THE EXORCIST – “Death Awaits” novel and film analysis

PART ONE

THE SILVER LINING

For many viewers, the demonic possession concept presented in The Exorcist was a terrifying one. Some were haunted by images of possessed Regan’s deformed and discoloured face, her horrifying self-mutilations and the demon’s sadistic desire to mercilessly torment the living. The movie has also prompted many debates about spiritual possession possibly being a real phenomena.

But something that has stood out to me while exploring the movie, its production and its legacy, is that The Exorcist carries an indirect but powerful wish fulfilment message – it satisfies, or at least massages, our desire for immortality. It does this by presenting extreme evil as an indirect proof of God and the afterlife. So this is going to be the central premise of this study on the novel and movie of The Exorcist, but we’ll also be exploring interesting related concepts like the grief for lost loved ones, the documented history on claims of spiritual possession, symbols of death in the story and the prices of faith.

Perhaps the most authoritative source of information on the mortality wish fulfilment factor is the writer of The Exorcist novel, William Peter Blatty. Sourced from his book, “On writing the Exorcist: From novel to film” I found the following quote relating to a newspaper article Blatty read while researching historical documents as basis for the story. The article reported a supposedly genuine demonic possession case. Blatty stated:

“I was excited. For here at last, in this city, in my time, was tangible evidence of transcendence. If there were demons, there were angels and probably a God and a life everlasting.(underline added)

While he does talk about his motives of wanting to write a successful fiction novel, his first response is one of immortality wish fulfilment. Personally I don’t follow the logic. Demons don’t prove the existence of angels, nor do either of them prove the existence of the Devil or God. And the existence of any of these spirit forms doesn’t in itself prove we mortals have an afterlife.

Now I must emphasize immediately here that I do not intend any disrespect to the now deceased William Peter Blatty. He was a very intelligent and skilled writer. The Exorcist novel is full of nuance and detail demonstrating Blatty had done a great deal of research on his subject from many angles including the psychological and the scientific. And incidentally I separate out psychology and science as separate branches of research because the mathematical rules of science largely fall apart in the realm of psychology, just as they do in the realm of spiritual belief. I have a great respect for Blatty’s efforts in writing The Exorcist and for his efforts in writing and directing The Exorcist 3, which I personally find scarier (though not better).

Blatty was a believer in the spiritual afterlife, or at the very least wanted to believe. Director William Friedkin, on the other hand, has identified in interviews as agnostic – as in he thinks it isn’t possible for we mortals to understand the true nature or intentions of God, if God exists. The differences in spiritual belief appear to create a divergence between Blatty’s Exorcist book and Friedkin’s Exorcist film. Personally my spiritual beliefs are more aligned with Friedkin’s, but I still like a lot of elements in the novel that didn’t make it into the movie.

In the novel, most of the key characters have a specific fear of death and, in turn, a longing for God and the assurance of afterlife. Chris Macneil has recurring dreams about death that also haunt her when awake (p119). Before Regan, she’d had another child who died at age three, killed by a new antibiotic on the market (p58-9). So she’s afraid to be too emotionally close to Regan. Her housemaid, Sharon, keeps trying different spiritual fads in search of belief. And near the end of the story, both of these characters, Sharon and Chris, rush into the bedroom where the exorcism is taking place to witness the levitation of Regan’s bed – proof of spiritual forces at work (p258).

For me the novel gets a little bit too preachy at the end about this. Despite witnessing the levitation and the possession of Regan, Chris still says she doesn’t believe in God because of his silence, but she also says that the Devil does a lot of advertising (p317). Dyer responds that if seeing evil accounts for the existence of the Devil then what accounts for good? Chris replies, “that’s a point”. That felt a bit forced for me. (By the way, the etymology for the words good and evil is that they relate to the words God and Devil. That had never occurred to me until I wrote this study.) Ultimately, Sharon and Chris’s experiences of Regan being demonically possessed, open them a bit more to believing in God and the afterlife.

Even Regan has issues with death in the novel. Before the possession kicks in she attends a funeral with her Mother and asks why people have to die, as well as being quiet for the rest of the day. Though all that is missing in the film, her statement of mortality to the astronaut in the party is, “you’re gonna die up there.”

With Damien Karras the movie version keeps his faith dilemma at the forefront of the story, but the novel features significant expansions. At one point he prays there is someone to pray to (p91). Like Chris he is tormented by what he perceives to be the silence of God (p55).

A nice visual touch in the film is that when Merrin arrives at the house and when Karras is out getting items for the exorcism, the streets are shrouded in lit fog, but when Karras dies the fog is gone. Fog typically gives an impression of spiritual proceedings as well as confusion. Fog is also seen when Regan postures in parallel with the Pazuzu statue, both backlit. The shot is as much a “seeing the light” wish fulfilment confirmation of the spirit realm as it is a confirmation of the demon itself.

While there are some quotes at the beginning of the book’s major parts, which seem to try and edge the reader toward belief in evil and therefore God and the afterlife, Blatty also included an opposite opinion for the character Burke Dennings. He tells Chris that “Death is a comfort” (p101). She also thinks of his stardom as a form of immortality. We could say the same about her stardom as an actress – celluloid immortality. Blatty also made sure to include, on p128, a reference to thanatophobia, which is the fear of death.

Whilst the movie version was bound to end up deleting a lot of info from the novel, the choices of what to delete and what to keep I think fit well with the different spiritual positions of Blatty and Friedkin. Blatty wanted the afterlife to be confirmed. Friedkin didn’t hold that particular hope and so the movie discards with nearly all of the wishful thinking thanatophobia-related elements for most of the characters. Instead that paradigm is concentrated in Father Karras.

Last example before we move on, and this comes from the most unexpected source in the novel. On p258 Karras is reading the transcript of possessed Regan’s reverse dialogue. Among the gibberish spoken by Pazuzu are the words “Let her die. No, no, sweet. It is sweet in the body … better than the void”. Isn’t it the void of death that people fear in their pursuit of afterlife confirmation?

PART TWO

WISHFUL HISTORY

In order to prop up the case for spiritual possession being a real phenomenon, a lot of books, documentaries and websites covering the subject will refer to historically documented claims of possession as if the claims are actual proof. But Blatty’s Exorcist is much cleverer in its approach. It seems that he had explored every real world scientific or psychological explanation for demonic possession that he could find across the literature and he’s included near enough all of them in his novel, but the story then debunks them one by one, leaving the reader with no other explanations to turn to. It’s a really smart balancing act. On the one hand the story is presenting us with fantastical and impossible events like beds shaking on their own, objects moving about by themselves, Regan’s head twisting around (somehow not killing her) and levitation. These are events that normally we would dismiss as ridiculous, but because the novel is also offering us a lot of technical talk about brain scans, medications, hypnosis, autosuggestion and even ESP (which the novel treats as separate from spirituality) – these factors of perceived academic realism counter our disbelief of the supernatural elements in the story. This is true of the movie as well, but it’s much more detailed in the novel.

While this wrestling back and forth between academia and supernatural belief is being played out, Blatty occasionally sprinkles in historically documented cases of supposed possession. The vast majority of these aren’t made up by Blatty, they are from real world records, but his novel bends the known facts about those cases. The apparent merits of the cases are given, but sometimes the published debunks aren’t, though in Blatty’s defense some of the debunks were published after The Exorcist novel was. I’m not going to give an exhaustive breakdown as it will drag this study out. I’ll give a handful of examples then outline some more general thoughts on the topic.

The supposed real life werewolf Peter Stumpp gets a mention in the novel, but it isn’t mentioned that his confession was reportedly extracted by torture, which renders the confession unreliable.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Stumpp The wiki page cites him as being a wealthy famer (so possibly a financial motive in framing him for crimes) accused of cannibalism, killing fourteen children, ripping babies from the uteruses of women and eating them alive. It all sounds so fantastical that I wonder if he was even guilty of anything at all. He was apparently subjected to an utterly barbaric execution and his daughter executed with him. If anyone was possessed by evil it was the people who sentenced, tortured and killed him. In The Exorcist novel his case is bluntly stated as factual, including reports of him being caught eating his own child’s brain.

There’s the Loudoun possessions cited on p213 of the novel as an event involving multiple real possessions, but historians have cited this case as having been a political scam to dispose of a wealthy priest by multiple parties who had opportunity to gain from his demise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudun_possessions

Another is the so-called Watseka Wonder possession case in the late 1800’s. A whole book was published about this and the version that I found, a downloadable copy, included a publisher’s note near the beginning saying fifty thousand copies had been sold. So immediately the fact that decent profit was made from the book invites consideration of a charlatan profit motive. Much to my surprise, at the start of the book, the main thrust of this article you’re now reading is presented as a precursor to the case – the quotes, quite explicitly, frame the story in terms of fulfilling the reader’s wishes for confirmation of life beyond death and the comfort of knowing our dead loved ones are not lost. In the publisher’s final note at the very end of the book, it’s even more explicit. The publisher is …

“Firmly convinced by rigid evidence, that life continues beyond the grave.”

The Exorcist novel also cites on p213 that the psychologist Flournoy dealt with a possession case involving a girl called Helene Smith, who could change her facial features rapidly to present different personalities. But the novel doesn’t tell us the girl claimed she could speak with Martians and that Flournoy considered the whole thing a clever fabrication.

There are more of these mentioned either in the Exorcist novel or in William Peter Blatty’s reports of how he conceived the story. They are frequently pointed to as evidence, but I’ve read up on about ten of them and in every case where I could acquire additional information there have been accusations of fraud, hysteria and other explanations by those investigating the events.

Some of the cases involve reported possibilities of parental abuse of the victims, perhaps even sexual, or other forms of sexual disturbance, leading to guilt or rage based conflicts in the personality of the supposedly possessed, especially in teenage subjects. Carl Jung cited the different personalities of one subject as being angelic and whore by comparison, indicating unresolved sexual issues.

As I noted in my video on potential sexual abuse themes in The Exorcist, Regan displays many of the symptoms of sexually abused children, but neither the film nor Blatty’s novel ever explore it as an explanation to be debunked. It is conspicuous in its absence. Did Blatty block it out mentally, due to pre-occupation with the desire for immortality confirmation, or did he consciously choose to exclude it? I think he just blocked it out. And at the same time, in cases of supposed possession, parental abuse wouldn’t be admitted of course, so the perpetrators of the abuse would likely go along with the demonic possession narrative to admonish themselves of guilt or suspicion. A related interesting point is that in his book On writing The Exorcist: From novel to film, Blatty cites the more recent discovery of Tourettes Syndrome as a possible explanation for some of the seemingly possessed behaviour in certain cases. Tourettes tends to cause the individual to shout out swear words and similar remarks randomly, as if there’s a nasty person inside trying to take control.

The Exorcist novel rides a difficult line in pursuing its approach of using actual documented history in supposed support of possession being real. Is it ok for a fiction author to distort real world historical events to fit a desired narrative? Arguably not, but at least the book, by being a work of fiction, isn’t taken as gospel truth about the subject. Non-fiction studies, which distort a given issue through bias, conscious or unconscious, are extremely common anyway, even in academia. Blatty’s efforts to include rational non-supernatural explanations in his work of fiction can be equated to balanced journalism.

I’ll add some more random points of interest on the supposed merits of possession before we move on. There are quite a few actually.

In the film and on a few pages of the novel, possessed Regan says “I am no one”. The reason for this is never explained. P109 and 123

A very famous possession case, known as Roland Doe, has been cited by Blatty, but a full book’s worth of debunks of the case was published in 1993.

The novel claims that the symptoms of possession have been the same across all cultures as far back as recorded claims have been made. I think Blatty got this from paranormal psychologist Traugott Konstantin Oesterreich’s book on possession, published in 1930. This book is cited a couple of times in The Exorcist novel and its opening chapter claims the symptoms of possession are the same across the globe. However, I’ll counter this by saying that just because the symptoms are similar doesn’t mean only demonic possession can be the cause. People across all cultures once believed the Earth was flat, but that doesn’t make it true. Other psychological problems that underpin debunked possessions can also be present across history, resulting in the same symptoms. For example, the widely reported desire of the invading spirit to destroy the host. Self-harm and suicide also have common patterns across cultures too, due to basic human psychology. Incidentally, Oesterreich notes in the conclusion of his book that demonic possession is “mainly responsible for inspiring and maintaining belief in the existence of demons and the survival of the souls of the dead”. It’s funny how this silver lining of immortality pops up across much of the literature

On p213 of The Exorcist it’s mentioned that the possessed are usually women, but no explanation is given. I’ll offer a theory for consideration. Women tend to have more sexual guilt pressures placed on them by society, and are more likely to blame themselves than others for life’s problems. In some cultures they’re more likely to suffer sexual abuse as well.

On p214 it’s explained that possessions usually come on gradually. I’ll add that mental declines such as depression, schizophrenia and dementia do as well. There’s also a conceptual continuity error in the book and film in this respect. Regan’s possession takes a long time to build up, but once the demon is out, Karras is fully possessed in just a few seconds to the point of pale skin and discoloured eyes.

Merrin states in the novel that he doesn’t know why demons don’t repossess (p294). Well, one interpretation is that if a purely psychological problem in the subjects mind is resolved during the ritual of exorcism then it wouldn’t need to come back.

Psychologists like Carl Jung had conducted lengthy examinations of supposed possession cases and concluded non-supernatural causes. Jung published a detailed paper on the subject titled On the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena.

With all the video recording devices now being carried everywhere by the general public for many years and the availability of other recording devices for decades before that – why have there been no captures of supposedly possessed people displaying the kinds of physically and mentally impossible feats attributed in written accounts from centuries ago when they were harder to debunk? It seems that demons are camera-shy. Actually there’s a great little quote from Pazuzu, the demon possessing Regan, in the novel version of the scene where Karras interviews her. Pazuzu says, “Have you noticed how few miracles one hears about lately? Not our fault Karras. Don’t blame us. We try!” (p223) Actually the whole expanded version of the scene is very good – full of well-written demon dialogue.

Director Billy Friedkin made a movie later in his career called Rampage, which involves a deranged man killing a priest in a church and drinking his blood on the altar. He is revealed later to have a brain defect that causes his delusion that he was a vampire. Friedkin, by choosing to make that film, comes off like he is rejecting the possession concepts of his most famous hit move The Exorcist.

From my experience of working with the mentally ill, the belief in external mind control forces is a common factor – I’ve met people who think the TV talks to them, the radio talk to them, God or the Devil talks to them, I even met one guy who used to throw his clothes away because he thought they were talking to him. At one point he got lost in the street because he threw his glasses away thinking they were talking to him too! Typically, these perceived external voices are expressing thoughts, fears or desires that the conscious mind has suppressed and does not want to reconnect with – an elementary example being one patient who told me he was hearing voices in his head telling him to masturbate. When I asked him why he doesn’t just do the deed, as every normal person does from time to time, he looked shocked.

As I said earlier in the video, I’m not knocking Blatty or trying to discredit his novel. If you read it you’ll still find in his novel more insight and a broader range of theories on possession than you will from most other sources. In fact I’m going to side with Blatty, not in terms of believing in demons or spiritual possession, but in terms of academic science not having the answers regarding the fundamentals of our existence. What we have in science is a set of mostly mathematical models of reality which are incredibly useful for manipulating the physical world and, sometimes, incredibly useful at manipulating our organic bodies. But how the universe came to exist and the nature of consciousness are realms in which science has failed to provide answers. Many academics have tried, but all they seem to come up with is unverifiable theories that hold no more weight than religious explanations. On p203 of The Exorcist Karras talks about the mysterious ability of billions of brain cells being able to send signals in a co-ordinated manner. He suggests that each of those brain cells has a consciousness of its own and that in cases of dual personality there’s a conflict between groups of brain cells as to which is running the overall ship. It’s theoretical and the novel was released in 1971, but here we are fifty years later in 2021 as I write this study … and these questions of the nature of consciousness and the ability of the brain to co-ordinate itself remain unanswered. The impression of magic, of forces beyond the supposed scientific “rules” of reality, remains.

Karras’s monologue raised in my mind the question of how we even identify consciousness in the first place. We communicate our awareness as human beings through the tools of dialogue and physical behaviour. Whether there are other methods of communication I’m not sure. But does the family cat or dog have consciousness? Or do we write those organisms off as purely automated organic entities, lacking in conscious choice, because they don’t speak in words? Cats and dogs can and do defy the orders of the masters, and sometimes engage in mysterious behaviours. Is this evidence of consciousness? And do we attribute unpredictable behaviours in smaller creatures, such as mice, as evidence of consciousness? How far down do we take it? Do insects, bacteria or viruses have consciousness? Where is the line drawn? Or are there degrees of consciousness depending on the complexity of biological container? Is there an, as yet, undetected force of consciousness for which organic bodies are merely a vessel. Does the limited complexity of the physical vessel mean that the life force is less than that of a human being … or does it merely inhibit communication of conscious thought in the same manner that a physicist like Stephen Hawking was born into a body that limited the ability to speak without the assistance of scientific aids? I think these are crucial questions, and academic science hasn’t provided conclusive answers.

Sometimes in biology, these questions are brushed aside by the implied, and sometimes verbally stated, assumption that consciousness does not exist. Consciousness basically means awareness and the scientific confusion on this is evident in the confused dictionary definitions around the topic. They usually describe consciousness as being awake or aware. Look up definitions of awake and the phrase “not asleep” comes up a lot, and yet definitions of asleep often are described with the phrase “not awake”. In the absence of scientific understanding of consciousness, negative definitions are given in the dictionaries. We could also say awake is not a tomato, which would be true, but gives no understanding. Go explore the dictionary descriptions around the issues of consciousness or awareness and you’ll find circular verbal references. In fact think about how self-contradicting it is of some biologists to claim consciousness, and therefore awareness, doesn’t exist. They are conscious of their belief that consciousness doesn’t exist.

Interestingly, the Exorcist novel explains that Father Merrin writes books about faith from a scientific position. Regan’s mother reads one of his books and finds a chapter where Merrin outlines the scientific position that matter cannot be destroyed and that this means that when we die we don’t disappear. From a materialist scientific view every aspect of our existence, every atom in our body, is merely distributed elsewhere in the cosmos. It can be argued to be a form of immortality.

PART THREE

THE GRIEF FACTOR

A much shorter chapter here, but an important one. Witness accounts of supposed possession are suspect on account of the general desire of human beings for confirmation of the afterlife, which we’ve already explored. And this would certainly be a factor if the family of a “possessed” individual held strong religious beliefs. But, in some of the cases I’ve read about, the desire for assurance that dead relatives aren’t actually dead might be an even stronger factor. Many reported possessions involve the subject being supposedly invaded by the spirit of a deceased family member.

In the novel version of the Exorcist scene where the doctors talk about primitive cultures believing in possession, the doctor states that it usually involves invasion by the spirit of a dead relative. So it’s possible that the person who is “possessed” is in denial of the relative’s death and is merely acting like the relative to comfort themselves. I’ll give this a name, NORMAN BATES SYNDROME. Remember Norman in the movie Psycho? He couldn’t handle his mother’s death so he took on her personality to comfort himself. Bates is an extreme example and a fictional one at that, but in real life people often engage in little behaviours indicating denial of a deceased relative’s departure. Some will maintain the bedroom space of the deceased in a pristine condition, as if the person is still alive and occupying the room. Some will even sleep in that space, as if they are the lost loved one. And many of us do this by keeping portrait photos of the dead relative in our daily living space. Grief is an incredibly painful emotion and the desire for the dead to resurrect is perhaps most evident in our tendency to have dreams in which the relative is still alive.

The frequency of children and teenagers being supposed targets for spiritual possession I believe fits well with the grief factor. Kids and teenagers are usually more sensitive around the issue of mortality than adults. They haven’t accustomed themselves as much to the grim fate. They also are less in control of their emotions. Kids and teens are more likely to fly into fits of rage, more likely to act out their frustrations in bizarre ways instead of talking openly, and more likely to suppress awareness of things they find painful. Kids and teens are also more preoccupied with imitating their peers and elders. All of this makes kids and teens more susceptible to Norman Bates Syndrome – taking on the personification of a lost loved one as a way of denying that they are gone.

There are elements of this in The Exorcist too. Specifically, Karras’ grief at losing his mother. When he sees Mother in Regan’s place on the bed, how much of that is Pazuzu playing head games and how much of it is his own wishful thinking? He then checks Regan’s heart and is concerned about it, but is he mentally checking his dying mother’s heart? He also has nightmares about the lost relative as happens to most of us in real grief scenarios.

There could be an element of this regarding the death of Burke Dennings, though Regan never seemed all that fond of him, so this would be more of a factor in Chris MacNeil’s perception of the situation. The Karras grief dilemma is the stronger of the two by a long shot, though it’s complicated by his guilt about not having been there for her when she died. And his fears that she may have gone to hell add to his torment.

To finalize the importance of the grief factor, it’s not just about the person who is claimed to be possessed. If the witnesses of the possession are also family members in grief, and strongly religious, then they too could be inclined to perceive the return of a loved one in possession form. In fact their reaction might even encourage it in the living subject.

PART FOUR

SYMBOLS OF DEATH

Let’s now step aside from the largely verbal debate of whether demonic or spiritual possession is real or not, and examine some of the more aesthetic elements of the film that play on our fear of mortality.

One major issues is the age and frailty of Father Merrin. Actor Max Von Sydow was given an incredible make-up job to make him look really old. And his acting performance in the film involves shuffling slowly about with the difficulty of an old man and having the shakes of a man who is close to his death bed. His body’s motor skills are beginning to wind down. Just before his death he takes a bathroom break and he looks like he’s about to collapse, A couple of scenes later and he is actually dead.

As well as communicating the film’s subtext about fear of mortality, Merrin’s age I think is important in another way. Pazuzu had been defeated by Merrin in a previous exorcism in Africa. If the exorcism “nearly killed him” then how’s he going to perform the same feat being much more physically frail? So I think part of Pazuzu’s scheme was to wait for Merrin to grow old and frail before challenging him to another exorcism duel, one which would allow Pazuzu to kill him off easily. When the Demon talks backward of fearing the priest, the novel version includes the statement “he is ill”. (p258)

Naturally, the fear of death makes a lot of us fear the ageing process itself. As Regan is gradually taken over she appears to age too. She becomes pale, just as Merrin is. Her skin becomes cracked and slightly wrinkled. And perhaps the most important element in terms of ageing – her voice becomes unrecognizable. She starts to sound old.

Pazuzu is, itself, an ancient Demon, much older than any living man on Earth. In the moments when we catch a glimpse of Pazuzu’s face (one instance is a flash frame in Karras’ dream about his dead Mother) the skin may be fairly smooth, but the paleness of the skin and the darkness around the eyes and mouth are clearly intended to look like a skull – itself one of the great symbols of death and mortality in the human psyche. So I think on the strength of that facial appearance alone it can be argued that Pazuzu represents death itself.

Isn’t it interesting how good spirits and God himself are almost universally depicted in art with the facial features of a living human being, and yet evil spirits and their conceptual kindred, known as zombies, tend to be depicted with skeletal elements on display, as if the flesh has died and rotted away. Good is depicted as physically alive and evil is depicted as physically dead. But this makes no sense in terms of spiritual realms. If there is an afterlife then the physical body dies for both good and evil people doesn’t it? … Apparently not. In the human psyche across cultures evil is frequently cross-symbolized with physical decay, with mortality itself. And evil spirits are frequently feared to be bringers of death. This is true of Pazuzu as well, who brings death to Merrin and Karras and tries to bring death to Regan. He wants to possess her “… until she rots and lies stinking in the earth.”

With Pazuzu there is yet another element that further links to our fear of physical decay, and hence death. He inflicts Regan with symptoms of disease … green eyes, green vomit, yellow phlegm. Regan appears to be infected physically and obviously hasn’t had her hair washed for quite a while. She smells bad, has open cuts all over, urinates on the floor and, in the novel, frequently defecates to torment those trying to care for Regan. To put it bluntly, she’s gross-burger.

The deterioration of Regan is even paralleled in the weather of the story. We start with sunny Iraq and go from there to Georgetown USA in October, which is Autumn. Decaying leaves are literally falling from the trees and dying as Chris walks home after a day’s filming. The blowing wind is relevant too. Pazuzu is a wind God and I don’t mean flatulence, I literally mean wind. As Regan’s possession progresses to the point where Doctors are considering an exorcism cure, an establishing shot outside the hospital has more leaves blown by a stronger wind and trees that are now almost bare and looking like skeletons, as they typically do in winter. Winter, when trees become skeletons! I like that. Same when Karras goes to meet Chris for the first time  – first shot of the sene has bare trees and dying leaves blown about. And when Merrin receives his letter requesting he perform the exorcism, I love the setting of the shot. He’s on his way up a hill full of skeleton trees surrounded by dying leaves, as if he is departing this world already and on his way up to heaven. But wait, hang on Father, before you die and join the Lord we have one final task for you. No big deal, Just do battle with a powerful Demon one more time, and he’s like shit haven’t I done enough good deeds, I’d rather rest in peace than pea soup (Regan’s projectile vomit reference of course). And although we don’t reach full winter during the exorcism, the fog of Merrin’s arrival at the house gives the feel of winter.

The last element for this chapter is the death of Regan’s youth. There are lots of transformational issues going on at the age of puberty, not just the sexual change, and one of them is the death of innocence, or we might call it the death of childhood. That’s right, puberty is a form of death in itself. We keep photos of our loved ones at different stages in their physical life cycle. Particularly we treasure photos of them as children. I think this is partially because we have an underlying grief for the fact that the adorable child is gone, even when the adult version of them is still alive. Maybe this is a subconscious element in The Exorcist. The desire to protect Regan is the desire to protect the concept of youth, an age when mortality is less prominent in our minds. Regan is at that age where we can still see the child, but it’s clear that the child will soon be gone and replaced by a full grown woman, who will look and behave dramatically different. And with boys the vocal change in puberty kills off the child image even more. Regan also has her twelfth birthday as a key event in the story. In the novel it is noted that her birthday triggers a big change in the advancement of the possession condition (p50 and 57). Remember also that in the novel Regan attends a funeral with her Mother, which makes her sad and prompts her to ask questions about mortality.

Regarding aq case of supposed possession he studies, Jung had the following to say in his published paper on the subject.

 Remembering that our patient’s age at the beginning of the disturbances was 14 and a half, that is, the age of puberty had just been reached, one must suppose that there was some connection between the disturbances and the physiological character-changes at puberty. There appears in the consciousness of the individual during this period of life a new group of sensations, together with the feelings and ideas arising therefrom; this continuous pressure of unaccustomed mental states makes itself constantly felt because the cause is always at work; the states are co-ordinated because they arise from one and the same source, and must little by little bring about deep-seated changes in the ego. Vacillating moods are easily recognisable; the confused new, strong feelings, the inclination towards idealism, to exalted religiosity and mysticism, side by side with the falling back into childishness, gives to adolescence its prevailing character. At this epoch, the human being first makes clumsy attempts at independence in every direction; for the first time uses for his own purposes all that family and school have contributed hitherto; he conceives ideals, constructs far-reaching plans for the future, lives in dreams whose content is ambitious and egotistic. This is all physiological. The puberty of a psychopathic is a crisis of more serious import. Not only do the psychophysical changes run a stormy course, but features of a hereditary degenerate character become fixed. In the child these do not appear at all, or but sporadically. For the explanation of our case we are bound to consider a specific disturbance of puberty. The reasons for this view will appear from a further study of the second personality. (For the sake of brevity we shall call the second personality IVENES as the patient baptised her higher ego).

 Jung continues regarding the sexual conflict in the teenager …

… The patient’s romances throw a most significant light on the subjective roots of her dreams. They swarm with secret and open love affairs, with illegitimate births and other sexual insinuations. The central point of all these ambiguous stories is a lady whom she dislikes, who is gradually made to assume the form of her polar opposite, and whilst Ivenes becomes the pinnacle of virtue, this lady is a sink of iniquity. But her reincarnation doctrines, in which she appears as the mother of countless thousands, arises in its naive nakedness from an exuberant phantasy which is, of course, very characteristic of the period of puberty. It is the woman’s premonition of the sexual feeling, the dream of fruitfulness, which the patient has turned into these monstrous ideas. We shall not go wrong if we seek for the curious form of the disease in the teeming sexuality of this too-rich soil. Viewed from this standpoint, the whole creation of Ivenes with her enormous family is nothing but a dream of sexual wish-fulfilment, differentiated from the dream of a night only in that it persists for months and years.

Thank you very much, Carl Jung. So, to sum up this chapter, we have puberty, ageing, disease, the autumn season and the skull-like face of Pazuzu as symbols of mortality in the story.

PART FIVE

THE FAITH DILEMMA

While The Exorcist carries mortality wish fulfilment as a silver lining, there’s no denying the dark cloud element. Personally, I’ve never found the film to be very scary, probably because it never convinced me to start believing in demons. Even seeing the movie for the first time at about age twelve the only moment that disturbed me was the crucifix self-harm scene. I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the film. It was, and still is, one of my favourite horror films on account of the solid story, fascinating subject matter, acting performances and Friedkin’s direction.

However, I have met quite a few people who were deeply disturbed by the film, and usually they were people who believed in the supernatural a lot more than I did. So there is a major emotional price to be paid for believing in demons, angels and the afterlife. The anxiety and terror people endure on account of belief in demons and the possibility of spending all of eternity in hell, in my view, is far more terrifying than the idea of mortal death being the absolute end of our existence. And just as I’ve argued that the desire for immortality confirmation motivates people to believe in spiritual possession, a counter-argument could be made that my lack of belief in the afterlife is motivated by fear of hell. I don’t think this is the case though. If someone showed me proof that ghosts exist I’d probably jump for joy at confirmation of the afterlife. The traditional religious notions of good vs evil and the supposed justification for casting people to hell I’ve always considered ridiculous anyway, even if souls do exist.

In The Exorcist, fear of hell is a major problem for Karras. When he dreams of his Mother after her death he sees her walking down into a subway. I’m pretty certain than this is a representation of her soul being taken to hell. And the novel has convinced me further of this. On p87 Karras despairs that  his Mother “may not be in heaven”. A couple of pages later comes the dream sequence of Mother standing by the subway tunnel. The Pazuzu face insert, seen in the film, isn’t mentioned in the novel, but it is stated that Karras imagines his Mother lost and helpless in the maze of tunnels below. But there’s also another scene in a subway. Karras sees the beggar who claims to be an old altar boy. The beggar’s face staring coldly under the flashing light from the passing train has always given me the impression that the beggar is Pazuzu tormenting Karras. But in the novel it’s less sinister. Karras interacts with the beggar and gives him a dollar. Given the Mother in hell concept, and Karras himself having probably once been an altar boy (show him in church), I suspect that another subtext going on here is that the ex-altar boy represents Karras’s fear that not only will he end up a poor beggar if he clings onto his faith in God, but also that he might end up in hell on account of losing his faith. I like the beggar scene because it carries multiple overlapping implications – a great representation of the how complex Karras’s faith struggles are.

The notion of his Mother being in hell is directly stated to Karras later, “Your Mother sucks cocks in hell …”. There also seems to be an implication that Regan, Dennings and Karras’s Mother, by being apparently trapped inside Regan, is equivalent to them being in hell. “Why you do this to me Dimmy?” And the lunatic hospital ward where his mother was placed when he last saw her alive itself is a scenario often equated to hell. “Momma I’m gonna get you out of here.” Sounds of the hospital ward are dubbed over the scene where Karras sees his Mothe in place of Regan … again hell and lunatic asylums are cross-symbolized. And the laughing heard in lunatic asylums, which can be heard in this scene also, tend to give the impression of demons laughing at those who are imprisoned.

So, the fear of hell as a price for believing in the afterlife is a huge price to pay, and that fear applies to the self and to the afterlife of loved ones.

A few paragraphs back, I stated that I thought the reasoning behind religious beliefs about why people would be sent to hell are ridiculous. Let me expand on this. In my view institutional, money-hungry, power-hungry versions of spirituality play guilt trips on people for, often petty, so-called sins as a means of psychological, and hence behavioural, control. In my view, if there is a God, it is no more akin to man than it is to ants. I don’t personally believe that humans, as a species, hold special space in the realm of the supernatural, if it exists. And if the soul exists, I consider it to be something fundamentally different to the arms, legs and sense organs of the biological vessel we call the human body.

Depictions of heaven and hell in religious art typically depict the soul as human in form, with the pleasure rewards of heaven and the pain rewards of hell directly equivalent to the human body vessel, even though that body is supposedly already dead. I’m not sure why but I find is amusing that the soul is so often assumed to be human body shaped. The most frequent variation seems to be the soul as a ball of light, somewhat like the sun. But again the perception of the soul as light is still based on the organic sense organs we call eyes, which die along with our bodies. If there is a soul I believe its experience would be in an entirely different realm to organic senses.

By using our living fears of organic pain and pleasure as representations of an afterlife choice between heaven and hell, organized religion controls its members. Historically it has even sought to manifest the hell portion of the equation through real life physical torture. Meanwhile the heavenly afterlife is, across most cultures as far as I can tell, considered to be a realm much more pleasurable than Earth or, at least, much less painful. Souls are usually considered floating entities, freed from the grounding restrictions of gravity. Again it all seems like wishful thinking.

It may seem like I’m being blasphemous in describing religion in these ways, but in The Exorcist novel on p294 Father Merrin talks about Satan as possibly serving God’s will. I’ll take that further and describe Satan as a henchman of God, a controlled opponent. Satan terrifies believers in God with the threat of eternally burning in hell if they don’t obey God’s rules. The result is wider and stronger allegiance to God … fanatical allegiance at times. Ever heard the term “God-fearing” as a description of believers? It makes God sound like a tyrant.

Consider Father Dyer’s last lines to Karras p311. He wants Karras to apologize for offending God, so that he won’t be sent to hell. This whole paradigm could be called a protection scam. In fact the infamous prayer line “The Lord is my Shepherd” furthers the case. The shepherd uses a sheepdog to scare wandering, self-motivated sheep back into the fold under the barked threat of vicious attack. Satan and his army of demons are, in a way, sheepdogs working for the shepherd, but the sheep probably don’t understand that. And hey, in the opening of The Exorcist we have dog barks representing the attacks of Pazuzu.

This plays out very clearly between human beings. Religion-based governments, monarchies and leaders within religious institutions – you know, people with big fancy hats and gowns who get to write down the rules and pass them off as God’s will – they become the henchmen, they become God and Satan in organic form, burning and torturing people as punishment for disobeying the rules of God.

Another, less dramatic, way of putting all this is that God and the Devil represent the conscious and subconscious. The conscious convinces itself and others that the whole person is fundamentally good in intention, while the darkest selfish and destructive urges are pushed down into the subconscious, where their very existence can be either denied or projected onto other human beings who can then be attacked as part of the denial process.

Here’s another way of thinking about how powerful the spiritual controlled conflict is. Ask people if they believe in God and many will say no, but most atheists still talk about the force of evil existing in the world. They hear a news story about a sadistic murder, a child abuser or a mass murderer like Hitler or Stalin, and they are quick to describe the perpetrator as evil. But evil is a religious concept. Despite the abundance of research showing correlation between childhood conditioning by parental figures as a factor in adult crime, many people still perceive society’s worst criminals as being born evil, as being evil in their very nature.  In my view, this is a way for people to suppress their awareness that dark criminal urges are present in us all. People don’t typically call themselves angels, but by calling criminals inherently evil, they imply themselves to be angels, or at the least, inherently good.

Other common verbal habits suggest subconscious belief in supernatural forces, such as people crying out to God or the Devil in moments of frustration or pleasure. Chris Macneil does this a lot in The Exorcist. Her statements can be considered to be tiny momentary prayers. In fact, on p300 of the novel, it is described that Karras realizes that his thoughts about wanting Regan to live are prayers.

All of these complexities lead me to believe that verbally stated belief or dismissal of spirituality only equates to the conscious mind. Subconsciously people can think and feel very differently. And so, even those who claim to be “non-believers” or “atheists” can still emotionally engage with a good quality ghost story or horror film.

Whether you believe in Christianity or it’s oppositely framed alternative, the occult, either way you are embracing a belief system that promises immortality beyond the grave. And this brings me to a strange irony in the belief system of life everlasting. The desire to be alive conflicts with the desire not to suffer. In an important difference between Exorcist novel and film, in the novel Karras discovers that Merrin had taken a nitroglycerin pill because he knew he was dying of a heart attack. At least that’s the way it reads to me on p308. And yet, in Christianity suicide is considered a sin, but surely the yearning for immortality should make believers not only accept the death of their physical body, but actually look forward to it, even long for it? If suicide is a sin then wouldn’t the desire for death be a sin too? No wonder religion confuses people.

A lot of spiritual movies involve a protagonist character dying at the end only to discover life everlasting. And The Exorcist includes this factor. Dying at the bottom of the steps, Karras uses his fingers to confirm his belief in God and the afterlife as Dyer prays for him. The novel describes a look of happiness in his eyes, as he looks beyond this world, and a sense of triumph p318. Dyer sees this and “feels lighter”. There’s the spiritual anti-gravity again.

CONCLUSION

So there you go. Human spiritual belief in ghosts and the afterlife is fairly complicated. It has lots of nuances that take quite a bit of unravelling. Volumes upon volumes of books and published studies have tried, for centuries, to identify, explain and resolve the subject. The Exorcist, with its historical references and complex psychology of youth, mortality and related factors, struck a lot of psychological nerves and continues to do so today, half a century later. I consider it to be an important contribution to the spirituality debate.

 

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FULL METAL JACKET and the universal art of brainwashing

FULL METAL JACKET
and the universal art of brainwashing

by Rob Ager

This article is a transcript of my video of the same title. The video
can be 
downloaded for free on the film analysis page of my site www.collativelearning.com

Let’s take a look at brainwashing as presented in the classic war movie Full Metal Jacket. Before we get into details I first need to frame the context. This article isn’t going to be a generalized attack on military institutions. We need military institutions because if we didn’t have them then other regimes that do have a military could take over the world, just like if we didn’t have police then organized criminals would take over. And part of having a military is that we need to have soldiers who are trained in the art of violence against violence. So what I’ve referred to in the title of the article as brainwashing can be more politely referred to as conditioning or simply training. Some forms of conditioning and training are extremely useful, such as learning to read and write. And military training can also bring out great qualities in men. At the same time soldiers can be brutalized by their training, which can be made worse in turn by their war time experience. They can end up committing horrendous war crimes or can become crazy spree killers, as is alluded to in Full Metal Jacket’s Private Leonard Lawrence (Private Pyle) looking ominous as his drill instructor talks about Spree killer Charles Whitman. Soldiers, like politicians and academics, can also be so brainwashed that they end up being useful idiots for warmongering regimes. Every war has its complexities and so it’s not always easy to tell which side, if any, has the least brainwashed army. So for any military personnel watching this video, rest assured I’m not denouncing all military training or denying that it has positive functions.

Ok, on with the film review. Until recently I’d always considered the first half of Full Metal Jacket to be a basic statement against the brainwashing aspects of military training. It’s hardly even subtle in this respect. Private Leonard Lawrence is relentlessly targeted and bullied by Sgt Hartman, who also manipulates the rest of the platoon into torturing Leonard. He is emotionally broken by the experience and kills Hartman then himself. That’s the basic surface narrative, and the sheer horror of what’s done to Leonard is initially masked by Hartman’s hilarious insulting of the recruits. Hartman tells Leonard, “Wipe that disgusting grin off your face … or I will gauge out your eyeballs and skull fuck you”. Note the SKULL fucking implication regarding the MIND fuck that the recruits will be subjected to during their relentless training.

Incidentally, for those of you who’ve heard the commonly repeated rumour that most of the dialogue in the first half of Full Metal Jacket was adlibbed, it wasn’t. I read an early version of the script from 1985 and a lot of the dialogue was already there. What does appear to have happened, from the set reports I’ve come across, is that Lee Ermey, the actor who played Hartman, was doing a lot of rehearsals and at that stage there was some adlibbing, from which Kubrick selected out parts that he liked and incorporated them into the script. By the time of the actual shoot nearly all the dialogue was on paper, but a bit of adlibbing still occurred with Kubrick selecting and deleting as he saw fit. So no, the idea that most of this dialogue was just made up during actual shooting takes is misinformation to my knowledge.

So anyway, I recently I went back to Full Metal Jacket with a view to updating my original study, which I’d written way back in 2008 when I’d not long started out in film analysis, and something dawned on me that I’d not considered before. The military training context of Full Metal Jacket’s brainwashing scenes might not be the main point. Kubrick may have also been making a larger statement about how brainwashing occurs generally in multiple social contexts. A quick glance over Kubrick’s filmography supports this. …

In Paths of Glory, Kubrick gave us a story of French soldiers being coerced into battle under the threat of execution if they refused to fight. That story was a military context of course, but like with Full Metal Jacket its lessons about military coercion are more likely statements about military coercion of violence across the globe and across history, rather than only relating to a single historical war that is long gone and is now unchangeable. Kubrick also directed Spartacus, but it wasn’t his script and he had very limited control of production, but still the movie involved men being brainwashed or trained for violence and then coerced into fighting each other in gladiatorial contexts. Thematically this fits in his larger filmography. Dr Strangelove had scenes in which branches of the US military fight each other based upon paranoia and lies fed to them by their higher command – again, military context. But two films later Kubrick made A Clockwork Orange, in which non-military brainwashing is a central plot element. This time the surface story is of a convicted man whose criminal impulse is neutered by brainwashing and in turn his ability to defend himself in an already violent world is neutered. Kubrick’s next film was Barry Lyndon, in which a young man is forced into military service in multiple contexts. He is brutalized by the training and war experiences. But instead of being a fully brainwashed soldier dedicated to a national or ideological cause, he is turned into a social psychopath who manipulates his way through the ranks of wealth and power. Eyes Wide Shut’s orgy scenes present brainwashed secret society members who rigidly do as they’re told, like foot soldiers. And finally there’s A.I. Artificial intelligence, which has brainwashing elements weaved in beneath its story of robots programmed to serve their human masters. Spielberg directed the film, but Kubrick spent decades conceiving the basic story and supplied Spielberg with extensive visual storyboards which Spielberg adhered to. In other words Kubrick laid the directorial foundations. In the boardroom scenes of A.I. businessmen and scientists in their combat gear (also known as business suits) listen to delusional lectures about creating perfect human robot “companions”, in other words slaves, and his applauding audience of brainwashed academics are shown with inanimate robots placed among them, as if they ARE the brainwashed robots they seek to create. The reference to academia as a form of brainwashing, and hence to academics as pre-programmed or conditioned automatons, is made more overtly in scenes of the final act. Protagonist android David, meets a factory clone of himself in the office of his own creator. The clone tells David, “This is where they teach you read”. After smashing this robot, David walks into the boardroom where executives had previously discussed their plan to create robot children, but now the room is occupied by factory produced androids placed in the same positions – the executives and academics have been symbolically revealed to be artificial.

Kubrick was very conscious of the fact that there’s a thin line between training, conditioning and brainwashing. He even avoided academic training himself, preferring to self-educate through extensive reading and experimentation. And his films A Clockwork Orange and A.I. certainly present non-military brainwashing themes. And so, going back to Full Metal Jacket, I now view the training section of the movie as both a statement against how men are conditioned or brainwashed into war and as a statement about how people are brainwashed in the more general sense, be it through lunatic cults, academic ranks, secret societies, political parties or plain old news media brainwashing. But military training is a strong metaphoric context because the brainwashing methods are universally used in the militaries of many countries on account of their reliability. Those methods are also incredibly precise and purposeful in design, and military training is such an intense and exaggerated form of brainwashing that is has powerful dramatic impact on screen, whereas more underhanded and prolonged forms of brainwashing in other social contexts are harder to draw attention in the context of a two hour movie.

There are, of course, some key differences between military brainwashing and non-military brainwashing, especially contexts where the conditioning is unofficial. So for example, with both the military and academia, there is an openly stated intention to condition the subject within a specified timeframe. The military version is short and intense. The academic version takes years. And if we consider that the education of children in schools includes brainwashing elements, such as the regimentation of a five day working week into the subject’s psyche, that form of brainwashing spans a good ten years or more. However, unlike schools, universities and the military, some powerful forms of brainwashing are done without the subject being made aware that they are being enrolled in a training program, commercial advertising for example. We don’t usually sign up for these. We don’t ask to be manipulated into buying a product by associating false value with it. Instead advertisers try to get to us covertly through product placement and other methods.

So what I’m going to do for the rest of this article / video is highlight some of the key brainwashing elements in Full Metal Jacket’s training scenes. Some are universally present in many other contexts outside of the military. Others are military specific. As we go through have a think about which of these brainwashing methods do and don’t manifest in non-military contexts and how they manifest. If you occasionally feel like you may have been subjected to some of these methods yourself then that’s ok, you probably have. I know I certainly have.

Right, so let’s get into it. I’m going to use a bit of a scattershot approach to try and get as many points across as possible. There are lots of overlaps between these techniques as well, enough for you to further explore later.

ONE
LEGAL PRESSURE

By this I’m mainly referring to men being drafted into military service against their will (though apparently this is not the case in the Marines), but I’m also referring to the presence of military courts and prisons. Refuse to serve under a draft or go against the program too much during training and you can wind up in a prison cell for a year or two, which is effectively a form of mild, but prolonged torture. Stanley Kubrick was certainly aware of this form of coercion and brainwashing because he made a whole movie about it called Paths of Glory, a story of French soldiers tried in a rigged court and executed for not storming an enemy who they knew they couldn’t defeat. The trial and execution of course were done as a showcase, a warning to the rest of the military to follow orders without question.

Outside of military and criminal behaviour contexts the threat of imprisonment isn’t usually a means of brainwashing coercion, though it still sometimes exists in the form of what some governments call hate speech laws, which in some contexts might be more appropriately called anti-speech laws. But, for the most part, legal pressure in terms of monetary fines is more common outside of the military to my knowledge.

TWO
SEPARATING THE SUBJECT FROM FAMILIAR LIFE CONTEXT

Military training involves young men being taken out of their familiar environments – their home, neighbourhood, family, friends – and dropping them alone into a new environment that is radically different to what they’re used to. None only is the physical environment new, but they are effectively locked in among a large batch of unfamiliar faces. Imagine how much more difficult it would be to brainwash a large group of people who are already familiar with each other and have close bonds. Such a group would be a lot more resistant to the conditioning. They would stand up for each other, share opinions of disagreement with the program and so on. In fact I’ve seen that kind of resistance in work-based civilian training courses.

So the military tactic of separating recruits from familiar environments and familiar individuals is a massive psychological pattern break. It severs many of the thousands of intricate links between people and their historical context, making the brainwashing process easier from there on. In fact it’s a familiar tactic used in brainwashing cults, such as the one ran by Charles Manson. They typically find a remote location to house their members and cut off access to family and friends.

Full Metal Jacket makes a very strong point of this tactic in that hardly any of the recruits talk about their personal histories. Hartman asks them some initial questions about their backgrounds, but only so that he can insult their backgrounds, to try and make them feel ashamed of where they are from. The same disconnection from personal history even occurs between the two halves of the movie. Joker meets up with Cowboy, who he was in boot camp with, and there is only minimal dialogue about their shared boot camp experience. It’s almost like they can’t remember their personal histories or the way in which they were brainwashed.

THREE
FRAMING THE BRAINWASHING AS SELF-IMPROVEMENT

In military institutions there’s a very clever piece of verbal manipulation regarding the perception of training. Even though recruits are already technically adults they are told that military training will turn them into MEN. An implication, therein, is that the personal history of the recruits before the boot camp was just child’s play and is therefore something to be disregarded, but the implication is nonsense if you think about it. Boot camp training is an incredibly artificial setup. What the recruits have experienced beforehand in civilian life is more akin to reality. In fact it could be argued that military training causes some men to regress into boyish states of mind where bullying, peer pressure and fantasies of violence acted out through toys soldiers become dominant in the psyche once again.

In his very first speech Hartman slips in two pieces of clever manipulation. “I am hard but I am fair.”And “The more you hate me the more you will learn.” Well both of those claims are garbage. Hartman isn’t fair. He claims to be non-racist then gives a racial insult, “Well, there’s one thing you won’t like Pvt Brown, we don’t serve fried chicken and watermelon in my mess hall on a daily basis”. He brutally targets Leonard and drives him to suicide. And the idea that the more the recruits hate him the more they’ll learn … Well, if I hate Stalin or Hitler does that mean they stood for something good and worthwhile? No. An effective teacher is more likely to be respected than hated. If they’re hated by the majority of their trainees then they’re likely doing something wrong. But these twists of logic are thrown at the recruits so quickly they barely have a moment to question any of it.

When Hartman dishes out harsh and unnecessary punishment he typically frames it as if the recruit is inflicting punishment on themselves. “If there is one thing I hate it is an unlocked footlocker!” But actually the one thing he hates is the recruit he is talking to, Leonard Lawrence. Responding to Joker’s statement that he doesn’t believe in the Virgin Mary, “Why you little maggot, you make me want to vomit!”, followed by a backhand smack in the face.

Hartman’s attack on the personal background of the recruits is an attack on their identity, but it’s also a clever piece of reverse psychology. Indoctrination often involves the subject being told that their own personal history was a form of brainwashing and that the new leader is going to deprogram the subject, free them from their personal history and give them psychological freedom. Ironically, there’s often a string of truth to this, but the new leader takes the subject too far the other way, giving them some new strengths, freedoms and insights, but also brainwashing them in ways that defeat the point as far as the recruit is concerned.

The head shaving is also a bit of an insult because a lot of people have never been head shaved and it doesn’t suit them. Humiliation is an important factor in a lot of brainwashing and, oh boy, do we get an onslaught of this in Full Metal Jacket. Hartman’s constant insults to the recruits are so extreme they’re hilarious. There’s personal one to one humiliation and there’s the much more powerful public humiliation that Hartman specializes in. We could even think of military training as equivalent to an exorcism. The unique individual needs to be ridiculed, discredited, made to seem undesirable and purged through a repetitive succession of rituals.

This technique of framing the individual and their history as corrupt, delusional and unworthy is not only powerful, but in many brainwashing contexts it is essential. In many cults and membership organisations a view is aggressively promoted that everybody outside of the institution are the brainwashed ones, the blind ones, the indoctrinated ones, the weak ones and that only the brainwashing institution or cult leader can provide awakening, strength, truth and virtue.

Religious cults are a frequent context for this kind of only we can awaken you / only we can put you in touch with the truth tactic, often framed as being in touch with God … and Full Metal Jacket includes allusions to this such as the recruits singing Happy Birthday to Jesus, Hartman’s insistence that Joker should believe in the virgin Mary and his statements to the entire squad, “You will be a minister of death praying for war,” and “God has a hard one for Marines because we kill everything we see.” Later a helicopter gunner will be shown firing at and trying to kill everything he sees. It’s an interesting line actually. Does it mean the trained recruits see nothing?

As well as the claim that military training will turn the recruits into REAL MEN, Hartman hilariously makes suggestions that they have come to boot camp as gay men who need to be straightened out and insists that they give their rifle a girl’s name. And all along, successful military service is likened to losing one’s virginity. Joker knows about this and mocks it during an interview scene during his tour of duty, “I wanted to be the first kid on my block to get a confirmed kill.”

In my view REAL MEN and REAL WOMEN form their own personal opinions based on what they actually experience. They don’t wait for some group or institution to spoon feed them an oven-ready narrative, complete with dumb slogans and contradictory codes of conduct. Have a think about the membership groups you are involved in, especially the ones you cherish most, and whether you have been sold the BS line of thinking that non-members are blind fools or weaklings and that only the membership institution has access to the ultimate truth. If you swallowed that line and internalized it then you’re probably, to some extent, brainwashed.

Before we carry on with this study folks, there is one cult I do recommend you join and this is the cult of individual, self-determined, free thinkers. It’s a philosophy I weave into much of my work at www.collativelearning.com. You’re fine as you are of course, and I’m certainly not the only person supporting or promoting this free-thinking attitude. There’s probably others who are much better at it that I am, so if you find them then that’s great. Meanwhile, if you like this article and want to access a great deal more of my content then go ahead and join my cult. You’re not required to abandon your friends and family, I won’t tell you that I have all the answers, I’m not offering a single universal truth that will save you, I don’t even require you to wear a uniform, and you can leave anytime you like without being harassed. To join up you can either become a monthly supporter of my work on Patreon, which will give you access to many hours of additional content, or you can simply visit my website from time to time where you’ll find free in-depth articles on Kubrick films and other topics and you can order digital downloads from my library of offline videos and articles. Bookmark my site so you don’t forget about it and check in from time to time to see what’s on offer.

Ok, back to Full Metal Jacket …

FOUR
REPLACING INDIVIDUAL PHYSICAL APPEARANCE
WITH GROUP APPEARANCE

Next up, we have the technique of altering the physical image of the recruit. Hair colour, length and style tend to be unique to individuals so shaving this away is a direct attack on their identity. It’s also funny that shaving the head is something we do to people who are about to have brain surgery. And in some historical context, the shaving of heads is done as a public insult by lynch mobs.

The discarding and replacement of the recruits’ clothing and supplying them with identical bunks and other belongings serves the same effect. But it’s not just about discarding the existing personal-image based identity. You have to supply a replacement identity. And so the skinheads and identical uniforms are also about making the recruits look almost identical to each other. This is a way of forcing them to adopt a group identity and hence group behaviour instead of individualist behaviour.

This is common in life. School uniforms in some countries like here in the UK reduce personal identity at the visual level. We have police and firemen uniforms, business suits, tuxedo uniforms for specific occasions, religious uniforms, and even social trend uniforms whether it’s goth, punk, biker, hippy or rapper. In fact the word uniform (uni-form) is directly related to making people look identical, uni means singular. I’m not saying it’s always bad. I’m just saying it’s there and sometimes is part of a brainwashing alteration of personal identity. So while we can argue that police uniforms, for example, are important so that the public can distinguish who is and isn’t a trained and certified police officer, the restriction of individuality is also present in that we hardly ever see cops whose physical image includes personal expressions of individuality. Tattoos, wild hair styles, prominent facial piercings or expressive adornments attached to the uniform are also conspicuously missing. And this is the case with many forms of physical image conditioning. The absence of expressed individuality is key so that the cop is viewed publicly as only a cop and nothing more.

FIVE
MANUFACTURING CONSENSUS OF OPINION

Next up is the tactic of manipulating everyone into expressing predesigned uniform opinions. There’s a lot involved with this, but of course a fundamental element is the denial of individual free speech. Hartman, “You will speak only when spoken too.” In particular, recruits asking questions that challenge the opinions of the brainwashing institution has to be declared a no-go area. Any expression of disagreement or refusal to express conformed opinions is responded to with immediate, aggressive shouting down or even with violence.

Unique to Full Metal Jacket, in comparison to other military training movies, is that the recruits are very rarely shown engaging in personal chit-chat and so hardly any personal opinions among the recruits are shown. In a toilet mopping scene Joker engages in a private chat with Cowboy and he first looks around to see whether anyone else is listening before he dares speak.

Having the recruits collectively speak prewritten opinions in a single group unified voice is also a means of manufacturing consensus, the prayers and marching sons being perfect examples. But this is also present non-verbally in the form of group shared activities. Having everyone go through the same brainwashing routines not only reinforces their identification with the group instead of the self, but also it promotes the idea that the physical and emotional torture of the experience is socially acceptable. It’s amazing how much abuse people are willing to take if they see other people around them enduring the same. Subject an individual to such harsh treatment and they might well complain or refuse to do as they’re told, but in a group each recruit’s lack of willingness to speak out against the activity creates an illusionary consensus, the false notion that everybody accepts and agrees with the orders.

The result of all this is that the recruits don’t express any thoughts of their own, but also they don’t get to hear any opinions outside of those supplied by the institution. This is immensely powerful because most people lack confidence in their own thoughts to the point that they need to hear similar opinions expressed from others in order to maintain their belief in it themselves.

Going beyond boot camp forced consensus, some governments even have laws prohibiting soldiers from talking publicly about what they’ve experienced in the military. This can be argued as a measure for protecting sensitive operational information from making its way into the hands of the enemy, but it also serves a function of preventing war atrocities and waste from being reported to the general public. And it prevents a lot of soldiers who have become disillusioned with their military service from communicating their ideas to the wider public. How often do we hear former soldiers publicly advising people not to join the military or advising them how to resist the brainwashing techniques of boot camp?

Suppression of personal and alternate opinions and repeating of predetermined slogans for creating false consensus is incredibly common. Many non-military institutions have strict rules on what their members can say publicly, with punishments at the ready if they do speak out of line. Public firings as a warning to other members, withdrawal of funds and general character assassination at dissenting voices …. These techniques are prominent in academia (even in the basic physical sciences), they’re also common in journalism, politics and many other contexts. It also occurs in terms of news media coverage of specific issues. The public are often denied access to dissenting opinions in terms of news coverage, pollsters often misreport public opinion giving the impression of consensus that doesn’t exist. And a lot of people hold a view that if something isn’t being reported in the news then it’s either not true or not important.

But of course the ultimate aim of manufactured consensus opinion is to persuade enough people to repeat the opinions of the brainwashing institution so that the institution itself no longer needs to speak those opinions. It can rely on those it has already brainwashed to do the speaking and thus keep up the false consensus illusion. And that brings up the next brainwashing tactic.

SIX
INCITING PEER PRESSURE AGAINST RESISTORS

Possibly the most insidious form of brainwashing is the covert encouragement of violence against a resistant subject by third parties. Hartman knows that by punishing the rest of the recruits for supposed mistakes by Leonard he is calling upon the group to violently gang up on Leonard. Note that when Leonard is howling in pain after the soap beating, which is known as a blanket party and apparently really happens in marine training, Hartman doesn’t come out of his quarters to find out what the noise is. But he knows and he wanted this to happen. If it had been reported by Leonard he would have done nothing about what is essentially torture.

However there doesn’t have to be actual violence for the peer pressure to work. The threat of violence from the peer group is often enough. By engaging in this blanket party beating of Leonard the group are reinforcing the brainwashing message among each other that Hartman’s orders must be followed without fail. They are effectively contributing to their own brainwashing.

Beyond violence, simple peer rejection for not conforming to the brainwashing program is often enough. It amazes me how few people in society are willing to stand their ground for something they believe in when they feel that group opinion is against them. But often it’s not really the case that everyone else disagrees. Sometimes it’s just that others are afraid to express agreement for fear of being targeted. Social media is a funny context for this. I find that what people will say in person about what they believe is often very different to what they will admit on social media. It only takes a few hard core brainwashed idiots to attack someone who expresses an opinion they don’t want others to hear, and in turn a lot of people avoid expressing that same opinion lest they be attacked. In some ways it’s mass cowardice because the ramblings of the brainwashed attackers are usually easy to defeat.

SEVEN
REPETITION OF FALSE MESSAGES

In itself repetition isn’t very powerful. You can tell someone something they don’t believe over and over and end up being ignored, but repetition is powerful when combined with other methods.

A key example is from boot camp is to physically and mentally exhaust the recruits, which distracts them consciously but also breaks down their cognitive ability to resist verbal input. They lack the energy to put up a mental fight so you can hit them hard with repetitious verbal messaging with a better chance that it will sink in and become subconsciously embedded. A variation on this, apparently used by Charles Manson, was to drug his followers and then verbally program their beliefs while they were spaced out and unable to resist. Whether it’s exhaustion or drugs the result is similar to hypnosis. Get someone into a trance and a lot of their usual conscious defences are lowered.

Another aspect used by Hartman is that if a recruit is bombarded very rapidly and constantly with lies then they don’t have time to mentally process what they’re being told and so the messages sink in. Hartman is constantly screaming orders and indoctrinating statements to his men to the point they probably hear his voice and slogans echoing in their sleep. For example, in a slow motion shot of the recruits running through muddy water, Hartman’s non-stop shouting of orders ought to be slowed down and distorted, but is heard at normal speed.

I’ve heard this overload and repetition approach used a lot in ideological indoctrination. Like Hartman, ideologists usually have memorized an extensive internal library of verbal arguments with which to influence others. When each of those arguments are heard in isolation and you have time to formulate questions and notice contradictions those individual arguments fall apart. But the ideologist gets around this by spewing out a non-stop bombardment of internally prewritten dialogue and they deliberately keep changing topic s before any of their statements can be challenged. If you pin them down on specific badly thought out statements and demand discussion of its merits they start to squirm and get angry because they don’t want their belief system to be successfully challenged. So if you’re under a bombardment of such rhetoric, you can break the pattern by forcing the speaker to slow down and debate the merit of each isolated statement. It really trips them up.

Before we move on, one more variation on the use of repetition, and this is a powerful one, is Hartman’s requirement that the recruits memorize military slogans, lyrics and bureaucratic orders. If they don’t memorize them he punishes them. Part of the reason this is effective is because the memorizing process requires that the recruits internally repeat the messages to themselves over and over again, thus programming themselves.

EIGHT
DEMONIZING THE ENEMY

This one is extremely common in brainwashing and arguably a requirement. The brainwashing leader or institutions has to persuade the recruit that there is a terrifying enemy threatening them, their loved ones and their future. With Hartman the enemy predictably is Communism. It’s funny that he talks about the “free world” to the recruits, who are virtually prison inmates, many of whom will have been drafted against their will.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of Communism, but the throwing about of over-simplistic ideological labels is standard in political indoctrination. Left wing, right wing, liberal, conservative, capitalist, communist, libertarian, socialist – these labels create division and justify us vs them politics and the brainwashing that goes with the resulting conflict. There’s no such thing as a completely socialist or capitalist country, you need elements of both and if there is a devil at work it can be found in the details unique to the country in question. Vietnam specifically had a long and complex history that led to “communism” taking root. I seriously doubt that most marines were taught that history.

I won’t dwell on this aspect of brainwashing though being that Hartman only makes minimal use of it. I expect though that in real life military training demonizing enemies with the use of over-simplistic ideological labels is probably more central to the brainwashing process.

NINE
BRIBING THE RESISTORS

Hartman initially makes Private Brown squad leader, possibly because on the first day of training brown shouts his answers the loudest and so he seems to be the most committed to doing as he’s told. But when Hartman discovers that Joker is the most intellectually resistant to his brainwashing he fires Brown and makes Joker squad leader. He even compliments Joker, “Private Joker is silly and he’s ignorant, but he’s got guts and guts is enough.”

An element of Hartman’s decision could be that it’s a form or bribery. It appeals to Joker’s pride, but also Joker is excused from some of the training routines on account of him taking time out to train Leonard. At the same time, tasking him with training Leonard cleverly reframes Joker’s situation. Joker is encouraged to help brainwash another recruit. He may do it more calmly and effectively, but he’s still helping to mould Leonard and it gives Joker an opportunity to be proud of stepping into Hartman’s shoes. This is an interesting dynamic because, those of us who have a tendency to defy authority often find that being made to be an authority figure is an eye opener. It makes us realize that sometimes authority figures have good reason to act the way they do.

In general life this method of bribing the resistant is quite common. Higher wages, greater perceived social status – these gimmes are used across the board to get intelligent, capable people to assist in the brainwashing and control of others. It certainly works, though I’ll add that the extremely resistant aren’t usually bribed like this because they’re too good at rocking the boat if they’re promoted. In most of the organisations I’ve worked for before becoming self-employed, I noticed that the willingness to “tow the line” and not “rock the boat” was the key trait upper management were looking for when filling mid-management positions. The secondary trait was management capability. And so I met many mid-level managers who were inefficient, but approved of by high management. Brainwashing institutions have to operate in this way. Otherwise, strong-minded individuals will climb the ranks and restructure the institution into something else.

TEN
THE BRAINWASHER MUST EXPRESS CONVICTION

Onto my final point. Given that the logical, rational and moral arguments used to brainwash people tend to easily fall apart under calm scrutiny, brainwashing leaders and institutions tend to compensate with over-emphasis on emotional conviction. Hartman absolutely relies on this, screaming his slogans right in the faces of recruits and using violence when they resist his claims. And of course that’s what the close up shouting is all about – it’s a constant reminder … accept and agree with my statements, no matter how ridiculous, or I will physically hurt you.

However, it’s not always all out shouting and screaming that communicates emotional conviction. In general life Hartman’s behaviour would be rejected by most people, unless they had already been brainwashed into his belief system. So in general life, strong emotional conviction in the form of underhanded threats is a lot more subtle – prolonged uncomfortable eye contact combined with a slight frown and jaw tension, a voice that is slightly raised in volume but deep in tone, rigid stone-cold non-reactive posture can be very intimidating to people. And these things can be done consciously or unconsciously by the brainwashing party. Then there’s more positive forms of conviction that don’t convey overt hostility, but give the impression of firm belief in what is being spoken … over enthusiastic delivery in the forms of exaggerated facial expressions, hand movements and vocal emphasis of key words and phrases. These things in themselves don’t make the rational arguments stronger at all, but they give the impression that the speaker thoroughly believes what they are saying and that they don’t feel emotionally or intellectually conflicted. A lot of people get fooled by this, but if you go listen to delusional schizophrenics who strongly believe the things they say, they also can come across as having total conviction. So it’s important to remember that, while conviction can be an indicator that the speaker does not feel emotionally conflicted, it does not mean that what they believe is actually true. They might be flat out wrong and blind to that fact.

It is possible for people to convey strong conviction even when they know they’re lying, but from what I’ve seen that appearance is superficial. It falls apart under close scrutiny and especially under cross-examination. And so, as with many cult leaders and ideologically driven tyrants, if the brainwasher personally strongly believes in their own lies then they are more likely to convey persuasive conviction. Hitler’s famous speeches are an example – he conveys total belief and, actually, his screaming and shouting are similar to that of a drill sergeant. Of course I’m not saying that drill sergeants are mini-Hitlers. There were drill sergeants who trained people to fight the Nazis. I’m talking about the generalized patterns of persuasive conviction that are familiar to many contexts

To this effect, the leaders and high level members of brainwashing institutions are usually brainwashed themselves. They believe their own garbage. And so, in the boot camp scenario of Full Metal Jacket the most brainwashed character is Sgt Hartman himself. He’s like a robot. He lives and breathes the lies that he speaks. If we could hear his internal dialogue, the things he says to himself, would we find his internal voice to be calm and rational or would we find that he constantly shouts at himself too? I think it would be the latter. At least the recruits have an end date for their training and, if they make it, an end to their tour of duty, but Hartman seems to be brainwashed for life. Don’t forget that there was once a time when he too was a maggot recruit being screamed at by another drill sergeant who he may have consciously forgotten for the most part. Drill sergeants get trained too. They don’t make all this stuff. They get conditioned and they end up shouting endless slogans to others that they mostly didn’t even think up themselves.

Ok, that’s a wrap. I’ve no doubt that some of these points you already knew, but I hope you picked up some extra insights here or at least some considerations that you can go away and think about in terms of what kinds of brainwashing you’ve experienced, witnessed or even subjected others too.

Make sure to check out my other articles and videos on psychology and film analysis at www.collativelearning.com

Stay free.

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“Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual” book review

“Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual by Nathan Abrams”
Book review and response by Rob Ager, March 2021

In late 2020 my attention was drawn to Nathan Abrams’ work by his article titled Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining. I was already aware that there are some who believe Kubrick’s films to be an exposure of supposed Jewish world control (once in a blue moon I’d seen anonymous statements to that effect on forums), though it’s not a view I’ve ever personally agreed with or promoted. In fact Kubrick’s ethnicity is something I’d always considered incidental to the man, being that I personally judge people by their individual character … I’m from Liverpool, but don’t particularly identify with my city of birth (especially after spending a five year chunk of my childhood living abroad) so why should I put anyone else in such a box?

Nathan Abrams’ article enticed me to contact him and start a dialogue. It also got me interested in his book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, which I’ve since read, almost in full. Being that Nathan is Jewish himself, my assumption was that he would be able to provide a cultural interpretation of Kubrick and his films that otherwise wouldn’t be evident to a non-Jewish researcher such as myself. I’d never personally detected much in the way of Jewish themes in Kubrick’s movies, despite studying their production histories in great depth, but maybe that’s a blind spot for me.

Nathan’s book did partially meet my cultural insight expectation. He has conducted an extensive amount of research on the issue and, while I agree with some of his conclusions and not others, the background information his book provides was worth the read in itself. There are many points in the text in which claims are made about Kubrick’s personal background and the production history of his films, in which the sources of the information aren’t given, but in many of these instances I recognized information previously acquired through my own research and so I was aware that the sources did actually exist. This factor, plus the absence of technical misinformation (to my knowledge) in the text, strongly suggests to me that Nathan has been quite meticulous in his research, even where sources aren’t given. And he certainly drew many factors to my attention that I wasn’t aware of, despite more than a decade of researching and writing about Kubrick’s work myself. Nathan’s book shines on the level of technical research.

On top of this Nathan offers no shortage of interpretation regarding the potential meanings of Kubrick’s movies. Some of it is certainly very interesting. In places he offers what I consider very plausible arguments that Kubrick intended particular characters in his movies to be Jewish at the subtext level.

However, there were as many instances during my read through, in which I felt Nathan was desperately trying to force a Jewish identity interpretation upon specific characters, where none seemed to exist in my view. For example, attributing the presence of both the colours red and yellow as evidence of a reference to Jewishness.

Given what appears to me as Nathan’s strong bias toward interpreting Jewishness in every corner of Kubrick’s films, I quickly came to suspect that the author, despite being academically very intelligent and capable, was compromised in the writing of his book by his own deep identification with ethnicity and faith. In this respect he is remarkably different to Stanley Kubrick, who was not only non-academic, but also a staunch individualist and, according to the evidence I’ve seen, an atheist. Personally I’m agnostic. But, despite my own leanings, Kubrick has always struck me as a man who believes that physical death truly is the end of the line. Consider these interview statements regarding his films Dr Strangelove and The Shining.

“There’s a fatal subconscious attraction in resolving the problem of one’s own death in the thought of the whole world blowing up together.”
SK quoted in the Stanley Kubrick Archives book p365

“As fewer and fewer people find solace in religion … I actually believe that they derive a kind of perverse solace from the idea that in the event of nuclear war; the world dies with them.”
SK interviewed in 1968 by Eric Nordern for Playboy

“I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.”
SK interview with Michel Ciment about The Shining

However, one area in which I do believe Kubrick and Abrams had strong overlap in their world views is their interest in the anti-Jewish portion of the WW2 holocaust and its implications about history and human nature. Nathan’s article Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining conveys the author’s deep concern that the blame all the world’s problems on Jews mentality of Nazism remains a serious threat to modern day Jews. I certainly agree there are fringe groups promoting those ideas, but the world is psychologically, culturally and technically a very different place today and so the chances of a new Jewish holocaust occurring are, in my view, remote in the extreme. To that effect I’ll quote “Jewish intellectual” Stanley Kubrick himself.

“It can never happen in that way again, which may be true, but it’ll happen differently. Everybody’s convinced they’ll never have another 1914 situation, but they’ll have a 1985 situation they’re not prepared for.”
SK interviewed by Jeremy Bernstein 1966

Note that Kubrick isn’t talking specifically about a forthcoming new holocaust against Jewish people. He seems to be talking more about holocausts and wars in general. After all, the WW2 holocaust is just one of many throughout history, to which effect Kubrick’s The Shining includes themes of the holocaust of Native Americans. This is one of the most widely accepted interpretations of the film, but I have found no mention of that factor in Nathan’s book about Kubrick. The WW2 holocaust included persecution and genocide of multiple social and ethnic groups. Jews were certainly the prime initial target, to my knowledge, but the Nazis reportedly had plans for a massive expansion of the program that would have seen many millions more, from Slavik countries mainly, executed with a small percentage kept alive as slaves – their Master Plan for the East.

Kubrick was wise enough to recognize the historical patterns of genocide and slavery spanning multiple racial and social contexts. In A Clockwork Orange lead thug character Alex fantasizes about taking part in historical battles going back to Roman times, Dr Strangelove features a great nuclear holocaust of almost the entire world, The Shining has Native American genocide themes, Full Metal Jacket has racial themes regarding the slaughter of Vietnamese, and the Spielberg / Kubrick movie AI: Artificial Intelligence has a scene in which self-aware robots of the future are slaughtered for the entertainment of crowds – a historical parallel with Roman colosseum fights. We could just assume all these examples to be metaphors about the genocide of Jews only, but I think that would be an insult to all those other persecuted groups and an insult to the intelligence of Stanley Kubrick himself. While the genocide of Jews in WW2 is a history lesson that absolutely should not be forgotten, we should also remember that slavery, genocide and holocausts generally are not limited racially. They span the spectrum and we should remain watchful for signs of it occurring in all its potential forms. It can happen to any racial, religious or social group given adequate propaganda and an establishment will to do so.

Unfortunately, when people become preoccupied only with injustices done to a single perceived group, this can ironically sow the seeds for bigotry against other groups. The German people themselves felt victimized after WW1 and so they turned to Hitler and his Nazi Party to address that tunnel vision view – the “victim” becomes the abuser. A modern day example of this, which I presume Nathan Abrams is aware of, is that many African Americans feel (with some historical justification) that they are THE victim group in the US, and yet anti-Semitic views are statistically high among African Americans in the US, assuming the opinion polls are accurate. The ADL has reported on this.

Unfortunately, in reading Nathan’s book I found saddening contradictions that are quite typical of over-identification with the victim group. To put this into context let me first present to you a series of quotes (the source of which I will reveal later in this review) that can be taken as examples of hatred toward Jews. These are real quotes from a published book offering interpretations of Kubrick’s films. I‘ll give you the page number references first then tell you the title of the book afterward, from which all of the quotes have been taken.

Page 87, regarding lead character Humbert in Lolita
“These various traits fitted into the stereotype of the dangerous, predatory, sleazy, sex-obssessed, and sexually deviant Jew who was, simultaneously, a seductive and devilish monster as well as unmanly, weak, effeminate sissy, outside the norm of goyish masculinity.”

Page 202, regarding lead character Jack Torrance in The Shining
“Jack persuades Ullman to give him the job, and, in a display reminiscent of Quilty’s death sequence, he uses his Jewish brains to attempt to wheedle his way out of the walk-in freezer, switching personalities from a hurt little boy to a screaming bully.”

Page 212, regarding lead character Jack Torrance in The Shining
“Ultimately, he’s abandoned like a snowy lamb in this frozen maze. Given that this “snow” consisted of nine hundred tons of dendritic dairy salt, Jack is salted – a piece of kosher sacrificial meat.”

Page 258-260, regarding the character Zeigler in Eyes Wide Shut
“Zeigler is a charming Quilty-like character whose representation draws on some of the oldest stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. Extremely wealthy, he treats other human beings, especially women, as servile objects. He’s sexually deviant with little concern for the women he uses; he almost kills a prostitute but does not worry about her welfare. His bathroom is decorated with very explicit and, arguably, misogynistic artworks of nude women in various sexual poses. He’s powerful, lying, hypocritical, hypersexual, and misogynistic, orchestrating and participating in the sexual corruption (and possible murder) of gentile women.
… Only a stereotypically tasteless Jew has a bathroom as lavishly and decadently decorated, his idea of WASP taste. The bathroom location suggests the dirty Jew doing his business in the conceptually filthiest of places, upstairs and out of sight of the genteel (and gentile) guests downstairs, the culmination of Kubrick’s signature use of bathrooms in his films.
… As the very first item he puts on while getting dressed is his oversized glasses, attention is drawn to them, as well as his nose, thus dominating our image of his face. This is closely aligned with the suggested reference toward his (Jewish) penis by the action of zipping up. He remains shirtless for several minutes, emphasizing his hirsuteness. Hence the stereotypical phenotype elements (body hair, glasses, nose and penis) dominate the image for most of the scene.
… Zeigler is seemingly responsible for orchestrating the orgy, which further underlines negative Jewish associations. Anti-semites regularly pointed to Jewish cabals and satanic worship among Jews, who were the Devil’s Earthly representatives. Since the exterior shots of Somerton are of Mentmore Towers in Buckinghamshire, built in 1855 for the Jewish Rothschild family, the place invokes anti-Semitic notions of an all-powerful cabal serviced by covertly manipulative court Jews as embodied by the Rothschilds.
… Zeigler is mimicking the concept of a Christian mass. Arguably, only Jews could conceive of such a Catholic ritual, and, of course, it was the product of the Jewish imagination: Schnitzler as refracted through Raphael and Kubrick’s screenplay and ultimately the latter’s research.”

Several of those quotes I found incredibly shocking and one would expect the author of such content to be singled out publicly and branded as anti-Semitic. Those interpretations never crossed my mind during the hundreds of hours I’ve spent producing many articles and videos on the works of Kubrick. In fact I found these descriptions more shocking than near enough any anti-Semitic interpretation of Kubrick that I’ve ever come across online. Equally shocking to me, in fact downright astounding, is that the author of these quotes is none other than Nathan Abrams – they were published in his own book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual. They’re not quotes from other sources that have been included in his book. These are his personal published descriptions. It’s an aspect of his book that I dislike having to report on because it tarnishes an otherwise fascinating study of Kubrick, but to omit these factors in this review would be an exercise in dishonesty.

It’s a great contradiction that Nathan tries to attribute Kubrick’s talents to his race and religious background (that’s how his book reads to me) and yet his interpretation of Kubrick films veers off into the very thing he objected to in his article Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining, the belief that Kubrick was making a grand negative statement about Jews. It’s a dead certainty that Kubrick’s films carry a consistent theme of anti-pedophilia, but to attribute those pedophile characters as being symbolically Jewish … could there be a more anti-Semitic interpretation? If the interpretation is true to Kubrick’s intentions then Nathan’s book is self-defeating. If it’s misinterpretation then it’s self-defeating, hypocritical and an insult to Kubrick himself. Toward the end of the book, Nathan seems to acknowledge this contradiction.

Page 264
“Kubrick lived as the lone American, a stranger in a strange land, living in rural England, and Eyes Wide Shut tapped into themes that have dominated his films, that unconscious Jewish desire, as social pariah’s, to unmask the respectability of European society by exposing its sordid, sexual goyim naches. But at the same time, the person seemingly organizing this goyishness, is a Crypto-Jew, a matrix of anti-semitic attitudes, who becomes a stand-in for the director himself. Kubrick, it seemed, remained ambivalent about his Jewishness to the end.”

A further aspect of the book that I found distasteful and contradictory, but not nearly to the same level, is the strand of racial and religious superiority displayed by the author. It’s not blatant, but in my view appears to be there. In fact it’s present in some of the quotes I’ve already given from the book, but there are many more examples I haven’t quoted.

To be fair to Nathan, I personally believe that there is an element of self-serving bigotry present in most human beings whether they’re plumbers, farmers, nurses, academics or politicians. But most of the time it isn’t particularly dangerous. It’s just standard human group-identity bias. As a white European male, I’m subconsciously primed to pay more attention to instances of anti-white male bigotry, just as Nathan Abrams does the same regarding anti-Semitism.

Being conscious of these kinds of self-interest biases, I’ve always sought to publish my own film reviews in a way that incorporates multiple perspectives on any given issue. I’ve written about Native American genocide themes in The Shining, but also challenged harshly anti-American reviews of the John Milius movie Red Dawn. I’ve written about a theme of racism against African Americans in the horror movie Creepshow, yet have also written about the demonization of young white male “jocks”  and Jews in the movie Revenge of the Nerds. I’ve written about the demonization of German foot soldiers in the movie Saving Private Ryan, but have also written about the warnings of Nazi-style fascism re-emergence in movies like Starship Troopers, Dr Strangelove and A Clockwork Orange.

And yet, despite this wide selection of racial viewpoints present in my publications, Nathan Abrams appears to have mistook part of my analysis of The Shining as being potentially anti-Semitic and made reference to that effect in his article Kubrick and the Paranoid Style: Antisemitism, Conspiracy Theories, and The Shining. In approximately fourteen years of posting film reviews online, not once has a published author interpreted my work as anti-Semitic that I’m aware of. In thousands of emails I’ve received about my work, not once have I been accused of anti-Semitism. This is despite me having published hundreds of articles and videos, some of them hundreds of pages or several hours in length.

The statement of mine, made in my interpretation of The Shining, which Nathan objected to, was my statement about the Rothschild family.

“In particular ‘Orders from the house’ could be a reference to Colonel Mandell House, the personal advisor who guided Wilson in surrendering the US government’s right to issue currency to the private bankers. Another possibility is that ‘Orders from the house’ could be referring to the European-based House of Rothschild, a banking dynasty which had dominated and controlled the majority of Europe’s central banks for hundreds of years and which was also rumoured to be the behind-the-scenes controlling force of the Federal Reserve System.”
For the full context of the above quote read the full chapter from my analysis here

Upon reading Nathan’s article, and the fact that Nathan had never contacted me to ask for clarification about what I meant by that statement, I was initially insulted. So I contacted Sense of Cinema, the blog under which Nathan’s article was published. Following this I received responses from Bradley Dixon and Jeremi Marek Szaniawski (editors at Sense of Cinema), the latter of whom assured me that he knew that I wasn’t anti-Semitic, but contradicted that view by claiming that my work on The Shining promoted a trope that encourages anti-Semitism. I asked for evidence that my work had had this effect. None was provided. So I asked for a statement of mine about the nature of my work to be included in Nathan’s article so as to inform the reader of my position. But rather than placing my requested statement in the article where my work was mentioned, it was hidden in the footnotes where nobody would be likely to read it. My name was removed from the main text of the article and a begrudging alteration of wording instead insinuated unconscious bias in what I’d written.

Interpreting these responses as somewhat disingenuous, I eventually I got a response from Nathan Abrams himself. We were very civil with each other and exchanged multiple emails. Nathan did not commit to accusing me of anti-Semitism, nor would he concede that there was actually no evidence of me being anti-Semitic at all. I responded by pointing out the many instances in which I had published material that was critical of the Nazi regime, but it seemed Nathan had already decided his narrative and was sticking to it regardless of evidence, claiming that the “tropes” in my analysis of The Shining act as a “dog whistle” to anti-Semites, whether I intended them to or not. Ironically, he does not apply that logic to the far more anti-Semitic descriptions published in his own book on Kubrick. When I asked for evidence of my working having a “dog whistle” effect Nathan waited several weeks then sent me a report (published after my enquiry) about anti-Semitic rhetoric in the Labour Party, a party of which I’ve never been a member and haven’t voted for since the early 1990’s. The report was irrelevant to my own publication on The Shining, which hadn’t made any mention of Jews.

In response to this lack of reason, I offered my opinions regarding the contradictions contained in Nathan’s book Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual, including the key point that his own interpretation of pedophile characters in Kubrick films being subtextually Jewish was likely a far greater anti-Semitic “dog whistle” than anything I’ve published. I received no response to this argument. Another page in his book (quoted earlier in this review) even outlined that the Mentmore Towers filming location in Eyes Wide Shut was formerly owned by the Rothschild family, yet Nathan objected to me citing a possible similar reference in The Shining.

I believe a key word in all this is projection. Nathan’s book claims that Kubrick was internally conflicted over his Jewish roots, but Nathan also seems to attribute Kubrick’s success to those roots. In my view, this is classic projection – Nathan himself seems conflicted over his racial and religious identity and this has surfaced in his interpretation of Kubrick and his films. His publications citing anti-Semitic writings by others and the inclusion of Jewish pedophile character interpretations of Kubrick’s films in his own book, also suggests internal conflict on Nathan’s part. In my view, Kubrick wasn’t conflicted in this way because he was an individualist who recognized that the victim / perpetrator relationship between different social groups has continually changed across history and across the globe. And being an atheist almost certainly freed him spiritually from the confines of tradition.

At many points in Nathan’s book I detected an apparent frustration on the author’s part regarding Kubrick’s attitude to Jewishness and the afterlife. It’s clear that Nathan has great respect for Kubrick’s achievements and talents, but his reflex seems to be to attribute those qualities as being the direct result of Kubrick’s ethnicity and religious family background rather than being traits of Stanley Kubrick as a unique individual. This seems to be the central motivation of his book. In my read through of Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual this was a disappointment because I think Nathan Abrams is a remarkably capable researcher and writer. And I attribute this quality to him as an individual, not as just another “Jewish intellectual”. He is much more than a product of genetics and cultural / religious background influences … as was Kubrick.

In summary, I do recommend Nathan’s book. The two thirds worth of it that I liked was worth the asking price. The parts which I disagreed with were certainly interesting enough that I found them worthwhile too. After all, if you can’t read things you disagree with and at least acknowledge the writer’s right to say them … then you’re something of a closed book.

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Rob Ager’s top 30 comedies of all time

30) Airplane 2: The Sequel (1982)
This is one of the many silly comedies that bombards the viewer with as many half-baked jokes as it can in the hope that half of them will stick. And it works. The setting of a passenger jet flying through space on mission to a moon base was novel and provided fertile ground for comedy.

29) Annie Hall (1977)
Woody Allen has made many great relationship comedy / dramas. Usually I find them intelligent, but they don’t have me rolling about with laughter. Annie Hall for me struck a very good balance.

28) A New Leaf (1971)
Walther Matthau’s comedies of the 60’s and 70’s are virtually always good, but this one hardly ever gets a mention. Matthau plays a spoilt-rich scumbag who goes broke and then tries marrying into money with the further intention of killing his new wife and taking her fortune. The film is technically below par and the humour is of the cynical and twisted variety in places, but the ending is a suitable antidote.

27) The Frisco Kid (1979)
Harrison Ford and Gene Wilder star in this very underrated comedy western about a Rabbi on his way through the US who teams up with an outlaw on the journey.

26) Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1989)
Another film about men trying to fleece a rich woman of her wealth. Michael Caine and Steve Martin perfectly compliment each other’s performances.

25) The Warrior and the Blind Swordman (1983)
Also a contender for dumbest movie ever made. This fantasy martial arts movie isn’t even supposed to be funny, but my whole family and I were in tears and fits of laughter, especially at the final fight sequence. If the humour were intended this would be in my top ten.

24) Monty Python’s The Life of Brian (1979)
Some would choose this as the greatest comedy ever and many would have it in their top ten. Though incredibly funny on first viewing I personally haven’t found a lot of rewatch value in it over the years, hence its low position on my list.

23) The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)
Belly ache laughs to be found in many scenes of this film. Scorsese’s direction and DiCaprio’s acting totally deliver. Great to see a modern movie that revels in being unPC. Film is a bit too long though.

22) Bachelor Party (1984)
Not the smartest of movies, but good adolescent fun all round. Fast pacing and some daring sexual scenarios keep the entertainment levels high. Tom Hanks veers away from his usual wholesome screen persona here too.

21) Pulp Fiction (1994)
Though as much a drama as a comedy PF succeeds in both. First time viewing in cinema was amazing. Whole audience in fits of laughter and word of mouth on the way out to the parking lot was all good. Incredibly smart use of racial humour too.

20) The Naked Gun (1988)
The second Leslie Nielsen film on my list. Lots of crazy set pieces from a car chase with a learner driver to the protagonist holding onto a statue’s concrete penis to avoid falling to his death.

19) Trading Places (1983)
Like The Life of Brian, many would put this close to the top of their list. It’s brilliant, but some of the jokes wore thin on me in repeat viewings. A good glimpse into the stock markets mixed into the story too.

18) As Good As It Gets (1997)
Jack Nicholson’s funniest performance for me (One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest just fell short of my list as it’s quite a serious movie with comedy overtones). Tightly scripted, lots of cringe-worthy insults, yet has its heart in the right place as well.

17) The Nutty Professor (1963)
Jekyll and Hyde comedy. Jerry Lewis, when he was on form, is one of my favourite comedians, but also talented generally. He wrote and directed this and many other films as well as starring, and even pioneered the technology for directors to see their own rushes on set instead of waiting until they got to the cutting room. Playing as the character buddy Love in this movie he is amazing, but his parallel role as a goofy professor is hit and miss. Eddie Murphy’s remake is worth a watch too.

16) The Big Lebowski (1998)
Packed with little hidden jokes and cryptic plot elements, this movie has high rewatch value. It’s a great social satire all round.

15) The Man With Two Brains (1983)
Steve Martin goes for all out silliness and a lot of sexual humour. Kathleen Turner shines as money grabbing villainess.

14) Porky’s (1982)
Often looked down upon for its objectification of women, this movie is much smarter than its critics would like to admit. Quality acting from a great cast, surprisingly effective drama, and fierce anti-semitism themes that are good but a bit overdone. But when the film goes for the full comedy effect it hits several home runs.

13) There’s Something About Mary (1998)
This soppy love story is expertly balanced by brutally cruel humiliation-based comedy scenarios. Many a classic scene.

12) The Sons of the Desert (1933)
Laurel & Hardy were apparently, in real life, sick of being asked to join the Freemasons. So they made this comedy about two bullied husbands lying to their wives so they can attend a Masonic ball. Result is some of their finest material.

11) Clerks (1994)
Kevin Smith’s debut ultra-low budget comedy still knocks the hell out of everything else he’s ever done and it produced a failed, but very funny, cartoon spin off that ran for just one short season. Clerks is daring, honest and insightful.

10) Cactus Flower (1969)
Another Walter Matthau relationship comedy that few have seen or even heard of these days, but it’s a gem. Plot structure and dialogue are exceptionally well thought out.

9) Liar Liar (1997)
Jim CareyI often find to be a pale imitation of Jerry Lewis, but this movie tops any of the latter’s efforts. The super sharp script about a shady lawyer who wakes up one day unable to lie is so intelligent and earnest that even a mediocre performer could have done something with it, but it’s a perfect vehicle for Carey’s goofy physical humour. Outstanding scene, Carey insulting a boardroom full of executives.

8) Revenge of the Nerds (1984)
This movie would have been a mega commercial hit had the executive who gave it a limited release (and was fired for doing so) realized what a great movie it was. A creative cast of relative unknowns were given a great deal of freedom, resulting in a whacky mix of inspired humour. Like Porky’s (number 14 on this list) this film pushes hard for an anti-bigotry message, but contradicts itself. It includes a questionable date rape scene that’s treated as no big deal, and the efforts to demonize jocks are so off the scale that they actually add to the comedy.

7) Pardon Us (1931)
Laurel and Hardy go to jail for selling liquor under prohibition – how could this result in anything other than one hilarious scene after another. Available in multiple versions, the longest cut (70 mins) is the best.

6) Sleeper (1973)
The second Woody Allen item on my list is unique among his filmography because it’s also science fiction. Frozen for 200 years, Allen’s character awakens in a future society of dumbed down people and assists in a revolution. It’s very smart and very funny.

5) The Jerk (1979)
Steve Martin’s third entry on this list is a satire of many things including detective stories and the rags to riches American dream. It’s very childish in places, yet brutally cynical and crudely sexual. Even Stanley Kubrick loved it.

4) Way Out West (1937)
Third Laurel and Hardy film to make this list. This one is as heart warming and sweet as it is funny. Their brand of humour is far more intelligent than it is generally given credit. Also directed by Stan Laurel.

3) It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963)
This movie is a good three hours long, but it’s anything but slow. Ensemble cast playing very well written characters. Packed with impressive and hilarious car chases and other stunts. Tons of physical humour and a big middle finger to money grabbing materialists. The size of the production and ambition of the story is remarkable.

2) Duck Soup (1933) (or any of the Marx Bros. best movies)
My first write up of this list included seven Marx Bros. movies, so I decided to make them occupy just one position on the list to make room for others. Duck Soup is probably the best, but Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, A Day at the Races and a handful of others only fall marginally behind it. Their humour was physical, satirical, even sexual in ways the censors probably missed. And they absolutely had it in for posers among the rich. Any of these films will provide you with a bag full of insults to fend off pretentious snobs.

1) Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I’m still unsure whether to place this or the Marx Bros in the number one spot, but for now I think The Grail wins by the tiniest margin. It’s wildly experimental, messing even in the opening titles with the traditional movie narrative structure as it parodies the artificiality of historical adventure epics. Like the Marx Bros at number 2, Grail is a big shout out against elitist snobbery with even the time setting of the film shifting from the past to the present as the deluded “King” gets carted off at the end in a police van and probably to be placed in a mental institution. For me this is the undisputed crowning glory of the entire Python filmography.

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THE SHINING who is the man in the bear costume? (Rob Ager’s work plagiarized)

On July 27th 2016 the Youtube film analysis channel Screen Prism published a video called “The Shining: Who is the man in the bear costume?” The video, which was credited to a writer named Jeff Saporito and which had since racked up over half a million views, offered a theory that the appearance of the bear suited guy in the mysterious bear scene of The Shining was a metaphor that lead character Jack Torrance had sexually abused his own son. But both the theory and the detailed arguments given in the video to support that theory were lifted straight from my own study of The Shining published in 2008, which is still viewable online today. Specifically the video plagiarized chapter 16 of my article, titled Danny’s Ordeal.

Two other online sources, who since featured the Screen Prism Shining video on their sites, offered their opinion that the video was basically a regurgitation of my work. Jon Fusco of the movie site No Film School said “The video leans heavily on cinephile Rob Ager’s analysis of the scene” and Jeffrey Potts of 52weeksofhorror stated the video was “Based heavily on Rob Ager’s analysis”. Those guys knew I was the source.

At the time Screen Prism posted their video the channel had only been running for a couple of months and they’d produced six previous videos, five of which still today have less than 10k views each.  The other video has now racked up 167k views, but the video which plagiarized my work, and has now been taken down due to my complaint to the owner of the site, had racked up over half a million views. So basically the channel’s first viral video was the very one that plagiarized my work and was almost certainly the one that built up the bedrock of their subscriber base, which has now reached 162k subscribers. It took them another 15 videos before they managed to create a video that acquired over 200k views and still today after 109 video released on the Screen Prism channel, their Shining video which plagiarized my work is still one of their top 10 most viewed items.

Screen Prism is a funded channel with a team of writers and editors producing slick corporate quality content, while my channel and site are a one man operation. I do everything from the researching and writing, to the site design, to the video narration and editing. The popularity of my work is driven by positive word of mouth and media coverage of my work, which I’ve been fortunate enough to acquire plenty of over the years. So to have a well-funded team rip off my work, pass it off as their own to the tune of half a million views … well as you can imagine, I wasn’t impressed at all.

Now rather than just fly off the handle and make a public accusation, I first contacted the credited writer of the video, Jeff Saporito, and asked him about the issue. He in turn claimed that a number of writers worked on the video and that he only provided the first draft based on an idea they wanted him to write about and agreed to provide the voice narration. And he was paid for the work. Frankly I didn’t believe his story and still don’t. His name is on the article, he narrates the video and he didn’t provide the name of any other writer involved in the project. It seemed to me that he was trying to pass the buck.

So I contacted Debra Minoff, owner of the entire Screen Prism site, being that Jeff Saporito said that she funded the project herself. Debra initially responded to my allegation by claiming that the video content was based on a number of sources, including my own work. I had to ask several times for these sources to be provided and it was only when I informed her I would publish my plagiarism allegation that she provided those sources.

Debra had claimed that academic professors were among the sources and I asked several times who those professors were, but when the list of citations was eventually provided no professors’ names were mentioned. She also provided a number of additional sources, but when I checked up on them all but one of those sources only talked about the missing back story of the bear suited guy scene that was in Stephen King’s novel of The Shining. They did not offer any sexual abuse interpretation of the scene. The one source that Debra provided that did include such an interpretation, itself cited my work as its source. It stated. “My central insight here has already been argued elsewhere, by Rob Ager of collativelearning.com.”

In other words all of the sources provided were red herrings. My work was the source. When I wrote back to Debra and pointed out these discrepancies, she responded by telling me she took the Screen Prism Shining video down. She also stated that Jeff Saporito had not told their staff that I was the source of the video idea, but if that was the case then why had she been trying to claim in her previous emails that the video was based on other sources such as university professors?

Now I must say here both Jeff Saporito and Debra Minoff were very polite in their correspondence and so was I. I approached them on the assumption that there might actually have been some other sources for their video and invited them to provide information to that effect, but I was given conflicting responses and no credible alternative sources.

So I’m left wondering who decided to plagiarize my work. Did Jeff Saporito approach Screen Prism with the video idea, having read it on my website, and pass off the interpretation as his own so he could get paid and take credit for it? Or did Debra Minoff or another member of staff at Screen Prism read my work, then approach Jeff and ask him to write about the issue and not tell him that my work was the key source?

I can’t prove which way it happened and I don’t think I’ll get to find out because I don’t think either party have been honest with me about the issue. Jeff claimed someone else rewrote his first draft, but if his draft didn’t copy my work then what was his initial draft about? Yet at the same time Debra Minoff gave me a series of red herring sources to make out that the video wasn’t plagiarism then said that Jeff hadn’t told her I was his key source. So why the red herrings?

Now the reason I’ve posted my allegation publicly is two-fold. Firstly, hundreds of thousands of people watched the Screen Prism Shining video and most of them still today will think that the interpretation offered in that video was the brainchild of Jeff Saporito at Screen Prism. So I’m posting this to set the record straight. If any of those people go looking for the Screen Prism video again, which they won’t find because it’s been taken down, they’ll instead find this article you’re reading (or my video version equivalent) which has the same title as the Screen Prism video plus corrective info.

The second reason I’ve posted publicly about this is to deter others from plagiarizing my work. Now I really don’t mind if someone else publishes reworded regurgitations of my publications if they cite me as being their source and if they bring something new to the table. For example Forrest Wickman of Slate took a short video I did years ago about animal rights themes in the movie A Texas Chainsaw Massacre and used it as a springboard for his own article. He cited me and included a link to my work, but he also went and hunted down some additional production information that supported the same interpretation of the film. And that’s great.

So if you’re a publisher and you want to reproduce some of my work then at the very least cite me as your source, and if you can expand my ideas to include new research or concepts then great. And if you’re not sure about it, just email and ask me. I can be contacted at newcreations10 at yahoo dot co dot uk.

I’ll probably follow this article up with my own short video about my interpretation of the bear scene in The Shining as well so if you’re not subscribed to me on Youtube and want to see it then hit that sub button. You can follow me on my FaceBook account, Twitter account and contribute to me on Patreon too. And if you want the really hardcore breakdown of the abuse themes in The Shining, then head to my site where you can download my 1hr 43 min video Jack Torrance: the Abusive Father. It’s really in depth and I’ve had a lot of ppl tell me it’s one of my best videos.

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Film analysis and why it’s important

Ten years ago I started posting short film analysis videos on Youtube thinking it would just be a short term hobby that would only capture the interest of film students and film makers. What amazed me is that so many non-film makers quickly took an interest in the videos and demanded more. I’ve since had probably over ten thousand email responses including many from academics and people working in the movie industry itself.  At the time of posting this article my main channel is just short of 50,000 subscribers – not a huge number, but not small fries either. There’s been about a hundred incidences of mainstream media and high ranking websites covering my work too, and usually with positive regard. I even earn my living from selling my offline vids and articles, which I never expected at all.

At the same time, other film analysis channels have been popping up on Youtube that cater to different types of film fan audiences. Some of these alternative channels are well funded enterprises with teams of technical staff producing eye candy graphics and fast-paced editing to capture the lower attention span audiences. Others are just individuals like myself, but with a general difference being that I’ve actually written, produced, directed and edit several fiction films. Overall, film analysis videos have become a small online industry.

Taking part in all this has made me realize that fiction movies and fiction TV shows are psychologically very important to the masses. For a lot of people it’s not enough to simply watch and enjoy a movie. They want to know how films are made and they want a deeper conceptual understanding of their favourite films. That’s why most movies are now released on home media with film maker commentaries, behind the scenes documentaries and so on.

So why are people so fascinated with movies to the point where individuals spend hundreds or even thousands of hours in a single year sat staring at an electronic box which, at a base practical level, does nothing more than display patterns of light and sound? They spend all this time watching fiction movies knowing that it’s all just a piece of perceptual trickery. They know the actors’ expressions are faked. They know that what they’re seeing never actually happened and never will. And yet the power that movies have over people is evident in a multitude of ways.

Pretty much all human emotions can be triggered by movies from belly aching laughter through to intense fear that triggers nightmares or even induces phobias (think Spielberg’s Jaws and the fear of sharks). Advertisers and PR companies are so convinced of the power of fiction movies to influence people that they put a ton of money and effort into product placement and various forms of propaganda to underhandedly sway our opinions and behaviour in the real world. There are huge fan clubs for specific movies and genres. Talented actors and directors are held in the highest public esteem, more so than most politicians and academics. And there are thousands upon thousands of people who strive to become film makers either through academic training or independent hands on experience.

Academics and journalists are generally in agreement that there’s more to movies than just escapist entertainment. They provide film theory classes and publish in-depth books offering their own interpretations of specific films. However, the written text format of those books is very limiting and that’s where the new video based film analysis essay has stepped in to fill a void. Video essays can show specific parts of movies, combined with narration, instead of relying on a reader’s limited memory of a particular movie. Ironically the academics of film analysis don’t edit film analysis videos to present their work.

Most people also have favourite movies that they keep watching again and again and don’t get bored of and they don’t get tired of discussing those movies with other fans. They know what happens at the basic plot level, they know the ending and sometimes have most of the dialogue memorized, but they keep re-watching. And this I believe is in part because certain movies are so complex, so multi-faceted, that the viewer simply can’t take it all in during a single viewing. So each viewing becomes a new experience depending on what is being paid attention to.

People even choose to watch movies where they already know what happens based on familiar genre formats. We know James Bond and Superman aren’t going to get killed or lose their battle, but we still watch those same generic stories across multiple movies. And that’s because the details are important. The variations in challenges faced by the protagonist make each journey distinct, despite the overall repeat formula.

Another reason I think people re-watch the same movies or the same genre formulas is because they like to think about what they would do if they were in the shoes of the characters. They like to think of a solution and then enjoy watching it work for the character, or they like the character to surprise them with solutions the viewer didn’t think of. And for that reason people tend to watch genres that relate to their personal world view. If you think that life is all just a big game of flirting, dating, social status and starting a family then rom coms and domestic soap operas will have you glued to your seat. If you think life is more of a survival of the fittest, dog eat dog affair then you’ll be watching horror or action thrillers.

This psychological use of fiction for organising our understanding of the world starts very early in childhood with fairy tales and nursery rhymes before kids start creating their own stories with character based toys and by drawing pictures and role playing with their friends. Stories help kids learn what to expect in given situations, to imprint and re-inforce understandings in their own minds and it safely teaches them ways of dealing with dangerous problems. And this carries on into adult hood with novels and fiction movies. It’s the same principle but with a lot more sophistication.

The power of movies is also communicated by the fact that we have age restrictions, censorship and outright bans on certain types of fiction content, far more so than with novels. And there’s the fact that individual movies can be incredibly controversial or can draw needed attention to specific social and psychological issues, thus spurring intellectual debate.

Yet there are still some folks who believe that films have no meaning at all. That it’s all just escapist entertainment that has no worthwhile meaning other than what the viewer projects into the movie. But if that were true then The Exorcist and The Jungle Book would be perceived in the same way by the same viewer. People who hold that dismissive opinion of films are almost never film makers and are the type of people who tend to watch a particular movie only once or twice.

Contrasting the dismissive view, novels, stage plays, architecture, famous paintings, and musical compositions are intensely studied and debated in and outside of academia. A single painting that lacks animation can be crammed with meaning. But by comparison with those other art forms movies are a lot more complex. They’re multisensory, they’re continuously moving, they incorporate a new complex medium called editing, and a single movie experience can last several hours or even longer if it’s a long running TV series with dozens of one hour episodes. Individual movies can take many years and hundreds or thousands of people to make. There are usually multiple concept changes and script drafts. Every line of dialogue is carefully considered. Every camera angle, costume element, prop, sound effect and piece of music is chosen. Very little is actually random. So to assume that movies and their effects on people are merely simplistic is to deny the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Art is an essential psychological facet of human civilization and its role in society goes back way before the industrial and technological ages and before our academic institutions existed. It exists in all our societies and it’s probably as old as religion, maybe even older. Art was almost certainly a valuable communication tool back when human languages were too basic to communicate complex thoughts. Still today children learn to recognize basic artistic renditions of objects before they learn to brand them with verbal labels.

But through academia and the onset of mass literacy, verbal descriptions of reality have come to dominate the modern conscious mind-set to the point that we over-rely on it. We begin limiting our world understanding to verbal descriptions, not realizing that words and calculations and the letters and numbers they’re comprised of are in themselves just symbols. If language was truly the highest and most advanced form of human thought and perception then art would disappear from our society, but that hasn’t happened. Commercial quick-fix entertainment markets may currently be dominating what kind of art becomes mass distributed, just as religion once did the same, but the basic human appetite for art continues. Art has always been both an expression and a reflection of those parts of the human condition that we don’t have sufficient words for. That’s true for us individually and as a whole society.

Being that movies are the most complex and multifaceted form of art available to us, the studying of movies allows us to gain insights into the hidden psychological undercurrents that exist in our society. But being that film making is, in historical terms, a very young art form (just over a century old) it’s generally been perceived as being like a fad, gimmick or a new toy. So, like with children not consciously realizing the purpose or effect of stories told to them, adults mostly don’t realize the power of the fiction movies and TV shows that they watch. They feel the effects emotionally and subconsciously, but mostly they watch and listen to films with intellectual blindfolds (and earplugs). Some people naively assume that by not thinking deeply about what they watch they somehow can shield themselves against being psychologically influenced, but that attitude actually makes them a lot more gullible to misleading ideological propaganda and product placement. It’s a simple fact that if you can spot product placement consciously then you’re less likely to be affected by it right?

So film analysis helps us understand what we’re watching and how it affects us. It can help us to understand important themes expressed or encoded by film makers that would otherwise be missed. And the perceptual trickery of film in itself, the fact that it’s all fake yet we react so strongly to it, means that movies are a fantastic opportunity for us to understand our inner selves. Because out of all the different art forms, movies are the ones that come closest to matching the complex thoughts and emotions that determine our own identities and behaviour in real life. There are very few areas of human experience where fiction movies can’t provide valuable reflection.

Maybe the biggest benefit of film analysis is that once a person has been shown the intricate depths of just a handful of their favourite movies, they develop an enhanced understanding of other movies without being handheld through the process. And that kind of enhanced perception can cross over into everyday experience as well. I’ve received many emails over the years where viewers of my videos have spoken of this generic knock on effect in their own experience.

So those are the reasons I consider film analysis important. And that’s why I’ve personally taken what began as an unusual hobby and now treat it as a serious line of work, which I consider just as important as any other line of work I’ve ever been committed to. That’s why I approach the subject with as much determination and methodology as you’d expect in the worlds of business and academia.

So with all that said, it’s back to the grind stone for me.

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It Follows … slowly and to an empty-destination

I’ve only just finished watching this movie so this is a very quickfire review, not a proper film analysis.

Having read from a few sources that last year’s movie It Follows is one of the best, if not THE best, horror movies to come out in ten years I went out of my to watch this one. And, having now seen it, if I had to give it an out of ten rating I’d go for a seven at best, more likely a six. I certainly agree that It Follows is one of the best American horror films for many years being that so few decent horror movies now come out of America, but I don’t think it’s as good as the fun, but effective, Drag Me To Hell or Cabin In The Woods. And at the international level I’d say it’s not up there with those very cool Japanese horror movies like The Ring, The Eye, The Grudge and the very special Audition (note that I didn’t include Dark Water there) and I don’t think it’s in the same class as Triangle (British), The Babadook (Australian) or Rec & Rec 2 (Spanish), the latter two of which are not the deepest of movies but are good solid entertainment.

So, positives first. I certainly hold hope for the future works of David Robert Mitchell because with It Follows he avoids several of the done-to-death horror movie tactics such as the very boring jump scares which, even when they aren’t predictable, fail to make a movie genuinely engaging. The characters in the movie aren’t the extremely annoying drama queen type teens we tend to get in a lot of horror flicks. They feel natural, but they’re also a little bland. The direction is slightly unusual and at times very creepy – nice use of symmetry and POV. There are a couple of nightmarish images and some highly effective scenes that burned well into my psyche. The use of 360 degree rotating camera movements and wide angle lenses is very good in places. And the originality and simplicity of the plot and supernatural enemy is the real star of the show, not least because it allows for a very small budget.

Now for the negative. Beneath the very simple plot are occasional details that possibly hint at deeper social themes to do with sexuality and death, but in all honesty I didn’t enjoy It Follows enough to be bothered watching it again, never mind doing a full blown film analysis. The first and foremost problem is in its pacing.  It’s just too slow. It buys into the art house cliche of having long stretches of silence and non-event, on the assumption that somehow the audience will perceive or project something of interest. And it doesn’t matter how nice and smooth the shots are in those moments. The edit could probably do with at least a ten minute trim to alleviate the boredom factor. I also think there are extensive missed opportunities to take the very good basic concept of the film and add layers of additional, non-verbal, communication to enhance those ideas. Especially in the long, silent sequences I kept hoping to at least find some visual and sound effect clues hinting at something extra. The film is also very limited in its emotional range. The initial relationship disappointment of the lead character could have been more sophisticated and could have carried stronger emotional punch. And the generalized reactions of the group of kids fighting the mostly unseen enemy is too played down in my opinion. They’re all just too polite, too nice. More umff please.

These are just my first impressions, but I’d certainly like to see a remake or sequel that significantly expands the basic premise and plays it out with more power.

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House (1986) … it’s aged well.

Last week I obtained a now rare DVD of the 1986 horror-comedy movie House … and a very nice trip down memory lane it was. Like A Nightmare On Elm Street, Friday the Thirteenth, Hellraiser and other classic horrors, House was popular and successful enough at the time of release that it spawned a succession of sequels. However, unlike those other sequel-churners House is now a largely forgotten film.

Spoiler Alert: The film tells a fairly simple story of a horror fiction writer, Roger Cobb, whose son is missing. The boy has been taken captive by supernatural beings haunting the family house he has inherited. Cobb instinctively knows the boy is somewhere in the house and decides to spend time there writing his new book, an account of his personal experiences of the Vietnam War. The film becomes thematically interesting in that Cobb’s re-accessing of painful war memories coincides with a series of violent hallucinations he experiences in the house. Is he crazy? Is his son really being held captive by ghosts of the past? And … does the loss of his son represent the loss of his own innocence in Vietnam?

The first half of the film finely balances the possibilities of Cobb having a mental breakdown vs the house is really haunted. Surrealist paintings left behind by his suicide-committing aunt contain visual clues that suggest he isn’t alone in his hallucinations. It has overtones of The Shining in its story progression. Unlike The Shining, House’s climax takes away several of these mysteries, which may have served the film better if they’d been left more open to interpretation. Regardless, the film is still really fun to watch. It’s well edited, scored, and shot, is driven by a surprisingly good performance from underrated actor William Katz, who really ought to have taken a career boost from House, but never quite did. And of great help to the film is its humour, which ranges from Slapstick situation gags to well-scripted character subtleties.

I only saw the first House sequel and it was so poor I didn’t even consider the rest, where as with a lot of other horror franchises there’s usually the odd sequel that keeps the flame of inspiration from the original alive rather than stamping it out – Elm St 3 & 4 were good fun, the Friday the Thirteenth sequels were perfect for the late night six pack and pizza gang, and Hellraiser 2 was one of the most viscerally intense gore experiences I’ve encountered in cinema.

Perhaps a decent House sequel might have cemented the reputation of the original, but the film’s biggest weakness is one that has only shown up worse with time – the inconsistent quality of its special effects. One scene has an excellent stop-motion skeletal bird attacking the lead as he dangles in darkness on a length of rope – it still looks good today – but the fat zombie woman with a shotgun looks awful. Some of the other creatures in the movie are fairly well depicted (including a 7 foot tall zombie soldier), but the film makers should have taken a leaf out of John Carpenter’s The Thing, by darkening the sets a little. When rubber creatures are over lit we may get to see them in glorious detail, but it’s often at the expense of just …. looking like rubber. Also rather fake looking, even at the time of release, is the depiction of Vietnamese jungle territory in Cobb’s flashbacks. The foliage appears to be made up of plant species found in the Americas, but it’s a minor gripe.

House very clearly is underpinned by a theme of war-related PTSD and it’s a theme taken quite seriously in parts. I’d be interested to know if screenwriter Ethan Wiley had some personal experience in this respect.

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Cryptically dull – Enemy and Under The Skin

Both of these films have been many times recommended to me by email as being worthy of deeper analysis so in the last couple of weeks I managed to watch both.

While I’m not the type of viewer who demands to be led by the hand in terms of how a plot is presented to me, I do expect to be at least moderately entertained by an unconventionally told narrative. Both Enemy and Under The Skin failed for me in this respect. The modern art house cliche of being sluggishly slow-paced for the sake of it is present in both films. Part of the problem is that particular shots start or end by lingering for a good five to ten seconds on something that doesn’t need to be watched for more than two seconds. There simply isn’t enough going on in the visual frame or the soundtrack to maintain interest. Another problem is that certain plot or character revealing events in the film, while being told unconventionally, are repeated four or five times when just once or twice would easily do the job.

In Enemy the lead character’s identity confusion is put across far too many times – I felt like the film had too little to show so was simply padding itself out to reach the standard minimum run time for a feature. At least a half dozen such scenes could have been edited out and replaced with something else, such as expanding the opening sequence, which generated interest and then was largely abandoned for the next hour of the film. A few more of those interesting spider metaphor clues might have been better too.

In Under The Skin the alien in a human disguise is devoid of empathy for human beings … and the point is made over and over and over and sometimes in the least subtle ways. She abandons a crying infant boy on a murky beach after his father has drowned trying to save an older sibling. The child will clearly die alone. This easily establishes the lead character’s lack of empathy in a way that barely needs any further reinforcement. A good half dozen other “she has no empathy” scenes could have been dropped. There were also too many scenes of men being led to their deaths in a mysterious black liquid. Just one would have done the trick more powerfully.

As readers will know from my film analysis articles and videos, I’m perfectly willing to take the time to sit down and study a cryptic film to try and figure out what isn’t being told outright, but I find it hard to be motivated to do this when I find myself bored by repetition in my very first viewing.

Both of these films are also based on novels, neither of which I’ve read. According to the Wikipedia write up, Under The Skin simply offers more information than the film does. If that’s true then the film is likely a 108 minute advertisement for the novel and would probably be inefficient to stand alone as a story that can really communicate its ideas. A shame because director Jonathon Glazer’s film Sexy Beast is my favourite British film of the last twenty years (not that it has been up against much worthy competition).

The novel of Enemy apparently lacks the film’s spider metaphors, so at least on that level I feel I can take the film on its own merits. Forrest Wickman of Slate magazine offers an interesting and plausible interpretation of Enemy. Normally, with a film like this, I would seek my own interpretation before reading someone else’s, but Enemy didn’t quite stimulate me enough to make me want to watch the film again.

Unfortunately, for me Enemy and Under The Skin are both standard examples of a type of misguided “alternative” film making that too many film makers are drawn to. Cryptically interesting communication that is then spoiled by unnecessary repetition and snail-paced editing. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll give these two films another visit, but for now I’m not inclined.

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David Cronenberg’s lack of understanding for Stanley Kubrick and The Shining

Based on some of his mid-career works such as Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly, Naked Lunch and Existenz (several of which are on my to do list for future film analysis) David Cronenberg has long been a permanent figure among my top twenty-or-so favourite film directors of all time. I’ve found many of his interviews about his better films, and the psychology behind them, incredibly informative and, in particular, his most surrealist works have provided partial inspiration to me as a film maker working outside of the lame dialogue / exposition form of storytelling commonly referred to as the “screenplay”.

 

So it came as a surprise and a disappointment to me today to read in the Guardian newspaper about Cronenberg’s recent dismissal of Stanley Kubrick as a primarily commercial film maker compared to himself and his assertion that The Shining is a poor horror film that supposedly reveals Kubrick’s lack of understanding of the genre. Despite my great respect for Cronenberg’s better works, I’m compelled to respond with a number of relevant observations of my own about the comparisons between the films of Cronenberg and Kubrick.

 

In 1983 Cronenberg released his film adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, which was four years after Kubrick’s adaptation of King’s The Shining was released. Unlike Kubrick, Cronenberg’s effort was very faithful to the source novel. Compared to his preceding three films (The Brood, Scanners, Videodrome) Cronenberg seemed to suppress his own “body horror” aesthetics to make a simple, commercial supernatural horror film. The result was a competent film adaptation of a competent, but not particularly special, novel by the supposed “master of horror” Stephen King (I prefer Clive Barker personally). Cronenberg played down his own artistic leanings so much that if his name had been removed from all marketing materials for The Dead Zone, then we could just as easily assume it had been directed by, say, Brian DePalma.

 

It’s arguable that, in the light of preceding successful film and tv adaptations of Stephen King books (Salem’s Lot, Carrie, The Shining, Creepshow a pattern that has since bred finance for dozens more, mostly pathetic, easy money film adaptations of King novels), Cronenberg saw in The Dead Zone an opportunity to make an easy commercial hit. Tobe Hooper, Brian DePalma, Stanley Kubrick and George A. Romero had laid the ground work with their successful adaptations of King novels and Cronenberg was next in line. Unlike Kubrick’s efforts with The Shining, Cronenberg appears to have made little effort to expand his version of The Dead Zone artistically beyond King’s source novel or technically in terms of film making craft. Let’s compare the two films in a little more detail.

 

Kubrick’s Shining involved pioneering use of the steadicam in combination with incredible set designs. Cronenberg’s Dead Zone is an assembly-line, by-the-numbers affair in terms of cinematography and set designs, perhaps with the exception a few images such as the long shot of a wet tunnel murder scene that looks, possibly by intention, somewhat like a spider web.

 

Kubrick’s Shining plays with concepts of the past and future throughout – Danny’s horror visions of the dead twins, ghostly hag in the bath tub and river of blood are striking and have etched themselves in cinematic history as great horror moments – and the cryptic moments of Jack Torrance talking to ghosts of the past and showing up in an end photo still stimulate interpretational debate today. By poor comparison, Cronenberg’s Dead Zone’s only significant non-dialogue feature is the occasional appearance of the central character within the past and future events he experiences telepathically, but it’s purely cinematic and has little effect on the story.

 

Christopher Walken’s central performance in Cronenberg’s Dead Zone is competent, but does not stretch the actor’s abilities in any sense, while Kubrick extracted one of Nicholson’s most intricate and renowned performances for The Shining, achieved through large numbers of takes and a great deal of on-set experimentation.

 

David Lynch and Martin Scorsese have referenced their admiration of Kubrick’s Shining by including music from The Shining score in their own movies (Inland Empire and Shutter Island, respectively) along with visual references/homages to Kubrick’s film. Scorsese has, in interviews, also voiced his admiration for Kubrick’s only horror film. The Shining also consistently appears high in critics’ choices of all time best horror films, while Cronenberg’s Dead Zone scarcely gets a look in.

 

In summary, Cronenberg’s Dead Zone is an efficient, and unimaginative, straight adaptation that reveals almost everything it has to offer in a single viewing, while Kubrick’s Shining virtually rewrites King’s novel for increased cinematic impact and rewatch value … and it succeeds. Anyone who thinks Kubrick was wrong to make so many alterations in his adaptation should check out the faithful, Stephen King endorsed, tv mini-series of The Shining released 17 years after Kubrick’s version – it isn’t a patch on Kubrick’s version. If it was, people would be raving about it.

 

Could it be that Cronenberg feels a little bias against Kubrick’s The Shining, being that his own film adaptation of a Stephen King book has not achieved comparable cult status? Despite Cronenberg’s claim that he is the more personal and less commercial film maker, the difference in stature between Kubrick’s Shining and Cronenberg’s Dead Zone suggest the opposite. Kubrick stamped his own personality on The Shining in a way that prompted initial, and misplaced, rejection from several critics and particularly angered hardcore Stephen King fans, while Cronenberg played it commercially safe and artistically restrained with the Dead Zone. Kubrick took risks. Cronenberg didn’t. Kubrick had statements of his own to make. Cronenberg didn’t.

 

Cronenberg has, admirably, made some very challenging films that break the standard rules of cinematic storytelling, such as Videodrome and Naked Lunch, but this is in stark contrast to movies like The Fly, The Dead Zone, and Eastern Promises, which are quite straight forward. With the exception of The Fly, Cronenberg has never really been able to successfully combine his trademark personal “body horror” films (his early background in biological sciences are frequently cited as the source of this) with his ability to direct by-the-numbers commercial genre films. Despite strong special effects and what some might perceive as exploitation gore, surrealist Cronenberg films like Videodrome and Naked Lunch were box office failures. Naked Lunch was, in fact, such a huge financial disaster that Cronenberg has only made one venture into “body horror” since (1996’s Crash, also a box office flop). Even his sci-fi film, Existenz, which included interesting “body horror” elements, was a commercial bomb.

 

By contrast, Kubrick’s The Shining is very light on gore and has just one “body horror” scene (the rotting hag in Room 237) and was a commercial hit. Kubrick didn’t fail to understand the horror genre at all. It’s quite the opposite. With his one attempt at the genre he made a movie that, artistically and commercially, was superior to virtually all of the eight or ten horror films Cronenberg has made, despite horror being Cronenberg’s speciality. If anything, I’d say Cronenberg has a limited understanding of most genres, demonstrated by his less impressive work outside his own “body horror” forte. Whereas Kubrick’s filmography is one of the most thematically diverse of any film maker in history … Dr Strangelove (comedy, nuclear politics), 2001: A Space Odyssey (sci-fi, technology), Lolita (drama, relationships), The Shining (horror), Full Metal Jacket (war), Eyes Wide Shut (conspiracies, relationships, sexuality), Barry Lyndon (historical drama), A Clockwork Orange (sociology, politics, violence, propaganda) and all of these films are still socially relevant.

 

A key element in Kubrick’s repertoire was what I call the “double narrative”, meaning that a film can have a commercially accessible surface story to satisfy broad audience tastes, while also containing subtle clues hinting at an alternative narrative of a more personal nature to the film maker. It’s a type of film making that requires a level of effort and imagination that, to date, I have not seen at work in Cronenberg’s films.

 

Rather than taking his own box office failures as awards for “personal” film making, Cronenberg ought to recognize that a great film maker doesn’t need to alternate between making unimaginative commercial films one year and alienating audiences with full on surrealism the next. It is perfectly feasible to be artistic and commercial at the same time. This is one yardstick where Kubrick surpasses Cronenberg. After getting his commercial flops out of the way early on, Kubrick had a run of nine commercially successful films from 1960 (Spartacus) through to 1999 (Eyes Wide Shut). Most of those films, such as Lolita, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut, have triggered intense public debate of social issues that Cronenberg’s personal films have never matched outside of the limited horror genre audiences they appeal to.

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