (somatization of the truth) and dreams about her convent days (free from profane life of human body) or the beauty of her wedding gown, and then taking morphine helps her to feel herself in a blissful prelapsarian condition. But in spite of her prejudicial perception of the reality of life (created in her by traditional concept of spirituality as being above-life), by separating from her sons into a delirium instigated by over-dosing on morphine, she, paradoxically, realizes her love for them. “Possessiveness can be selfish and kill, and possessiveness relates particularly to woman, as in the widespread mythological symbol of the impersonal, possessive, unwittingly selfish Great Mother, whose children are for her not persons but possessions that she consumes or smothers (envelops to the point of death)… But a psychologically sound woman knows how to relinquish, to let her natural protectiveness open into freedom for those she protects…” (Walter Ong, “Fighting for Life [Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness]”, Cornell, 1989, p. 100) By retreating farther into her delirium where past, present and the future are mixed in metaphysical eternity, Mary tries to liberate her sons from permanent agonizing worry about her drug-addiction, liberate them into surrendering her to her illness. O’Neill and Lumet emphasize that existential spirituality in all its health can act through neurotic and even through psychotic mechanisms. Mary Tyrone’s morbid addiction tells us about her refusal to sacrifice her children to a life that, according to her, is too predatory, indifferent and anti-Christian. In this she is different from Christ’s mother and, may be, even ahead in her not-resolvable suffering for the destiny of her children.

Special attention Lumet dedicates to the question of family members’ collective pathology of denying the truths and accusing each other in being carriers of lies. “The family…deals with internal tensions by denying their existence… This family tautology, together with work needed to maintain it, is a feature of the family held together by the narcissistic way of life.” (Christopher Lasch, “The Culture of Narcissism [American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectation]”, W.W.Norton, 1991, p. 172) The truth (examples of truths that are denied and disavowed are Mary’s drug addiction and Edmund’s Consumption) at first just bluntly denied, but it’s not enough to deny it to get rid of it because the family members know the truth perfectly well. So, it’s then projected (banished) into the “bad/evil person” (in Tyrone family it is usually Jamie who tries to defend the truth), and then through chastising him as a liar the truth is buried – mutilated and unrecognized. We remember this logical pathology of anti-truth psychological maneuverings in Bush Junior administration’s attempt to justify its decision to invade Iraq. The result is intellectual youth-abuse of unimaginable proportions when near one hundred percents of our soldiers who served in Iraq (and more than hundred thousand stationed there today) are made participants in a collective delirium that war in Iraq and continuation of staying there are absolutely necessary for defending our country from the enemies.

Edmund, Mary’s younger son, shares her love for the fog although their perception of the fog as a symbol is different. “…elder Tyrone tells his son Edmund that he has the ‘making of a poet’, Edmund replies that he hasn’t even the makings. ‘I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do… stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people’… the inarticulate child of fog speaks with his native eloquence… The fog was O’Neill’s first and last symbol of man’s inability to know himself, or other men, or his destiny… whenever searchers seek for meaning and identity, approach the truth about themselves they must run away, back to the fog, where, alone, they can ‘belong’. Mary tells her son ‘…I really love fog… it hides you from the world and the world from you… It is the foghorn I hate. It won’t let you alone. It keeps reminding you, and warning you, and calling you back’. Edmund too longs for that mysterious region where self was lost… He goes for a walk in the fog because ‘The fog was where I wanted to be… Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.’” (Doris V. Falk, “Eugene O’Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretative Study of the Plays”, Rutgers, 1958, p. 181) If for Mary fog is a metaphor of the traditionally spiritual salvation from the world, for Edmund it is the image of spiritual cradle – the origin of his inspiration and creativity. Traditional spirituality is simultaneously spiritual inspiration and hiding from it, opening yourself to the mystery of otherness of the world and retreating from the encounter with this mystery. If to consider that Edmund is a personification of O’Neill in young age, he is only partially belongs to traditional spirituality to fully reach existential spirituality later.

Lumet’s unique scope of spiritual sensitivity that opened him to the experience of traditional spirituality as power, Christianity with its humanistic potential to be a transitory step towards existential spirituality, and this last one (spirituality of living with mortality), puts him in a unique position to grasp O’Neill’s aspirations, and his own spiritual potentials.

Jamie doesn’t want to have an impeccable reputation

Wisdom of a positively negative frankness

Questions to help viewers in further study of the film

1.How can we compare the atmosphere of human togetherness in the Tyrone family with the atmosphere in a typical American family today, after hundred years of “historical development” of our country?

“…mind is neither brain, nor self, nor language, but the person’s ability to have a conversation with himself – the self acting as both speaker and listener – the “I” and the “me” speaking and listening to one another. When we talk to ourselves while sleep, we are dreaming. When we talk to ourselves while awake – in ways permitted in our society – we are thinking or praying. And when we talk to ourselves while awake – in ways prohibited in our society – we are (said to be) crazy… Conscience is a particular kind of self-conversation, the self’s inner dialogue concerning the goodness or badness of its own conduct. How does our conscience – that is, how do we – know how to do this? The same way we know everything else, namely, by learning… Although equating mind with brain implies a denial of the distinctively human activities called ‘minding’, ‘talking to oneself’, and ‘being responsible’, many experts now support this view.” (Thomas Szasz, “The meaning of Mind: Language, Morality, and Neuroscience”, Praeger, 1996, p. 2, 28, 75)

2. Can we say that passionate (and expressing care about each other) dialogues of O’Neill/ Lumet’s characters are dedicated to finding the truth of their identities and relationships, but simultaneously… hide this truth? Why these dialogues have this double intention?

3. What in the film is symbolized by Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction?

4. What is the fog a metaphor of in the film?

5. Why Mary does not pray to God-father or Jesus but only to Virgin Mary?

6. How does Mary’s growing withdrawal from human world reflect religious mythology?

7. Can we state that James Tyrone’s position toward Shakespeare is essentially religious, that he treats Shakespearean texts as a believer treats Bible?

8. Why Mary slaps Edmund when he tells her the truth about his illness?

9. What is the meaning of the fact that neither Jamie not Edmund married or at least think about getting married?

10. Can today’s idea of speedy correction of the “family problems” including divorce, superficial counseling or prescription drugs, which tries to eliminate the problem instead of solving it, is exactly what Tyrone family is so lucky to avoid?

11. What is Mary’s the most basic problem as a religious person?

12. How can we qualify the four characters of the film as the personifications of different aspects of spiritual experience?

13. Can we call Mary’s tendency to mix (under the influence of morphine) her memories, actual life and future – an escape (from life, history, sociality, otherness, the unknown) into Static Eternity as a radical psychological defense?

14. How can we characterize the difference in the very religiosity between Mary and James? Is his model of perfection more ritualistic, aesthetic and sociomorphic?

15. How does Mary Tyrone unconsciously try to help her sons even while regressing into delirium?

16. Can we find similarity between “sensitive” and intellectually developed male characters – Jamie and Edmund, and “brutes” – Hank from “The Night of Iguana” (NI) and Stanley Kowalski from “A Streetcar Named Desire” (SND)?

17. What is the basic difference between how members of Tyrone family behave in relation to each other and other people and how Stanley treats other characters in SND? What is the difference between democratic and totalitarian codes of mutuality?

18. What is so peculiar in how Jamie and Edmund react on their mother’s drug addiction?

19. Why Jamie and Edmund are so ambivalent about their father?

20. How can we characterize the four characters’ of “Long Day’s…” use of language in comparison with how Ms. Fellowes in NI or Stanley Kowalski in SND talk?

21. What is the difference between Mary Tyrone’s drug addiction and the addiction to prescription or illegal drugs in young people today?

22. In what sense Mary Tyrone’s position towards her sons is radically different from the position of Saint Mary towards her Son? Is this difference connected with Mary Tyrone’s drug addiction?

Claude Miller imagines or explains future shot

Mockery even at the shadow of gender uncertainty in dormitory of a summer boy-scout camp

Mark (one of the camp instructors) by putting on a mask of machoism tries to hide his own complexes

In “The Best Way to Walk” (1976) Miller deals with a topic most directors try to avoid – gender uncertainty in adolescents that can be the cause of so much anxiety and stimulate tormenting ordeals in those affected by feelings of confusion and ambivalence. Like men for centuries were afraid of women and for this reason have repressed them and on this repression erected/built their sense of masculine superiority and greatness, like the rich/strong countries have for centuries been repressing the poor/weak ones, so the ideological masculinity in men has repressed gender or/and sexual uncertainty and on this repression grew their machoistic power to self-assert, self-aggrandize and to subdue others.

Because for Miller as a director it was difficult to address the problem directly by observing teens, he modified the plot in a way that gender and sexual identity as a problem and militantly machoistic reaction on any ambiguity around it on part of other boys, are represented through the camp’s young instructors/teachers. This gives Miller the chance to show the conservative ideological agenda as an ideology in action.

Miller’s analysis of the cowardice of machoistic behavior and self-image in the film is profound and full of unique and artistically arranged psychological details.

David, the main character in “This Sweet Sickness”, doesn’t understand the difference between his imagination and reality, between his amorous projection into the object (target of his passions) when he is overwhelmed by his desire, and the right of Juliette to respond according to the truth of her feelings, not according to his wishes and expectations. His proneness to instantly lose himself in amorous abandon goes together with his impatient unconscious expectation of seeing her also losing herself in the cloud of erotic mutuality. He doesn’t have the ability to observe himself and her before giving himself to the wave of psychological excitement.

Even after he accidentally kills Julliette (undisciplined passion invites accidents), for David it is easier to imagine returning to the moments before her death than to become conscious of his psychotic inability to observe and control his passion.

In “This Sweet Sickness” (1977) Miller concentrates on the psychology of sexual obsession, personified by Gerard Depardieu’s David. Everybody wants to live and be happy, but people who are from childhood deprived of positive emotional contact with parents, want to live greedily, desperately, ecstatically, in frenzy. In “Sweet Sickness” Miller wants us to have frightening encounter with a frustrated, and for this reason exaggerated lust for fusing with the yearned object. We see crime committed in complete blindness and innocence, and how the behavior of the obsessed/possessed people, as we know in US too well in the behavior of many political leaders and Wall Street financial schemers, tends to be impregnated with prejudices, superstitions, illusions and endless blunders. Miller and Depardieu show the moment of amorous satisfaction as completely illusory, almost a hallucinatory experience, and shed light on the fact of how much absurdity in obsessed/possessed personality is projected into their criminal act.

Charlotte Castang, the heroine of “L’Effrontee” (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is emotionally not protected from the world. In her gaze we see the abysmal genuineness immediately involving the world. She is the personification of the aliveness of the world, the unity of the human and world’s existence.

Here we see Clara Bauman – Charlotte’s ideal, in the arms of her business manager (Jean-Claude Brialy), a person whose humanity is profitably exchanged for the success of his enterprise.

In “L’Effrontee” (1985) Miller represents the desire for intimate fusion not with psychologically “equal”, but with a “sublimated” object – a person who incarnates for the subject the ideal of achievement, success and artistic personality. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays an adolescent girl grown without a mother. Prone to melancholy, she is fascinated by a girl of her age who is worshipfully adored by everybody for being a famous pianist. Clara Bauman became Charlotte’s “best self” – her ego-ideal, her very soul embellished by her adoration.

By observing life of two girls we come to the conclusion that Clara, the prodigal child who practically works full time trying to upgrade her professionalism, is transformed by society into a sort of robot with shockingly standard emotional reactions while Charlotte is a miracle of vitality, emotional liveliness and intellectual curiosity. Through comparing the two girls Miller describes two directions in the development of society – instrumental and existential, orientation on achievement and success, on work and money and, on the other hand, on life and aliveness. Miller as if asks the viewers to think about what kind of future for human society they would chose – filled by financially successful conformists or people with a unique personalities and genuineness of the soul.

Janine (Charlotte Gainsbourg several years older than in previous film “L’Effrontee”) is ready to do everything to be accepted by the world. The desperate sincerity of her desire to live and be appreciated becomes part of her petty criminality and we, viewers, are torn between admiring her and reproaching her. Janine is a pure victim of a society that has corrupted her into manufactured dream of glamour, in the same sense in which some of our American soldiers abusing Iraqi and Afghani civilians are victims of fabricated wars (wars without authentic reason) that have corrupted them into the fantasy of their superiority, dream of being supermen with super-weapons.

Janine is trying hard to please her boyfriend – to let him, who is also a victim of the parental absence or indifference, to self-assert himself with her. She wants to make his life more cheerful. She identifies with him (she loves herself in him) and is happy by his happiness.

“The Little Thief” (1988) narrates how the success of mass culture in post-WW2 period with its entertainment, consumerism and orientation on popularity and success corrupts the soul of a young girl. Janine has been undernourished by parental love (by a caring environment) and finding herself between Hollywood glorious glamour and boutiques she is transformed into a greedy seeker of popularity trying to help herself by stealing cloth and cosmetics. Being traumatized from childhood, Janine is ecstatic to accumulate more and more experiences of successful self-assertion with people, and because she is personally charming and emotionally an authentic person her fight for acceptance becomes successful. But her success with men doesn’t include their real care about her. Her abandonment continues and finally leads her into a juvenile detention institution. Finally it’s only relations with art make her independent from symbiotic relationships with other people, things, images and ideas, from the need to be successful with others by any price. Miller’s conclusion is that post-WW2 so called democratic society is not able or interested to help people like Janine, only cultural education can. But it becomes less and less available.

Sophie Vasseur, the protagonist of “The Accompanist” (Romane Bohringer) who lives amidst poverty and hunger in France during WW2 – enters the theater where her future ideal – superstar Irene Brice entertains elegant public (those who are successful even under Nazi occupation) with her godly voice by singing the best pieces of Western chamber music.

Narcissism and triviality of Irene’s character (happily co-existing with her vocal talent), helps Sophie go through very important experiences of learning how not to become fascinated too quickly and easily, how not to become an appendix to her own idolatrous emotions. She also learns to differentiate between the image a person irradiates and the real personality. From idealistic girl she became more emotionally mature person capable to observe reality and to think about what things mean. In other words, she learned how to add invisible reality to what seems obvious.

After learning the truth about Irene that shocked Sophie, she becomes reserved, not allowing herself to get emotionally involved too readily.

In this shot Miller uses a realistic situation to make the heroes of the film dressed like the Soviet Russians of the same period. By this he helps the viewers to become aware that psychological idolatry is not just a matter of personal relations and love but exists in politics also – a Communist country as a typical totalitarian system is based on the psychological idolatry of its leaders, public figures, stars, and ideological concepts. Here we see Irene between her husband and Sophie, both of whom personify, in the film, the human common phenomenon of being psychologically idolatrous.

In “The Accompanist” (1992) Miller analyses two sorts of love – love for the “equal” objects of love, and love for the ideal projected into another person (which this person comes to represent for the subject). To have an ideal (and to be prone to project it into the other person) is unavoidable for those who dream of reaching an advanced form of human development and unconsciously look for role models. But there are traps on this noble road that must be understood and can be avoided. The film dissects the heroine’s “love” for and disappointment with her “ideal”, personified by the artistically talented but psychologically mediocre singer, that eventually lead to her growth as a human being. As always is the case with Miller, analysis of melodramatic knot is going together with analysis of political reality, and the personal is mixed with social.

“The Accompanist” is perhaps Claude Miller’s most impressive masterpiece. The film’s visual imagery is semantically complicated and elegant. In the audience the film generates endless questions that demand viewers’ concentration, thinking and remembrance of details. But returning to the film to clear the impressions, stylistic vignettes and meaning of various scenes and situations produces additional pleasures, sparkles of which are implanted into the narrative by the director in advance.

Films of Claude Miller are extremely valuable for everybody who has the ability to consider their present level of development as not ultimate but a prelude for future improvements, discoveries and transformations. Miller’s cinema is a call for our psychological and spiritual development and the aesthetic text-book to further our psychological/spiritual sophistication and humanization.

Joan Miro, “Man and Woman in Front of a Pile of Excrement”, 1936

Why for Joan Miro, a famous artist with a solid reputation, a genius according to many, to paint a work of art about “man and woman in front of a pile of excrement”? What is it – caprice of an eccentric talent, the tickling desire to shock the public or megalomaniacal assertion on part of an exceptional person of his right to do whatever he wants? The answer is – neither of this. It is the desire to say the truth. – The desire to tell truth? Is truth between a naked man, a naked woman and a pile of excrement? – Not always, but sometimes, for example, in certain historical moments, it’s certainly is. – What does this picture have to do with historical periods? – Look at the date of this painting. It’s 1936. What was happening in 1936 that could be of importance for the Spanish painter with a European fame and worldly range of concerns?

First, the outbreak of Spanish Civil war which in several years later ended with a victory of Spanish fascists led by general Franco. Secondly, Nazi Germany breaks the treaty of Versailles and joined Italy and Japan in forming an alliance. May be these and related events gave for Miro, well-known for his anti-fascist position, reason to associate the European/Spanish man and woman with a pile of excrement? When in the beginning of the April 2012 we learned from the polls that among American men, president Obama (limping but still a democrat) is behind Romney (polished by coins money-athlete), you can also start to think in terms of excrement as a metaphor of psychological condition of the American males. Poor worship money and admire the rich whose interests are directly opposite to that of the poor. Similar situation was in Spain, Germany and Italy in 1936. Poor pay not only with money (through taxes) which governments siphon to the one percent of the population to provide it with more profits/power, but with their lives on the battlefields of the fraudulent wars. Miro understood back then, what majority of males cannot grasp today. That’s why we are especially privileged in the spring of 2012 to see a pile of waste matter in his painting.

According to Miro, Europe produced fascism with the same spontaneity and innocence as a couple of Spanish peasants produced a pile of fecal mass. In the world Miro represents in this painting, the sun belongs to matter, to earth – the sky is black. The sun is of gold and fascist ambition, of the shining glory of power. Soil and sand are transformed by human greed and corrupted dreams into sunny earthliness that doesn’t exist without the spots of redness of human blood. Between the black heaven and the sunny land lies the darkly orange colored area of human flesh that became soil.

The couple is dancing after having fertilized the field! Look at the painting – the fecal product is dancing too! Life is wonderful, as it is for the one percent of American money-bellies today. May be, some of them will join in the dance depicted by Miro? For some dancing not only continues after fascism has triumphed but it became even more fun. The blood is spilled but it is still enough alive blood in the veins (look at the rooster-male’s feet, legs or head) – for drinking, dancing and excreting! Man’s sex is like a barracuda or a parasitic worm, while the female’s – like a predatory plant. Their fertility is anal, like fertility of gold and war, profit and power, luxury and lechery, and Stock Market. The arms of the woman-chicken are… much longer than the man-rooster’s (perhaps, because chicken-woman’s greed grows out of her adhesive need to embrace/appropriate/consume the man-rooster) – possession of land and property is the chicken-feminine aspect of physical expansion into the world, while greed of the rooster-man is connected with his need to possess weapon or power of gold-money.

The fascist world in Miro’s painting is hell – real hell is not how our ancestors, yearning for psychological consolation, imagined it trying to persuade themselves that they live in the better place than hell. But Hell is always engraved in the present tense and tends to be close to our neighborhood. Hell is the very dance of the fascist times. Miro refers here not only to the actions of fascists in a narrow – political and military, directly repressive sense, but to the fact that people tend to continue to enjoy life even under fascism, that after murdering and torturing fascists continue to enjoy themselves (some of them even write lyrics, some cheer themselves by posing with corpses of their enemies). According to the painting, this continuation of ordinary human life of petty satisfactions (symbolized by the dancing of the rooster- and chicken-like monsters) during predatory times – is the very substratum of fascism. It is the eternal philistine inside fascist (eternal philistinism inside fascism) makes fascism happen again and again. But what about just philistines who just want to survive fascist times without losing taste for life? – These not fascist philistines are still fascists but they are smart: they outsource fascism to enjoy their everyday pleasures without blots of bad taste. The Miro painting is exactly about this type of people more than other types – they make money, eat, drink, copulate, excrete, dance, grow money and express gratitude to the creator for being so generous to them.

Like gold in soil banishes verdure (destroys nature) – in Miro’s painting green is only present in the echo of the golden ambition, alive blood transforms the spilled blood into an excrement. Miro’s painting is very close in inspiration with Max Ernst’s “Barbarians”-series. It is the verdict of human culture against tireless attempts of the internal fascism to destroy humanistic sensibility of the human race and dismantle its democratic potentials.

Is this longest scene in “Oedipus Rex” an action scene? – No, it’s a rare, in the history of cinema, representation of psychological archetype. What archetype Pasolini opens for us in this scene? – That of our life long oedipal rivalry with the archaic father of our unconscious (the fundament of our anger, aggression, compulsions and hateful feelings in later years). This archetype is especially dynamic and “swollen” in totalitarian systems living by rivalry, competition, hunt for power and wealth, by wars and destruction of the environment.

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A democratic approach to Oedipus’ psychological situation would be a psychotherapeutic one. It could proceed in the following direction: Oedipus, you had a father who, when you were still an infant, hated you (because of his psychological problems), and you learned to hate him back. Now, this hate is inside you, and it is so intense that it can come to express itself in sudden aggressive feelings that can push you to violent acts. We want to help you to get rid of this violence…

To be condemned by Gods/destiny (to be Oedipus) means to grow up in a politico-economic system (based on rivalry, competition and fight for power) when this fact of living under impersonalized rule is expressed through mythological language. But when a person follows belligerence and injustice as systemic norms and has internalized the systemic evil (adorned by sentimental moralistic fables) he is forced to take full personal responsibility and pay the price by being punished. In other words, system is seducing people into sins and crimes (by suggesting them to compete, fight and be power instead of being love and then punishes those who didn’t succeed in becoming powerful, for sinning and committing crimes.

The psychology of Oedipus, according to Pasolini, is that of a hero. Oedipus needs to redeem himself – to neutralize his condemnation by heroic deed(s) and only then he is considered deserving love in a form of social recognition. The hero needs to be ready to murder for the sake of the system and be ready to lose his life in order to deserve love. Official Christian ritual of the baptism reflects this universe of primary condemnation of children considered not-worthy by the fact of being born.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini’s visual metaphor of Oedipus’ unconscious memory of his father and mother together interprets this memory as witnessing the primal scene.

While nurturing baby Oedipus his mother suddenly feels worry that something terrible will happen to her son.

The meaning of this shot of the human baby tied to a stick and carried through the desert is that this happens in essence with children in various historical periods – child abuse and neglect including installment in children’s minds and hearts ideologically poisonous worldviews (aggrandizing “our” leaders and nation and scapegoating other people) which will later victimize us as adults. In this sense today’s American kids are psychologically “tied to a stick (of brainwashing) and carried into the desert (of mass culture and militarism)”.

Oedipus (made concerned by nasty rumors about his past) came to the oracle at Delphi. In this shot we see Pasolini’s version of totalitarian “tree of knowledge” – when knowledge exists without explanation, in a form of dogma and prescription.

The oracles of pre-democratic knowledge predict the future according to an authoritarian code: it will happen because I said so. Even when what the oracle predicts is true, the absence of explanation as to why it is true prevents the possibility of changing reality through understanding the reasons why reality is like that.

Knowledge without understanding is inseparable from the world without determination. It is oriented against people, treats them as victims of the reality. It functions like god’s commandments, leader’s commands and authorities’ orders. It enacts our destiny that crushes us under its hooves and wheels.

Oedipus is trying to resist his destiny but without scientific/scholarly knowledge (based on understanding), all his attempts to be on the side of good is doomed to fail. Oedipus becomes a soldier of evil while his intention is exactly to be on the side of the good (to resist the foretold crimes that in advance are attributed to him).

Oedipus thinks that the disgusting arrogant old man he meets on the road must be justly punished for his disrespectful and despotic behavior but he doesn’t know that this man is his father. Oedipus becomes like our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan – being on the unreal side of reality and acting in the name of motivations unknown and alien to him.

To underline the impulsiveness of Oedipus’ aggression in a scene on the road, Pasolini makes the camera move quicker than the character’s limbs do. His aggressive desire (impersonated by the camera) is quicker than his arms.

Children who were abused (physically, emotionally, verbally and intellectually) by parental authority have a strong precondition to become hostile and connected with world on an emotional, not rational level.

It well can be that up to 90% of those who have grown up in an authoritarian families or even in democratic ones with emotional alienation between its members, tend either join the army, be for military solution of international problems or/and vote for ultra-conservative or support ultra-left politicians and be ideologically militant and intolerant of dissimilarity.

Oedipus is doomed to need one day a military uniform (he didn’t grow up in one of authoritarian families which provide the most soldiers and people who think that fight and war are the best means to solve problems, but his unconscious remembers the abusive father whom he himself has “forgot”). Now it is time for him to step on the military path.

After years of being married to an abusive (suspicious, capricious, cruel and sexually compulsive man) Oedipus’ mother Jocasta has lost the gentleness and tenderness of her soul.

After his early childhood that was spoilt by emotional problems with the father, Oedipus so desperately needs to become a power figure. He looks at the viewers of the film – he takes us as witnesses of his honestly deserved triumph over destiny, without knowing that this triumph is the ultimate trap.

Oedipus is sincerely in love, but with his emotionally hurting early childhood and the spineless love of the couple which adopted him he is doomed to make one wrong choice after another. The problem, according to Pasolini, is not the violation of incest taboo, but coming too close to learning the traumatizing, horrifying truth about his childhood.

By becoming king, Oedipus, without understanding it, opens himself to the overwhelming truth about his past. It is like for the young people involved today in “Occupy movement” to discover that they don’t live in a democratic country anymore. In the scenes depicting investigation of the death of the previous king Laius, Pasolini emphasizes the inertia and the legalistic artificiality of human speech when human Law is applied to individuals whose transgressions are result of Gods’ condemnation/ systemic logic, not their own “criminal nature”. Courtroom kind of verbal exchanges, according to Pasolini, are like artificial beard and a tall hat we see on Oedipus in this shot.

This shot registers one of the most important and meaningful symbolic images Pasolini creates in the film – Oedipus’ obsessive gesture of biting the back of his palm (his destiny) when he feels trapped in it in spite of all his attempts to avoid it.

Tiresias-the prophet is a typical intellectual functioning in essentially totalitarian system – he knows the truth as dogma or fact but he cannot explain it because regular people are not allowed to understand it. Tiresias is doomed to individualize transgression of taboo and Law (he doesn’t consider the role of the system in forming individual behavior). He sees only personal motivations for transgressions, not “systemic condemnation” of Oedipus that functions instead of psychological motivation for transgression.

In a totalitarian atmosphere intellectual’s truth is always sad and “blind” because he knows that this truth is concentrated on individual transgressors without taking into consideration the wider (systemic) causes of the individual transgression, and that this is the fundamental injustice to make an individual pay price for the values of a system.

Under a totalitarian rule intellectual is always accused and even scapegoated by those who transgress or are ready to do – the conservative masses or the radical left individuals. And he is the first victim during the directly fascist periods of totalitarian rule that can be either with conservative ideology (Nazism, Fascism) or radical left ideology (Soviet Union). Oedipus’ reaction on Tiresias’ truth is typical for desperate conservative poor who are prone to try to gain social status by semi-criminal or even criminal means. Today in US this poor segment of conservative population can easily become voluntary militia groups under the banners glorifying the one-percent of the wealthiest Americans.

Jocasta is not bothered by the accusations of incest. And she is right – much more serious crime is hidden behind it (her real crime is of the same kind as child- and youth-abuse and neglect including the absence of humanistic education for the young, and their ideological molestation) that, like the crimes of today’s wealthy decision makers will, probably, never be put before the light of justice.

Pier Paolo Pasolini plays himself episodic role of popular leader who appeals to Oedipus suggesting to him to act in the interests of people, not to try to save his reputation. This person’s political position is similar with that of some today’s democratic politicians who are interested only in immediate benefit for the people and not with justice to the individual who is marked for destruction by conservative hate – in this case, the king, and who are ready to betray/sacrifice Obama, as they did with Clinton, Gore and Kerry, for the sake of not “distracting attention” from “people’s” agenda. Pasolini shows in this character the limitations of mindless or crude type of “humanism” (that is without intellectual sophistication and philosophical perspective).

The angelic figure of the savior of baby Oedipus, finally is found, but second intervention of goodness into Oedipus’ destiny is not, according to Pasolini, much help, in comparison with the power of fundamental betrayal that comes to light.

Jocasta’s shame (that has nothing to do with incest) forces her final decision.

Pasolini’s Oedipus blinded himself not because of the sin of incest (as it was suggested for eons) but because of learning about betrayal of his mother who cowardly followed her husband‘s psychotic fears about their son as a danger to him, instead of trying to reason him.

We see here Oedipus after blinding himself – after he found out the whole truth about his father’s hate and betrayal of his mother. To understand better what Pasolini is suggesting here, let’s think about our soldiers killed or maimed in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and about those of them who became torturers or murderers of civilians, or those who after leaving the army became happy forgetful consumers of pop-music, video-gamers and sport events. The majority of American vets have lost the desire or the ability to see the truth of what’s happened to and with them. They are real Oedipus’s of today’s history.

Reappearing in Italy in an epoch of European economic prosperity Oedipus sees that what he understood about human world is not for regular people who are not able to relate to the truth and prefer appealing lies, ideological propaganda and commercial advertisement. In consumerist society almost nobody is attentive and sensitive to truth – people are busy consuming things, services, slogans, images and consoling prejudices. Oedipus ends up becoming like Tiresias whom he himself refused to listen to. But Oedipus’ truth is much more encompassing than Tiresias’ – it is not about individual transgression of Law, but about a systemic transgression of basic existential expectations equal to the very possibility of life. This shot is a resume of relations between historical process and historical truth up to the present moment. We still live in the ruins of formal/consumerist democracy. Will a post-consumerist society be willing to hear Oedipus’ truth? Will we be able to return to critical truth-searching among mass pauperization?

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Everybody needs encouraging and a protecting truth. But life needs our collaboration, our initiative; we need to become tougher without losing confidence and positivity. One of the factors of psychological maturation is getting the ability to take the truth as it is (in order to later to be able to elaborate an alternative truth, more refined and more humane), but to develop this ability we have to be prepared by humanistic education, by teachers who care about us and about life. “Edipo Re” is about existential education – about pedagogy of truth and how it has been twisted into anti-pedagogy that puts factual truth about life as it is – against people, makes it misanthropic, a vampire. The film follows Oedipus’ journey – his attempts to discover the truth about himself, his life and his destiny. It is about young people trying to understand life and how culture by its very organization hides the truth: reformulates it in a monstrous way and uses it to hurt and destroy those who are trying to understand – by not letting them to analyze and study the reality. Then authoritarian rulers and rules sacrifice us to their dogmatic repressive truths like Pasolini’s Oedipus was destroyed by the masked truth about his father’s cruelty and his mother’s betrayal that is formulated in terms of his, not their, crimes. It is the way to shift the responsibility from institutions of power and organization of social world to the individual. It is like telling a person who was subjected to corporeal punishment in childhood that he will become murderer because he hates people and has an evil character. When people like Oedipus finally will break through the distortion and understand they will be so demoralized/existentially shattered by what they have learned that it will be very difficult to start life anew. It happened in Nazi Germany when people got it that the Nazi ideology of racial superiority is destructive for the German people. This happened in Russia when people finally got it that the solemn doctrine of Communism is a fake. It will happen here in US in 21st century if people will believe the flattering, appealing and fooling conservative propaganda and again elect representatives of the one percent of the population to be the Congressional and Senatorial leaders of the country.

“Edipo Re” is about the tragic perversion in cultural educational function (in educational relationships of elder and younger generation) when knowledge is directed against the interests of young people and future generations. As we are learning from Pasolini’s film, the first strategy of making truth turn away from its seekers is hiding and individualizing it – making truth secret, enigmatic, a personal matter, a matter of self-assertion and an attack on someone’s public image. This strategy is pointed at in the film when Oedipus encounters the rumors about his past. In US this anti-cognition “pedagogy” expresses itself in pseudo-democratic cliché that every opinion is equal to opposing opinion, that opinions are always subjective, that there is no difference between scientific truth and private interest or prejudice, and that even to insist on an objective difference between a competent and educated opinion and incompetent and uneducated one is a sign of pre-democratic elitism. The second strategy of alienating truth from people is to distort it, to transform it into truth of authorities – of gods, fathers, clergy, social and political elite (including Wall Street money-pulators or Supreme Court wigs and twigs). This strategy is represented in the film by oracle’s prophesy and later by Tiresias’s predictions. The third strategy is to make truth so extreme and indifferent, so cruel and unbearable, that it makes a person to wish to hide from it, to escape it because it’s not mediated by democratic pedagogy (like psychotherapeutic attention or encounter with serious art of the kind Pasolini’s cinema belongs to). This strategy is characterized in the film when Oedipus, already king and husband of Jocasta, is desperately trying to fight the truth about his crime of killing previous king. In US this strategy of making truth antagonistic to human beings often takes form of using Laws for gaining political advantage by destroying political opponents (as conservatives did with Clinton by using Monika Lewinski affair, or in the case of Kerry by smashing his military hero reputation, etc.).

Democratic approach to Oedipus’ psychological situation, on the other hand, would be a psychotherapeutic one. And it could proceed in following direction: Oedipus, you had a father who, because of his deep psychological problems, hated you as a child, although you had done nothing wrong to deserve this hate. He expressed his fury toward you because he was jealous that part of your mother’s attention belonged to you. He wanted to possess her soul completely. You felt his hate and started to hate him back. This hate is inside you, and it is so intense that it can express itself in your sudden impulsive aggression that may push you to violent behavior. We want to help you to overcome this complex that if it will be left intact can endanger your. In comparison with humanistic approach to a person with Oedipus’ childhood, to make the prophetic prediction that he is doomed to become an “exotic” criminal is, according to Pasolini, not just a fascist reaction but with obscene twist in it, with the element of mockery at the victim of criminal abuse.

The fourth strategy to make truth about life incompatible with human beings’ cognition is to make truth antagonistic to living, extremely unbearable and destructive, is realized in totalitarian systems when after destroying human lives in collective disasters they are finally close to collapse. This level is only hinted at in “Edipo Re” when the film shows the Oedipus’s childhood under fascism. This final phase of incompatibility of truth of factual life with human needs, with the possibility of social life in general – Pasolini addresses in his last film “Salo” (1976).

To represent a totalitarian antagonism of truth and life not statically but historically and express this historicity in stylistic (poetic) form Pasolini borrows from science-fiction expressive arsenal – he makes the main character wander from one historical period to another (by doing it he returns science fiction genre where it belongs – to the very form of art). Pasolini starts with the fascist Italy when Oedipus is still a child, when boys, like today, play in war (then on the street, today in video-games with super-destructive weapons) and where Oedipus’s father is becoming jealous about his wife’s attention to their little child. Fascist worldview and sensibility are considered by Pasolini a common denominator of human history. Fascism is a culmination of conscious and unconscious hate towards young people on part of elite of the ruling males who love to use young bodies as a means of providing themselves with more power. These “silverbacks of fascist domination” hate the idea that in “freedom” young people will waste themselves on humanistic education, criticism of the social hierarchs and sexual pleasures (this position is impersonated by Oedipus’ father Laius’ pathological jealousy of the baby and his demand to banish his son to the death). The world of Sophocles’ play provides Pasolini with a semantic skeleton of basic totalitarian situation when people’s very intelligence has been put against their interests, health and life. As a seeker of truth Oedipus is put against himself by the sinister systemic powers. When today authoritarian/conservative father thinks/says that his son is better go to serve in the army or he will become criminal he comes very close how Pasolini understands Sophocles’ idea of Oedipus’ condemnation.

In the final part of the film Pasolini concentrates on a special systemic posture towards truth, a particular manner of its destruction which is characteristic of the period of Italian economic boom during post-WW2 period. It is a radical suspension of truth, not just its distortion – it is a distraction of people’s attention from truth by making life commercialized to such a degree that it becomes really harmful for human emotional, intellectual and physical health. Pseudo-democracy of consumerism and entertainment is the period when Oedipus appeared amidst European “mass prosperity” only to find that understanding he has obtained with such a high price is irrelevant when people move around as ghosts and robots. The conditions of life in most materially prosperous period of European history make Oedipus not just suffer because of hate of the fathers (social authorities and wealthy elites) for the younger generations and because of the betrayal of mothers unable to protect the young from this hate, but to grasp that there is no place for him to live – that nobody is interested in truth.

Can we characterize this strategy of suspension of the truth (instead of just distorting it) by distracting people’s attention from it by swarming materialistic pursuits the fifth strategy of creating antagonism between truth and human beings – when this extreme incompatibility between human cognition and reality is achieved not by making truth unbearable but not existent (un-really pleasant/entertaining)?

Today in 21st century the injustice of the system towards its children/its citizen has gone so much farther than what it was in a period when people had become shadows (of life) blinded by their pseudo-prosperity. Today people are again in danger of extreme pauperization. Truth about life again becomes unbearable – the strategy of manipulation by the financial and political elite has radically changed in comparison with the times when Pasolini was alive (when his Oedipus “returned” from his Ancient Greece experiences). Now the fifth strategy becomes mixed with the fourth one. One-percenters of 21st century got the idea that today it is the right moment when they have a real chance to grab as much money from the public as they want, and get away with it. Will this extreme socio-economic attack on people provide new chances that people to start to listen, to hear and to see Pasolini’s Oedipus has to tell them about the basic betrayal of human beings by the systems of power?

It is not negative knowledge (knowledge about his destiny without understanding it – without the whys, the hows and becauses) that kills Oedipus’s desire to want to live – it only took away his eyes which don’t want to see anymore. It is him being suspended between fascist negative (destructive) knowledge (messages of guilt, shame, crime, self-sacrifice and death) and the actual vacuum of a genuinely positive (humanistically oriented) knowledge. It is very close to the situation of the young Americans today torn between militaristic propaganda and corrupting promises of being super-human among the third-world on the one hand and their admiration of the new Dukes of super-wealth on the other.

Pasolini’s Oedipus is a personification of today’s citizens of democracy who are abandoned by the tough but positive truth because today’s equivalents of Oedipus’ adopting parents (Polibus and Merope, kind and loving people but without a larger vision of life) – the democratic politicians are unable to explain the essence of the basic disagreement between the one-percenters and their agents – conservative leaders, and the necessity to guard and to farther develop democracy. By being unable to “talk democracy” they leave the place open for conservative propagandists (today’s oracles and prophets) to hide, to distort and to suspend the truth in the manner that Pasolini’s film so effectively explained.

In “Edipo Re” Pasolini works with images we can call – images of psychological wholeness – when characters communicate to viewers not their particular reactions and not their ready-made personalities (the level of Hollywood commercial movies), but their personalities with particular destinies which are alive, continuing in time, not ready-made, and future-oriented. In the Oedipus’ story where destiny of the main character is completely predicted, Pasolini contests this closure by adding new historical periods, by inserting historical process itself into personal destiny. Of course, these two added by Pasolini to the Sophocles’ tragedy, historical periods (the Italian Fascism and Italian post-WW2 material prosperity) are objectively not establishing, on the level of meaning, the alternative to how human destiny was understood in the ancient world. But on the level of narrative form Pasolini represents the world as alive, not ready-made as it is the case for most directors who create films as cinematic artifacts. Stylistically Pasolini represents history as alive, as living organism even when semantically it is dead, not renovating/upgrading itself. His very style keeps hope alive.

Pasolini is also a master of symbolic images which elaborate the characters’ destinies as transcending concrete situations. For example, we see Oedipus committing murder when the sun blocks his sight – when he is psychologically blinded by the sun’s beams/arrows – that reminds him/associated by him with the hateful gaze of his father (we see in the beginning of the film) that paralyses him and provokes him to hate back. By inserting this association inside the hero’s action, Pasolini connects past and present motivations into one psychological stimulus to act in a certain way. By blinding himself after discovery of his mother’s betrayal, Oedipus unconsciously connects his father’s hate and his mother’s betrayal in one overwhelming determination – it’s Laius’ hate acting through Jocasta’s betrayal – makes him to destroy his sight as a completion of his destiny (as identification with his only roots: hate and betrayal). He is doing to himself in a finalized fashion what Laius’s gaze did to him in his childhood psychologically. Oedipus’ self-inflicted blindness is destruction of his ability to develop further his understanding of the reality; it’s the very destruction of human intelligence the system of authoritarian power tries to achieve through whole human history. Another example of the symbolic image beyond concrete situation is Oedipus’ obsessive gesture of biting the back of his hand, the other side of his palm when he feels trapped inside his destiny. The film is full of symbolic images of this sort which connect the circumstances with Oedipus’ personal psychology living through the time.

In his interpretation of the meaning of Sophocles’ narrative, Pasolini authoritatively deconstructs incest taboo transgression topic into the idea of the monstrosity of mother’s betrayal that becomes the main focus of Pasolini’s artistic research in the “Oedipus Rex”. In 21st century, when today’s American Jocastas are “proud” that their sons are/were participating in fraudulent/invented wars, that they act as strong ones, not weaklings (they take pride for their sons’ self-sacrifices according to the same logic by which Jocasta sacrificed the child-Oedipus to her husband’s despotism), the question of mothers’ betrayal (their acting in the name of the system, not in the interests of children) takes the place of the crime of incest.

Pasolini not long before his murder

Icy tiara of mountains
is like a frame of mortal landscape.
Today I parted the ivy
on the granite of the castle.

Today on all the roads I advanced ahead
of camps of pines.
Today I have taken a tulip
as a child by the chin.

August 16 – 17, 1936

The responsibility for nature’s future and destiny cannot be based only on scientific knowledge that if we destroy it we will die along with it, nor on our “love” for nature and habit of enjoying it. Love is a visceral feeling and enjoyment of nature is instinctive, while scientific knowledge about the fragility of eco-system is always, as we see today, can be rebutted by those who make profit on its destruction and have enough money to hire specialists claiming that nature is too grand to need our care.

Only having mystical feeling of being one with earth and universe can really position us to assume responsibility for nature – only this feeling can make us feel pain when earth is in pain under the axe of predatory mining, or fracking (the barbaric blasting of the mountain tops to extract coal) instead of developing more sophisticated ways to obtain energy.

But, may be, this Tsvetaeva’s little poem will help us develop a spiritual feeling of being congruent with nature like a drop of water from the ocean is one with the ocean.

The first two lines of the first stanza. Tiara can only help the Pope and those Catholic believers who think about their personal salvation (it can be a frame for the mortal human face), but “Icy tiara of mountains” will not save the landscape (nature that is battered, physically abused). “Icy tiara of mountains” is like a double exposition-image in cinema – it simultaneously refers to tiara and to icy tiara and emphasizes a similarity but also difference between two contexts, the human and the natural (the whole image can be read – what tiara is for the mortal human face, the icy tiara is for the landscape). Is it the same difference as between the subject and the vehicle of the metaphor? Can these two halves of the double image be considered as simultaneously subjects and vehicles for one another – icy tiara above the landscape metaphorizes the “frozen” (embellishing) tiara above the human face and simultaneously is metaphorized by it? With the formal structure of this double-image (by simultaneously talking about both) Tsvetaeva implies and “proves” that humankind and nature share the same destiny.

Second two lines of the first stanza. To part the ivy means to treat it like human hair – to celebrate their identity. The spiritual inspiration behind this gesture expresses Tsvetaeva’s lyrical heroine’s mystical identification of the human and the natural. In some translations of this poem into English it’s not certain – is parting the ivy on the wall of the castle a physical gesture or just the work of imagination; and this very ambiguity, it seems, undermines the basic semantic matrix of the poem. The unity of human race and nature in the context of the poem cannot be metaphorical.

First two lines of the second stanza. Why Tsvetaeva’s twin – the subject of the annunciated (the “I” of the poem), needs to surpass the “camps of pines on the roads“ (image suggesting that nature is on alert)? May be, because she instinctively rushes ahead in time to save nature from human greed and conformism? Her position is not just to observe the situation as it evolves but to be ahead of it to try to prevent nature’s demise we today are living through (“on all the roads” becomes a metaphor of the movement in time, not in space).

Second two lines of the second stanza. What is the “big deal” about an “eccentric but trivial” gesture of taking child/tulip by the chin? The non-differentiation between human child and nature is a revolutionary stance in culture which for eons nurtured in men megalomaniacal idea of being superior to nature. To invent this “strange” gesture of taking tulip by the chin is already not only elevation of nature to the status of human being but debunking of humans’ sin of pride/hubris/superbia. As we see, in this “atheistic” poet, Tsvetaeva, there is more of an essential Christianity than in many church goers. The unity of the human race and nature can be only physical; otherwise the sin of human ontological pride is left intact. “Surpassing camps of pines”, “taking a tulip as a child by the chin”, and equalizing mortality of human face and the face of the landscape are links of the semantic spine of the poem.

The awareness that nature today is an orphan is an urgent call of conscience to stop the slaughter of nature, the planet, human beings and the human soul. As humanity and nature become one in Tsvetaeva’s poem, human spiritual transformation, psychological revolution and leap in sensibility should become one with politics of progress.

“I collect evidence of man’s inhumanity against god. The pain we cause him. We have poisoned his atmosphere. We have slaughtered his creatures of the wild, polluted his rivers. We have even taken god’s noblest creation, man, and brainwashed him into becoming our product, packed, stalked and
canned.”
Larry Shannon in “NI”

“… something to believe in, broken barriers in between people wanting to help each other… I am a human being and when one of that unique species builds its nest in the heart of another the questions of permanence and propagation is not the first or even the last thing to be considered.”
Hanna Jelkes in “NI”

“O courage could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell,
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me?”
From Jonathan Coffin’s poem in “NI”

Whole his life and system of values Shannon built on the Church, but observing his parishioners and what’s happening with life around, he as an intelligent person developed his doubts – not in the existence of God-father and Christ and in their relevance – but in the value of regular believers’ faith. He started to feel how dogmatically conventional their pious clichés are and how conceited and self-centered they are themselves. He began to see that they are just philistines who need Christ’s love to stay philistines, that they are sinful with a kind of pious complacency. He understood that they want to be protected and saved no matter what’s going on in this world, and that’s why they are regular Church goers. Their religious belief is completely socio-morphic, it has nothing to do with overcoming egoism and megalomania Christ was talking about. They are bathing in self-aggrandizement of being associated with God-Son and this provides them with spiritual comfort and pride.

What to do when your career and future contradict your subjective truth – the belief in the necessity for more disinterested, sublime and refined faith. This situation ends for Rev. Shannon dramatically when after trying to explain to his parishioners that their passive and egoistic belief is not the right way to live – he was removed from his duties and sent to a “probation job” as a bus-driver for a tour agency organizing travels for American religious groups.

We see here Ms. Fellowes (the leader of the women tour group) with a mandate to watch Shannon’s behavior day and night and register his expected missteps.

Shannon is under the seductive attack of a pretty girl from the tour group who is attracted to him for his infamy and hopes by association with him to win the attention of group’s other members. For her to be a “harlot” in their eyes is better than to be nothing.

With Maxine Shannon understood that he is not as ambitious as he thought he is and that his real dream is simply to be left in peace, less burdened by spiritual and emotional repression. He decided to step back from social life into private existence, to be just an Adam. But this temporary solution can be the path of liberation for trying to find a more existential spirituality.

In this shot, we see the two Mexican guys whose job is not only to work at Maxine’s hotel but help her in her solitude.

For Huston, these two characters personify the American expectation of how “foreigners” (people of other countries) should behave. These two young Mexicans move and act in a completely artificial manner (as though their every move/step is choreographed) – they are a kind of dancing robots ready to serve and to entertain American tourists and settlers. But behind their robotic mask they keep an indignant and belligerent posture.

Hanna Jelkes is how a “saint” (without connotations suggested by religious ideology but) inside a purely existential frame of reference can be imagined to be like. To erect this character in the film is the exceptional achievement of Tennessee Williams, John Huston and Deborah Kerr.

Without Hanna’s spiritual help Shannon could never have recovered after being punished for deviating from the prescribed standard “faith”.

The encounter with the old poet and his sacred dream of creating spirituality inside life (based on human togetherness, and internal world as a space of introspection), became for Shannon a spiritual guidance he didn’t find in the official church.

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If in “A Streetcar Named Desire” Blanche Dubois (for whom the problems of human soul and how people treat one another are much more important than fight for social success) was marginalized, insulted, humiliated and finally sacrificed, in “The Night of Iguana” the main character Larry Shannon (who is similar to Blanche in his existential orientation) is able to go through all his ordeals in a predatory world and find his truth and destiny. The both, Blanche and Shannon are educated people with subtle and inquisitive minds (in a sense of being psychological wholeness, not of having technical – professional intellect): they are interested in understanding of human life in its holistic (including moral element) aspect. Why was Shannon successful while Blanche failed? Blanche was all alone while Shannon was helped by several quite exceptional people. Another factor is that Blanche was traumatized by the suicide of her beloved – she was tormented by guilty feelings and weakened by her (irrational) psychological defenses against the unbearable reality. Shannon also has his weaknesses but generous and disinterested psychological help made him able to pull through.

In Huston’s film we have the equivalent of Stanley Kowalski from Kazan’s “A Streetcar Named Desire” (American reality was already then producing Stanleys in disproportionally bigger numbers than cultural people like Blanche and Shannon, although not as overwhelmingly so as today). It’s the character of Hank (probably, Tennessee Williams calls him like this by association with “honk”), the second driver of the tour-bus. Hank in Huston’s film is a parody on pop-image of “American hero abroad”. He is a blond guy with standard features and the absence of personal judgment (loyalty to job description took place of his mind while pride for being American – his soul). Hank-honk is pathetic in his readiness to always take the side of official power and in his belief that his mission in a foreign country is to teach foreigners how to behave. The result is – he is badly beaten but still keeps the righteous consciousness of his “international mission”. Today we see exactly this psychology in how we Americans behave with innocent civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Latin America, and how the conservative leaders treat poor, needy and pauperizing Americans.

Like Blanche understood something valuable outside of consumptive and appropriative behavior, Shannon is able to do what no one Stanley can – he can disagree with his career and secured future because he follows his call to become a human being with a personal destiny, not somebody who just “survived” and “succeeded”. Today, there are not many Shannons left among the young Americans, but there are legions of Stanleys. Almost nobody can anymore discard a job by spiritual reasons. Many people in the “Occupy movement” are “awakening” only because they have unjustly lost or expect to lose their jobs and careers and because the cost of life is drastically up. Larry Shannon is much ahead of them – he is able to decide his destiny, not just disagree with how others (bosses) have decided it for him.

Shannon’s ordeal is very difficult – he cannot tolerate a false spirituality of being a priest (representative of social power masking itself as spirituality, of social power that has invented spirituality as power), but at the same time he is not able to emanate a genuine existential spirituality – he is not capable to go to the world with Hanna Jelkes. He needs Ms. Faulks as Adam needs Eve – he wants to be free. In this sense he is a figure from Old Testament but he is not a person of power. The essence of the film’s iguana motif is liberation from the constraints of a false ego constructed by conventional social expectations, and ideologies. Instead of persuading himself that his job is not too bad, pays well and has a creative/satisfying aspect in it, Shannon “behaves irrationally” according to many who accept job regardless of how their work’s results will be used, for humanistic or for repressive purposes (a good example is the technical specialists and scientists who are personally people with liberal sensibility but working for military-industrial complex).

The film describes the most important point in Shannon’s life – the change in the very direction of his destiny. He is punished but the loss of income and status became the path of his liberation. While Shannon is dedicated to the search for truth about himself, Stanley exists only as a social self. For Stanley there is no other motivation, no other logic than to fight for prosperity and prestigious public image. The important questions here are how many Americans today if they will not have jobs for a protracted period of time will agree to accept jobs of killers of civilians and torturers of suspected enemies.

It’s interesting to compare how Marlon Brando’s Stanley and Richard Burton’s Shannon express themselves verbally. With Stanley, the words he pronounces as if are not separated from one another, as if flowing into each other (anally-undifferentiated style of verbalizing), but it’s not only words but ideas and concepts are combined in amorphous ways, while Shannon tries to stop himself from talking where Stanley continues to blabber – Shannon starts to stutter because unconsciously he resists to allow himself to psychologically excrete into the world. It is from this resistance comes his psychological/spiritual development, while with Stanley speech becomes more articulated only when he aggressively verbally attacks – shouting/shooting (anally penalizing the world).

The birth of human internal world is connected with the ability to love another person – to share life with somebody else (to let other person also make decisions). Simultaneously, this ability cannot develop without building one’s internal world (and that cannot happen without the internalization of not-simplified cultural symbols and concepts). To be able to love otherness demands much more courage than killing, torturing and even dying do. To share responsibility in love can be compared with sharing of responsibilities in the free market economy (when the competitor is allowed to make free decisions and when victory in competition is an open game without any guarantees). Even free market (not as demanding as personal love) is too much for today’s leading American entrepreneurs – they are positioned to control the market through their monopolistic power, not to let it be really free. The behavior of Larry Shannon as that of Stanley Kowalski become metaphors of behaviors not only in personal and social relationships but also in economic sphere.

John Huston (1906 – 1987)

Questions to help viewers in further study of the film